Gangopadhyay 1

Madhurai Gangopadhyay
Roll 7
Internal Assessment
M.Phil 2nd Semester
14th May 2019
The Mother in Mother of 1084: An Analysis of the Contemporary Social Milieu As

Seen by a Mother

Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 is the story of a mother (Sujata) whose son (Brati), corpse

number 1084 in the morgue, was brutally mob-lynched in an incident of violence carefully

orchestrated by the contemporary state government, simply for subscribing to the Naxalite

ideology which advocated the picking up of arms against class enemies, collaborators with

the State and counter-revolutionaries within the Party. But Mahasweta Devi does not name

her novel Corpse no. 1084, but Mother of 1084.Therefore, the “mother” is not a person or a

character in the novel, but an entire context in itself. In a day-long interaction with the family

members of co-martyrs of Brati and his girlfriend (who herself was a victim of inhuman

police torture), Sujata comes closer to her martyred son than she had ever been while he was

alive, because for the first time she comes in contact with the ideology for which he had not

hesitated to give up his life. As had happened with many of the mothers during the age,

Sujata’s love for her youngest son gets converted into a larger attachment. It leads a mother

like Sujata to, if not subscribe to, at least fathom the depth of an ideology, which had caused

her son and thousands like him, to leave the comforts of home and hearth to stand in

solidarity with the marginalised sections of the society

Keywords: Brati, mother, Naxalite, peasant, Sujata ,.

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I felt increasingly that a writer should document his own time and history…The

Naxalite movement between the late 1960s and early 1970s, with its urban phase

climaxing in 1970-71, was the first major event after I had become a writer, that I felt

an urge to document. (Devi 2011: viii)

The question as to where exactly the Naxalite movement fits in the novel Mother of 1084 is a

rather difficult question to answer, since it is neither the novel’s background, nor the novel’s

foreground; rather this political element is present everywhere in the novel. Therefore, any

analysis of Sujata’s understanding of the contemporary milieu, remains incomplete without a

discussion of the contemporary political situation which had come as a cyclone, not only in

West Bengal or India, but all over the world. To understand the Naxalite Movement of the

1970s, we need to look at the historical evidence that lead to the root of the movement.

Basically, the 1948 farmers’ movement in Telangana could be called the precursor of

Naxalite militancy. The manifesto “Andhra Pradesh Model” proves that the leftist ideological

document that the undivided Communist Party of India issued in June 1948 was based on

what is called “Mao Zedong‟s New Democracy” (qtd. in Shad 17). This ideological position

lead to the fragmentation of CPI to CPI(M) in 1964 (Shad 17). Further, CPI(M) entered into

electoral politics and formed the coalition government of the United Front in West Bengal in

1967. This development generated anguish and frustration among the young cadre of the

CPI(M). It was one such group of young rebels under the leadership of Charu Majumdar that

launched an armed rebellion against the powerful local landlord, thus laying the foundation of

the Naxalbari Movement (Shad 17).The term Naxalite, in fact, comes from Naxalbari, a small

village in West Bengal, where this small rebellious section of the Communist Party of India

(Marxist) led by Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal initiated an uprising in

1967. On 18th May 1967, the Siliguri Kisan Sabha, of which Jangal was the president,

declared their support for the movement initiated by Kanu Sanyal, and their readiness to
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adopt armed struggle to redistribute land to landless. The following week, a sharecropper

near Naxalbari village was attacked by the landlord’s men over a land dispute. On 24th May,

when a police team arrived to arrest the peasant leaders, it was ambushed by a group of

tribals led by Jangal Santhal, and a police inspector was killed in a hail of arrows. This event

encouraged many Santhal tribals and other poor people to join the movement and to start

attacking local landlords. A large number of urban elites were also attracted to the ideology,

which spread through Charu Majumdar’s writing, particularly the Historic Eight Documents

which formed the basis of Naxalite ideology. Young students from various college campuses

often from upper middle class families symbolised by Brati and Nandini joined hands with

the peasants to fight the growing forces of oppression and repression of which the state

machinery had been a crucial part.

However, the CPI(M) did not approve of the armed uprising and all the leaders and all

the Calcutta sympathisers were expelled from the party. Violent uprisings were organised in

several parts of the country. On 22nd May 1969 (Lenin’s birthday), the All India Coordination

Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), which had been formed in 1967 and

was, till then being led by Sushital Roy Chowdhury, gave birth to the Communist Party of

India (Marxist-Leninist). But it is interesting to recall what Kanu Sanyal, the leader of the

Communist Party of India had said on the day the party was formed:

With great pride and boundless joy I wish to announce today at this meeting that we

have formed a genuine Communist Party- the Communist Party of India (Marxist-

Leninist)… Our Party was formed on a memorable day of the international

Communist movement-the 100th birthday of the great Lenin. When our party was

born, the historic Ninth National Congress of the great Communist Party of China was

in session under the personal guidance of Chairman Mao Tse-tung…I firmly believe

that the great Indian people will warmly welcome this event, will realise the formation
 Gangopadhyay 4

of this Party as an historic step forward for the Indian revolution, and will come

forward to raise the struggle to a higher stage under the leadership of the party (qtd. in

Franda 797).

Brati and his comrades were the actually the result of a terrible economic crisis that the

country was facing in 1966-67. The social scientist Srimanto Banerjee’s book In the Wake of

Naxalbari becomes extremely illuminating in this respect. He is of the opinion that the pre-

independence feudal structure continued after independence, but in a different and more

vicious way. Banerjee is of the opinion that all the policies, particularly the five year plans,

which was projected as something new was actually a distorted version of what was there in

the colonial times. The economy was being run by the big industrialists, who were not only

very powerful, but also were the ones who were in direct contact with the companies and

bodies outside India. The rules that were being framed were the ones which empowered the

bureaucracy to interpret as they wish, and in most cases they were distorted. These rules were

utilised by the small minority of very powerful industrialists for their own selfish needs. This

exactly was the Government’s policy, which was intentional, intended and known. This

purposeful siphoning off the Indian money to foreign countries was something the Naxals

had taken up arms against. But if one catches the government on the wrong foot, one falls out

of favour. Moreover, one falls into a lot of trouble. As a result, the repressive structure of

authority “criminalised” their intent and sought recourse to force and violence, thereby

endorsing political hegemony.

At the centre of Mother of 1084 is a sensitive intellectual young Naxalite, Brati

Chatterjee, who like many others of contemporary Bengal, was devoted to the social cause

during the state of emergency and fell a victim to police encounter. The novel focuses on the

psychological and emotional crisis of his upper middle class “apolitical” mother Sujata

Chatterjee, who awakens one morning to the heart-rending news that her youngest son Brati
 Gangopadhyay 5

Chatterjee was lying dead in the police morgue at Kantapukur, and has been demeaned to a

mere numeral corpse number 1084. To examine how this emancipation leads her to a journey

of discovery, in the course of which, struggling to understand her Naxalite son’s

revolutionary commitment, she too begins to recognize the gangrene of contemporary

complacent hypocritical society which her son and many others like him had rebelled against.

It is through Sujata’s perception of the contemporary milieu that Mahasweta Devi

gives us the explanation behind Brati’s insubordination. In her day-long mission, Sujata,

understands that Brati’s defiance (as well as that of thousands of others from different kinds

of family backgrounds who had plunged into the Naxalite movement and had taken up arms

against the state) may have been brought on to some extent by the disappointment with the

fraud, shamelessness, constraint and extremism noticeable in the contemporary patriarchal

households and social universes, of which her family itself was an integral part. Sujata was

no different from many of the mothers of that age whose sons had plunged headlong into one

of the most tumultuous armed revolutions of all times. Azizul Haq, the famous Naxalite

leader, in an interview taken by the researcher, says that his mother, who belonged to a very

conservative family and observed strict purdah, often used to feed and look after his

comrades with motherly affection, after he had become involved in the movement, simply

because she assumed that if she looked after them, some mother would look after her own

son. In this respect, it would also be interesting to quote a section of the Naxalite leader

Pulokesh Mondal’s essay “Ami Amra O Amader Koek Bochor”, where he talks about his

mother and her role in the Naxalite Movement:

My father was a police officer. Since I had to escape his strict surveillance and work

day and night for the party organisation, I had had to build up a parallel
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secret organisation within my family….My mother used to secretly look after my

comrades and feed them. She protected them in times of trouble. [Translation by the

researcher]

Therefore, the “Mother” in Mother of 1084 is as important in our analysis of the

novel, as it is not a coincidence that Mahasweta Devi depicts the contemporary milieu to the

readers through the eyes of a “mother”.

As Brati grew up, he discovered his family (which acted as a microcosm of the state

apparatus that, in its dying necessity to hold on to power and maintain status quo was

crushing thousands of young dreams behind bars or with bullets) was the centre point of

corruption and false reverence where his mother was diminished to an unimportant manikin

and child-producing machine and had concurred a marginal status. His father Dibyanath

Chatterjee was an extraordinary womanizer and an eager wanton, who never demonstrated

any regard and respect for his significant other and never attempted to make mystery of his

affairs. Without doubt, he felt it was within his rights. For him "a wife had to love, respect

and obey her husband. A husband was not required to do anything to win his wife’s respect,

love and loyalty" (Devi 2008: 45). Indeed, even his children "considered all his actions part

of his virility" (Devi 2008: 46). Truth be told, Dibyanath's "favourite" little girl Tuli used to

help her father in his extra marital affairs. This demonstrates the degree to which Dibyanath

had forced his improper social codes on his children who grew up to acknowledge a

counterfeit climate, "a shiftless, rootless, lifeless society where naked body caused no

embarrassment, but natural emotions did" (Devi 2008: 68) On the planet of corporate

business, Dibyanath had put accomplishment above doubts and had assembled associations

with the affluent and the politically effective. Hypocrisy overwhelmed his conduct in both

circles: his family was required to choose not to see to his conjugal betrayal, and his business

achievement depended on systematic corruption. This we understand when Nandini tells

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Sujata of Brati's affirmation that "his father bribed clients away from other firms" (Devi

2008: 81). This was truly disgusting for Brati who used to state that his father and siblings

were "not human". It is within the family that Sujata is able to find the seeds of Brati’s faith

in the power of so called “terrorism”. In her day long sojourn and in meeting Brati’s

girlfriend Nandini and the families of Brati’s co-martyrs, Sujata tries to find the answer to the

question "Why Brati (and for that matter all like him) had come to place such absolute faith

in the cult of faithlessness?" (Devi 2008: 20). And the only answer that she can come up with

is that for "Brati and those like him disgust begins at home" (Devi 2008:82). For Brati, as

Sujata later comes to know from Nandini, his elder sister Neepa was a nympho, the other

sister Tuli a bundle of complexes, and his brother Jyoti a pimp (Devi 2008: 81). For Brati,

and for others who at that time were sacrificing their home and hearth to fight for the cause of

the marginalised of the society, the ability to love others and form larger attachments with the

oppressed was a precondition for being called a “human being”. Joya Mitra, another famous

Naxalite leader and writer, too, when interviewed by the researcher, talks about this duality

within their families which had inspired an entire generation, which had grown up listening to

tales of the freedom struggle to rise in rebellion against the injustices of the government.

Naxals like Brati, were in marked contrast with the Parliamentary Leftist leaders,

whose activities, Banerjee expounds were a routine of revolutionary phrase-mongering from

a safe distance, followed by ruthless self-seeking through every available avenue (55). The

famous Naxalite leader Azizul Haq, who had spent eighteen long years behind the bard for

his ideology, is much more vitriolic in his attack against the CPI and the CPI(M). He attacks

their decision to first label and then expel the Naxals as reactionary forces and joining

parliamentary politics as:

 Gangopadhyay 8

I want to go to Kharagpur, but the time for the train to leave has not arrived as yet,

then do I board a train to Bardhaman! Since the time is not yet ripe for revolution, let

us play at ministers for a while (29). [Translated by the researcher]

The fight of these young men, who were ready to sacrifice anything to establish a just society,

was made doubly difficult when the first the United Front Government and then the Congress

government began a very planned propaganda that these men are a nuisance and a botheration

to society and if they die, then it would be a cleansing of society of the nonsense and the

disquiet that they have been creating. Azizul Haq’s comment in his jail memoir (Karagare

Atharo Bochor) is worth noting in this respect:

Since the media was in their [Parliamentary Leftists’] hand, a propaganda was made

that we [the Naxals] were responsible for the violence between the CPM and Naxals,

but the world would come to know what a lie it was, if not today, then hundred years

later. The entire plan had been hatched by Pramodbabu in 1969….CPM-Naxal

violence was perverted, but who was responsible for that? Ashim Chatterjee?

Charuda? Sarojda? Neither Charuda nor Sarojda could have done anything about it

(42). [Translated by the researcher]

In this way, public sentiment was not only detached, but also turned against these young men.

In the novel Mother of 1084 , Mahasweta Devi addresses every one of these components of

the urban period of the 1971-74 Naxalite movement: "the politics that lay behind the brutal

massacre of Brati and his comrades: the lumpen proletariat killers who constitute a local

mafia and standing threat to survivors" like Partha’s brother, or the traitors like Anindya, who

‘had come with definite instructions’ from the parent party to penetrate the ranks of the

dissidents ‘as part of a political man oeuvre’ to betray them to the police”(Devi 2008: xiii);

the torments dispensed by police on the Naxalites, the ideological deviations of the
 Gangopadhyay 9

movement, the excellence and genuineness of the fantasies of the Naxal youth like Brati and

his companion Nandini, the ruthlessness and offensiveness of cutthroat genocide by the state,

the shortcomings of the movement at that time and its ability to gain from slip-ups and so on.

In spite of the situation being so very adverse to them, it was Brati and his comrades’

uncompromising devotion to bring about any amount of realistic change to a politically

stifled society which shakes the urban middle class “bhadralok” and places them in front of

moving and disturbing queries.

However, as Joya Mitra points out in her interview, it would be wrong to assume that

all those who had plunged into the Naxalite movement all belonged to extremely elite and

well-to-do families. In fact, Sujata’s day-long sojourn and her interaction with Laltu and

Somu’s family bears ample evidence to that. In the novel we watch that many individuals like

Laltu and Somu who had joined the Naxalite movement had been denied their essential

regular needs and prerequisites. As an example we can take the example of Laltu, who,

regardless of being a splendid understudy, "went around desperately looking for a job. He

didn't get one. That is what hit him. And, a rage swelled within him" (Devi 2008: 58).

Furthermore, Somu’s case was also not much different. His family's predicament and

monetary emergency would regularly swell him into anger, and he would frequently answer:

"Are we beggars? Why must we beg for things that should be ours by right, and get kicked in

return?" (Devi 2008: 68-69). A cause had united them with the likes of Brati and Nandini,

who, “…sacrificing the comforts of their old environment, tossing away the tempting and

useful rewards that went with social position in a bourgeois world, rejecting all the benefits

that were available to those who conformed to the legal system,… chose to become one with

the deprived millions of India and join their struggle to change the system.” ((Devi 2008: 56)

Alluding to Brati's demise Mahasweta Devi asks an extremely thought provoking

question: "Whether by killing him the authorities had been able to destroy the burning faith in
 Gangopadhyay 10

faithlessness that Brati and his compatriots had stood for … ? Was Brati’s death futile? Did

his death stand for a massive NO?" (Devi 2008: 20). For Mahasweta, singular, it can't be so.

Nandini—Brati's friend and love, asks some significant non-serious inquiries in such manner:

"What has changed? Are men now all happy? Have the political games ended? Is it a better

world?" (Devi 2008: 86). Dismissing Sujata's claim that "everything has quietened down" she

retorts: "Nothing has quietened down, it can't! It wasn't quiet then, it isn't now . . . Thousands

of young men young still languish in the prisons without trial. And, you can say it's quiet

now?" (Devi 2008: 85-86).

It would be wrong to assume that Mahasweta Devi was, in any way justifying the

violent resistance of Brati and the like, but through presenting the contemporary milieu

through the eyes of a mother, she is simply highlighting the illegitimacy of the kind of witch-

hunting that had taken place against the Naxals during the time of the emergency. Mahasweta

Devi anticipates possible future resistances and catastrophes of this kind, in the case we

remain socially, politically or ideologically not interested in their situation and oppression.

For Mahasweta Devi and for many like her, the Naxalite movement (and besides any violent

resistance established in resistance) is a human catastrophe for which the nation and the civil

society is responsible, and must account for. This positively has a universal significance, and

remains constant for any part of the world—any conflict zone on the planet. It is in this that

Mother of 1084 becomes more than just a portrait of the contemporary milieu through the

eyes of Sujata, it becomes a saga of human life that touches us and burns us.
 Gangopadhyay 11

Works cited

Banerjee, Srimanto. In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India.

Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1980.Print.

Devi, Mahasweta. Mother of 1084. Trans. Samik Bandyopadhyay. Calcutta: Seagull Books,

2008. Print.

---. Five plays. Trans. Samik Bandyopadyay. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2011. Print.

Franda, Marcus F. “India‟s Third Communist Party.” Asian Survey 9.11 (Nov. 1969).

JSTOR. Web.

Haq, Azizul. Personal Interview. 8th May 2019.

Haq, Azizul. Karagare Atharo Bachhar. Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2006. Print

Mitra, Joya. Personal Interview. 24th April 2019.

Mondal, Pulakesh. “Ami Amra O Amader Koek Bochor”. Sei Doshok Ed. Joya Mitra and

Pulakesh Mondal. Kolkata: Papyrus, 2012. p 13. Print.

Sengupta, Gautam. “The Mother of 1084: Political Drama Redefined”. Indian Drama in

English. Ed. Kaustav Chakraborty. PHI Learning Private Ltd.: New Delhi, 2011. p.251. Print.

Shad, Asghar Ali. Genesis and Growth of Naxalite Movement in India. Trans. Mushir Anwar.

IPRI Paper, 2011. Web