Book Review – Mother of 1084, Mahasweta Devi

We all have our own favorite ideologies. But then all of us face the practical realities of our daily lives as well. Despite our principles pressing us otherwise, we end up doing things that we don’t want to, living in ways that are contrary to how we wish. Few of us can claim to be leading lives in ways that are in perfect harmony with our principles. Rare such souls may be, every once in a while one such soul tries to bridge the gap between the ideal ways of life and the ground reality. Such rebels have either been revered or reviled. Either way, they leave a lasting impression on the pages of history. But what happens to those people who were near and dear to them, those family members, friends and acquaintances who could never understand what the push in the mind of the ideologues is all about, nevertheless love and support them, like those punctuation marks that silently add meaning and beauty to the literature of the lives of such rebels?

Mother of 1084 is a gripping story that narrates the emotions of a mother, who lost her son to the systematic brutality that claimed the lives of hundreds of youngsters during Operation Steeplechase in the 70’s Bengal. Brati was the ideal youngster who shunned the hypocritic ways of his family and gets absorbed in ideologies inspired by the Naxal movement that held Bengal in sway during that period. The story begins two years after his death in a police encounter, with his mother Sujata reminiscing about her son, right from the day of his birth. His mother, who couldn’t come to terms with the reason for her son’s death and the emotional, ideological bent that drove him to his death, tries to make sense of his absence by leaning on others who have undergone similar emotional trauma. She tries to do so by being friendly with the family of Somu, another youngster killed along with her son. She also meets up with Nandini, the girl who loved Brati and who subscribed to the same ideology as Brati.

With the rest of the family members all having forgotten Brati or trying to ignore their past with him, it is Sujata, as a mother, that feels the vacuum of his absence, day in and day out. The pain of her son’s death, her inability to ease the pains of other family members akin to her, the sadness of seeing lives like those of Nandini and Brati being wasted away in revolution that seemed to have changed nothing, including the hypocritical ways of her own family members – how Sujata faced them all in a single day is narrated in these pages in a riveting, deeply moving manner.

This is the first book of this author that I am reading and I have fallen in love with her writing already. The translation could have been better though. Spelling mistakes mar the flow too.

This is a book that portrays the anger that simmered through a whole generation of young minds that wanted to change the world around them. This is a book that also recounts the unfathomable anguish of a mother who lost her beloved son to the bullets, but who gets to understand him and grow close to him after he is gone. As books on one of the darkest phases of Bengal go, this must be one of the best!