The four stories in “Bitter Soil” focus on the injustice done to the environment and to its inhabitants. The human species is but one of the presences in the environment: the non-human is both character and witness, scenario and agent of storytelling.
All four stories are set in Palamau, the tribal region she has traveled extensively. For Devi, Palamau is a mirror of India. These hardhitting stories are amongst the most important of Devi’s prolific writing career.
Her research into oral history as it lives in the cultures and memories of tribal communities was a first of its kind. Her powerful, haunting tales of exploitation have been seen as a rich guide to the vital questions of politics, gender, and class. The Seagull Edition I’m reviewing was translated to English by Ipshita Chanda from the University of Hyderabad in India. The stories in “Bitter Soil” focus on the injustice done to the environment and to its people.
The first story is entitled “Little Ones” and revolves around the contrast between the mainstream and the tribal people, both sides of a relationship of dependency and corruption. As the title suggests, mismanagement of land resources and malnutrition create over time a starving generation of adults with growth impediment.
The second story “Seed” deals with the themes of exploitation of field workers, who lack proper wages and are offered uncultivable lands as reward for their long-lasting work. In “Seeds” the government made it a law that the wealthy landowners were to provide some of their lands to the landless people. The landlords begin to give away bits of infertile, stony, barren land to provoke their fellow landlords into doing the same.
The third story is called “Witch” and delineates the concept of “daini,” a nightmare made up by the village men to isolate and diminish the power of the village women. The impurities of the land were caused by “daini,” a presence and an omen that women bring to the land.
The fourth and last story in “Bitter Soil” is entitled “Salt.” A greedy merchant refuses to sell salt to the village tribe, as a way of revenging and dispossessing the villagers of their access to the forest, a major food source to the region. A legal battle between the village tribes and the greedy merchant reveals the corruption of a legal system committed still to colonial dependency. “Salt” functions as a myth decrying the tragic injustices during the the British control of the subcontinent, where salt tariffs were heavily imposed on the people of India.
The act of writing in itself is the offspring of an impulse to express one’s responses and reactions, both intellectual and emotional, including anger, defiance, and resistance. Mahasweta Devi gives us in “Bitter Soil” an inspiring example of resistance to complacency and discrimination, especially when these scenarios are the cause of women’s oppression.
