Bait: Four Stories

What Was Communism? #6

by Mahasweta Devi, Sumanta Banerjee (Translator)

Unlike most of Mahasweta Devi’s works, which focus on Bengali tribes and the rural dispossessed, the four stories collected in Bait are located in the urban and suburban criminal underworld, and form an unusual segment of Devi’s oeuvre. The first story, “Fisherman,” is about a man who recovers the bodies of young boys from the village pond so that the police can pass them off as victims of drowning. “Knife,” on the other hand, is a tongue-in-cheek account of the liminal cultural world of West Bengal, which borders Bangladesh. A young woman makes her own protest against an exploitative establishment as a result of abuse by a politician and his cohorts in “Body.” An unemployed middle-class youth discovers himself after his first “test” killing in the dark story “Killer.” This collection of fascinating and unsettling stories is anchored by an in-depth introductory essay by cultural historian Sumanta Banerjee who has firsthand familiarity with the settings and situations from his crime-reporting past. Banerjee contextualizes the stories within the development of the growing criminal underworld in Bengal today.

Genres: Short Stories, Indian Literature

175 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Mahasweta Devi was an Indian social activist and writer. She was born in 1926 in Dhaka, to literary parents in a Hindu Brahmin family. Her father Manish Ghatak was a well-known poet and novelist of the Kallol era, who used the pseudonym Jubanashwa. Mahasweta's mother Dharitri Devi was also a writer and a social worker.

She joined the Rabindranath Tagore-founded Vishvabharati University in Santiniketan and completed a B.A. (Hons) in English, and then finished an M.A. in English at Calcutta University as well. She later married renowned playwright Bijon Bhattacharya who was one of the founding fathers of the IPTA movement. In 1948, she gave birth to Nabarun Bhattacharya, currently one of Bengal's and India's leading novelist whose works are noted for their intellectual vigour and philosophical flavour. She got divorced from Bijon Bhattacharya in 1959.

In 1964, she began teaching at Bijoygarh College (an affiliated college of the University of Calcutta system). During those days, Bijoygarh College was an institution for working class women students. During that period she also worked as a journalist and as a creative writer. Recently, she is more famous for her work related to the study of the Lodhas and Shabars, the tribal communities of West Bengal, women and dalits. She is also an activist who is dedicated to the struggles of tribal people in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. In her elaborate Bengali fiction, she often depicts the brutal oppression of tribal peoples and the untouchables by potent, authoritarian upper-caste landlords, lenders, and venal government officials.

Major awards:
1979: Sahitya Akademi Award (Bengali): – Aranyer Adhikar (novel)
1986: Padma Shri[2]
1996: Jnanpith Award - the highest literary award from the Bharatiya Jnanpith
1997: Ramon Magsaysay Award - Journalism, Literature, and the Creative Communication Arts
1999: Honoris causa - Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU)
2006: Padma Vibhushan - the second highest civilian award from the Government of India
2010:Yashwantrao Chavan National Award
2011: Bangabibhushan - the highest civilian award from the Government of West Bengal
2012: Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Sahityabramha - the first Lifetime Achievement award in Bengali Literature from 4thScreen-IFJW.

মহাশ্বেতা দেবী একটি মধ্যবিত্ত বাঙালি পরিবারে জন্মগ্রহণ করেছিলেন । তাঁর পিতা মনীশ ঘটক ছিলেন কল্লোল যুগের প্রখ্যাত সাহিত্যিক এবং তাঁর কাকা ছিলেন বিখ্যাত চিত্রপরিচালক ঋত্বিক ঘটক। মা ধরিত্রী দেবীও ছিলেন সাহিত্যিক ও সমাজসেবী। মহাশ্বেতা দেবী বিখ্যাত নাট্যকার বিজন ভট্টাচার্যের সঙ্গে বিবাহবন্ধনে আবদ্ধ হন। তাঁদের একমাত্র পুত্র, প্রয়াত নবারুণ ভট্টাচার্য স্মরণীয় কবিতার পঙ্‌ক্তি ‘এ মৃত্যু উপত্যকা আমার দেশ নয়’ এবং হারবার্ট উপন্যাস লিখে বাংলা সাহিত্যে স্থায়ী স্বাক্ষর রেখে গেছেন।

তাঁর শৈশব ও কৈশোরে স্কুলের পড়াশোনা ঢাকায়। দেশভাগের পর চলে আসেন কলকাতায়। এরপর শা‌ন্তিনিকেতনের বিশ্বভারতী বিশ্ববিদ্যালয় থেকে ইংরেজিতে অনার্স এবং কলকাতা বিশ্ববিদ্যালয় থেকে স্নাতকোত্তর ডিগ্রি নেন।

১৯৬৪ খ্রীষ্টাব্দে তিনি বিজয়গড় কলেজে শিক্ষকতা শুরু করেন । এই সময়েই তিনি একজন সাংবাদিক এবং লেখিকা হিসাবে কাজ করেন। পরবর্তীকালে তিনি বিখ্যাত হন মূলত পশ্চিমবাংলার উপজাতি এবং নারীদের ওপর তাঁর কাজের জন্য । তিনি বিভিন্ন লেখার মাধ্যমে বিভিন্ন উপজাতি এবং মেয়েদের উপর শোষণ এবং বঞ্চনার কথা তুলে ধরেছেন। সাম্প্রতিক কালে মহাশ্বেতা দেবী পশ্চিমবঙ্গ সরকারের শিল্পনীতির বিরুদ্ধে সরব হয়েছেন । সরকার কর্তৃক বিপুল পরিমাণে কৃষিজমি অধিগ্রহণ এবং স্বল্পমূল্যে তা শিল্পপতিদের কাছে বিতরণের নীতির তিনি কড়া সমালোচক । এছাড়া তিনি শান্তিনিকেতনে প্রোমোটারি ব্যবসার বিরুদ্ধেও প্রতিবাদ করেছেন ।

তাঁর লেখা শতাধিক বইয়ের মধ্যে হাজার চুরাশির মা অন্যতম। তাঁকে পদ্মবিভূষণ (ভারত সরকারের দ্বিতীয় সর্বোচ্চ নাগরিক পুরস্কার,২০০৬), রামন ম্যাগসেসে পুরস্কার (১৯৯৭), জ্ঞানপীঠ পুরস্কার (সাহিত্য একাডেমির সর্বোচ্চ সাহিত্য সম্মান), সার্ক সাহিত্য পুরস্কার (২০০৭) প্রভৃতি পদকে ভূষিত করা হয়।

২০১৬ সালের ২৮ জুলাই, বৃহস্পতিবার বেলা ৩টা ১৬ মিনিটে চিকিৎসাধীন অবস্থায় তিনি শেষনিশ্বাস ত্যাগ করেন।


जन्म : 1926, ढाका।

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although a killer cannot become a killer all on his own. He has to be employed.

The divide between being able to find Indian literature and being able to find Indian literature that wasn't originally written in English is rather monstrous, the more one thinks about it. This isn't a prelude to me throwing the works of Arundhati Roy or Jawaharal Nehru or Vikram Chandra under the bus, but simply me acknowledging how I picked up this particular work for the sake of the confluence of race, gender, and language at which it lies, little realizing how the experience of reading it would be the equivalent of being hit with a sledgehammer. Lord knows I don't know the first thing about Bengali argot or will ever understand how difficult it is for translators to bring Mahasweta Devi's work into English for the benefit of an insipid monoglot such as myself, but to put it plainly, these stories don't mess around, and after having spent so much time with literary award winners and uber popular trendsetters that do nothing but that, I can at least acknowledge the worth of the antithesis when I read it. The genre tags for this gut punch of a quartet mention crime, mystery, noir, but in my mind, this is the horror show of capitalism eating its children to the tune of a specific breed of postcolonialism, except Devi has no time for your voyeuristic reader guilt or liberal breast beating. Nor, however, does she have time for any writer who shanks their girl character simply for titillation: if you're unwilling to connect that corpse to Naxalites, Kali, and the Bengal Famines of 1770 and 1943, this isn't the work for you.

Much of what these stories cover is what "Americans" have been taught to uncritically romanticize. The fast life. The gun fights. The live or let die. The corrupt politicians inculcating the corrupt police force inculcating the corrupt populace, and the grinding of the individual into either one of many cogs down below, or a cannibal on high. Of course, the sense is different when one is a white male hardboiled detective and the other is a Dom caste female assassin, and much as I valued the gritty realities of Sacred Games, this series of stories numbering less than 100 pages makes that tome that comes to nearly 1000 pages look like a clown show performed for children. For Devi's writing is clean, precise, and filled to the brim with "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," save her stories take place in a much smaller world than did the ones of the Wild Wild West, and the choices available to those who "want to make it" lie in either turning one's back, or drinking another's blood. Anything outside of that? Well, if you have any inkling of the history of India post-partition and the place that the resulting collection of countries serves in the wider scope of modern day neoliberalism, you know you can't just play the weak little fool and talk about fairy tales like quality of life, GDP, democracy, and human rights bought and paid for by the "American" dollar. True, there's always talk of revolution, but just whose youthful bodies do you think are being fished out of the water tanks on a weekly basis? In any case, so long as this isn't happening in certain prescribed regions of certain prescribed countries, it all doesn't really matter. Does it.

This is far from the most popular work of Devi's logged on this site, which means I have a lot to look forward to. Technically, it's less "looking forward to" and more "needing to fill in the gaps," for much as it is with Austen and Wollstonecraft, Mann and de Sade, you may acknowledge the greatness of the first in a vacuum, but once you've read the second, you know exactly which much suppressed shoulders they were standing on the whole time. True, the less vaunted figure is probably going to require one to read a baker's dozen or so nonfiction texts of one form or another to really understand the import of their writing, but that's the thrill of the exploration, no? For, if the appeal to humanity doesn't work, all that's left to do is demonstrate how the anti-life will eventually consume the benefactors with their stock options and their NFTs as much as it does the beneficiaries with their tea shops and their knives in the dark, and judging from the scope of this, the latter is exactly what Devi achieves. The lack of a fifth star might be disconcerting to the comfort zone perfectionists, but honestly, that just leaves the door open for the author's work that eventually clinches it on a pitch that is entirely perfect for my own biases and suppositions. There's always the chance that I may never educate myself to the point that I can appreciate Devi's work to that degree, but hey. No harm in trying.

True killers don't need the knife.

[Nikhil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent translations of excellent stories.

Mahasweta Devi was a hugely important author for me and the development of my consciousness. When I was younger, I had found myself frustrated with a lot of writing by Brown folks for an explicitly Western audience (though in retrospect some of this was me just being foolish). Discovering Mahasweta Devi, who wrote in Bengali argot and whose works are so different than those other authors in tone and content was revelatory, and started a process where I read South Asian authors writing for native audiences. Interestingly I don’t think this perfectly lines up with language choice (as Ngugi would argue) because at this point English is as much a South Asian language as any other. It depends more on who is publishing it and where.

Like other works by Mahasweta Devi these stories focus on the pervasive, choking violence that characterizes life on the margins of Indian society (maybe not just the margins). These are really noir stories in the original sense of noir (I.e., crime stories, not hardboiled) and they are as good as any in the genre. Focusing on 60s and 70s Bengal, where state orchestrated political terror against Naxalites and tribals formed an atmosphere of violence, these texts zero in on individuals participating, willingly and unwillingly, in the apparatus of state terror. The texts probe the characters and milieu of these individuals while always maintaining a wide enough lens to condemn those responsible for orchestrating the violence (“true killers don’t need the knife”).

This translation is also fantastic. Mahasweta Devi is notoriously difficult to translate because she writes in argot that combines the dialects of various rural, marginal folks. This translation is propulsive. The language is short, sharp, crude and effectively conveys the broken misery of the world the characters inhabit. Lyrical interludes sparsely punctuate these jagged fragments of text, retaining all the more power. It almost reads like a series of chiaroscuro snapshots (exactly like noir should).

Highly recommend..

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Think of it as Bengali noir. The four stories in Mahasweta Devi's Bait: Four Stories are of an India far from Mother Theresa, Gandhi, or your favorite guru. Devi's Calcutta is full of goondas (gangsters), assassins, and whores. The first story, "Fisherman," is from the point of view of a worker who is tasked with recovering bodies of murdered teens who were "drowned" by goondas who pretended their deaths were accidents. "Knife" takes us into the mindset of one of the killers; "Body," into the mind of a call girl who drives a silver Fiat; and "Killer," into the mind of another assassin.

There are explanatory footnotes, but not enough to explain all the references to places and public figures.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was published in a strange and interesting Tariq Ali-edited series on 'What was Communism' and its role within that is extremely puzzling - hard-boiled tales of West Bengal lowlife, interesting enough on their own terms, economical and stylistically interesting, but relation to the grander themes very puzzling perhaps other than through 'West Bengal still had plenty of gangsters under Left Front governments'.

[Vishualee · Rating 5 out of 5]

"These days Jagat demands seven rupees per corpse. What, after all, is the value of a rupee today? The value of money, the price of human lives, both so cheap these days."

I have read only the first short story "Fisherman". We are introduced to the character of Jagat Sha, who used to be a fisherman, but these days he is employed by the police to dive deep into the waters, to lift corpses up from the murky depths. Those corpses always found their way into the waters. The police quickly wrap these incidents as a case of drowning. However, there is something sinister behind all these recurrences. Jagat finds out in the end.

I found the translation to be quite good, except for the dialogues, which need to include who said it. Regardless of these minor errors, the story will keep you engaged till the end.

[Soumya Prasad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the story Fisherman from this and it was very well written. The concept was executed well with just the right amount of drama and emotion.

Detailed review coming soon.

[Vani · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compilation of some engrossing stories by Mahasweta Devi, translated by Sumanta Banerjee. The book wins to enthral the readers, maintains the grip and surprises us towards each ending. Her prosaic style of writing has just another charm where the reader is touched even more by the developments in the plot.