Bonded Slavery and Gendered Violence: Intersectional
Vulnerabilities in Mahasweta Devi’s “Shanichari” and “The Fairytale of
Rajabasha”
Sneha Sahoo,
Junior Research
Fellow,
Department of English Literature, Language and Cultural Studies,
Vidyasagar University, Midnapore,
West Bengal,
India.
Abstract: Mahasweta Devi was a politically committed writer and activist who
devoted her life to advocating for marginalized communities, especially tribal
groups in India. Deeply involved in grassroots activism, she exposed the
systemic exploitation faced by “dalitized” Adivasis under capitalist and feudal
structures. One of the key mechanisms of their oppression is bonded labour or
debt slavery, where tribal families are trapped in hereditary servitude through
manipulated debts imposed by feudal lords. Women suffer the most in this
system, experiencing triple marginalization: as tribal subjects excluded by
dominant social structures, as women facing patriarchal violence, and as
labourers subjected to exploitative systems like contract labour. Devi’s
literary and journalistic works highlight these layered injustices and aim to
give voice and agency to these silenced groups. This paper examines her short
stories “Shanichari” and “The Fairytale of Rajabasha” to reveal how such
marginalized women—like Shanichari and Josmina—are trapped within intersecting
systems of caste, gender, and economic oppression, and how Devi brings their
struggles into critical visibility.
Keywords: Bonded Slavery, Tribal, Contract Labour, Gender, Trafficking
In the history
of human civilization Indian social structure is perhaps the most stratified
one with its scripturally-sanctioned Varna system, which is a rigid
hierarchical social institution and a never wornout instrument of exploitation
in the hands of a certain section of caste Hindus who enjoy the privilege of
being scripturally sanctioned as being superior with a scriptural rights to
mistreat the ‘others’. This Caste system in India is the outcome of
ethno-religious power politics in the Indian Vedic society, where the Caste
Hindus had stratified the entire society and its people into fourfold
system–the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas and the Sudras. But This
Varna categorization implicitly had a fifth element, being those people deemed
to be entirely outside its scope, such as tribal people and the untouchables.
There is a large section of people left outside this unjust categorization.
These denigrated and disregarded groups of people are the untouchables or the
outcastes in the Indian social fabric who has taken the identity of Dalit as a
powerful instrument of assertion of their identity. The very word ‘Dalit’
itself bears the stigma of their ostracization, oppression and manipulation in
various ways down the ages. The politics of polarization supports and sustains
the mechanisms of devaluation, humiliation and pauperization meted out to the
‘dalitized’ tribals by the capitalist-colonial-development apparatuses in India
for ages. For years, these “Wretched of the Earth” have been kept silent
without giving them the least voice and agency to assert their own rights. Even
after 70 years long walk from the day of independence, these people living in
the margins have not been provided the facilities and advantages promised to
them by the grand promise of independence. Instead, they have been victimized
by several exploitative mechanisms of discursive control that have always kept
these indigenous groups of people at the locus of exploitation and
dehumanization. One of such exploitative apparatuses is the inhuman system of
‘bonded labour’ or ‘debt slavery’ which, after its formal abolition in 1975 has
come up in the form of contract labour under different names. Even after the
formal abolition of the ‘Slave Trade’, the colonial capitalists invented the
concept of indentured labour and used the machinery of debt bondage to entrap
them on plantations in Africa, the Caribbean and South-East Asia. In India, the
socially, economically and culturally devalued and disregarded sections of
people, the Dalits in particular were forced to accept the inhuman practice of
slavery by the Caste Hindus. In the savage system of ‘bonded labour’ in India ,
a tribal family is hereditarily kept in perpetual bondage by a feudal lord who
dictates forced labour by exerting the ruse of debt deftly imposed upon the
impoverished section of people. ‘Bandhua Mazdoori’ is embedded intricately in
India’s socio-economic and cultural structure- a structure which is a product
of caste and class relations, a colonial history and persistent poverty among
large sections of its citizens. An ingrained legacy of caste-based
discrimination, vast poverty and inequality, unjust social relations and the
government’s callousness to the suffering of the impoverished Dalits are
considered to be the reasons behind the practice of this system of forced labour.
Designed by a creditor-debtor relationship that passes on the next generation,
debt bondage is typically of an indefinite duration and involves illegal
contractual stipulations, which deny the basic rights of negotiation and choice
to an individual. And among all the South Asian countries it is in India that
“Debt Bondage” was at its most brutal form.
India was the first country to pass
legislation directly prohibiting debt bondage through the Bonded Labor System
(Abolition) Act, 1976. But although it was legally abolished in 1976 it remains
prevalent in different forms with weak enforcement of the law by governments.
As Mahasweta Devi writes in his essay “Contract Labour or Bonded Labour”, “The
bonded labour system was formally abolished in November 1975. Following that, a
new system of recruiting bonded labourers was very quickly introduced in the
bonded labour areas. Since their ex-masters would not give them work and since
little was done by the state governments towards their rehabilitation, the
landless ex-bonded labourers were in the acute distress. Now came the agents of
various masters to lure them away to faraway places with promises of good job.
Once they reached these places, they found themselves in a worse form of
bondage” (Devi 94). This was the condition in which the poor adivasis, the
ex-bonded labourers and the Muslims and scheduled caste people recruited by the
labour-contractors. Devi writes: “The brick kiln owners of West Bengal are
mostly from north Bihar. This practice of recruitment of adivasi labour must be
quite old. Adivasi women, ex-concubines of the kiln owners, are sent to the
remote villages. The link railway stations are Chaibasa, sonwa, Pendrasali and
Chakradharpur. These recruiting women are called Sardars. They go the village hats and lure young girls with tales
of good jobs near the magic city of Calcutta” (Devi 47). Each kiln employs 200
to 400 rejas and each sardar receives Rs 30-40 commission for each reja.
Poverty and deep-rooted apathy of the state government towards adopting any
remedial measures to remove the root causes of chronic poverty drive these
helpless people to the brick kilns. “And their lot was worse than that of those
in the unorganized sector. A beggar can go a begging where he chooses. A
contract labour cannot. He does not have any freedom” (Devi 52).
Again, as Devi writes in her essay
“Birbhum Punjab”: “The agricultural prosperity of Punjab has been achieved at
the cost of the lives of the slave labourers” (111). Inhuman oppression and
extortion were meted out to these migrant labourers who change hands through
various contractors and middlemen. The workers at local factory from Punjab
serve as local contacts for big farm owners of Punjab. They contact those who
have an easy and frequent access to the villages. The village middlemen arrange
for the supply of slave labourers. “This is how collies are illegally exchanged
between Bihar and Punjab. And all these people, from the department of railways
to the local agents to the middlemen in the villages, have a stake in this
trade” (Devi 107).So, in spite of the enactment of the Bonded Labour Abolition
Act,1976 and interest shown by the NGOs and spirited individuals, abusement of
the bonded labourers has been in continuous process exposing the cruelty of the
employer, exploitation of the employed and utter callousness on the part of the
government to the suffering of the helpless victims. After its official
abolishment, ‘bonded slavery’ has taken different crafty shapes to keep the
system of enslavement and manipulation in action. Be it the contract-bound
labourers in the brick-kilns of West Bengal or the migrant slave labourers in
the big farms of Punjab or the contract-workers in many grand projects in the
megacities, they are all bonded
labourers in one sense or another. They have been the hapless victims of this
barbaric system of oppression in its modified forms. Mahasweta Devi rightly
comments in her essay “An Eastside Story”: “I have always suspected that the
bonded labour system is very much present in the agricultural and unorganized
sectors of West Bengal (India) in the form of contract labour under different
names. And, today, it is not enough to liberate the bonded labourers in the
agricultural sector alone. A new bonded labour system has come up all over
India. Careful scrutiny will prove that the contractors’ labourers are nothing
but bonded labourers, in reality. You will find them working on building
projects, dams, roads and brick-kilns” (Devi 65-66).
The most helpless victims of this
redesigned version of ‘Bonded Slavery’ were the women. They have been the
victims of inhuman treatment and punishment causing very serious and cruel
mental and physical suffering. “The sardars
prefer the young unmarried girls” to hook because “they are better ‘workers’
and good for sale”(Devi 49). In addition to the back-breaking labour they have
to give, these young girls are forced “to sleep with the owners, the
supervising staff, the truck drivers, khalasis,
and local mastans. Anyone who refuses
to cooperate is first locked up in a room, beaten and then seared with a hot
iron. It is usual to make a girl drink heavily and then send her for the
master’s pleasure” (Devi 50). It is really unfortunate that:
in
politically-conscious West Bengal these rejas (Women labourers in brick kilns)
are denied a minimum wage, medical facilities, maternity leave or any kind of
leave, and, of course, the right to form a union. There is no attendance or pay
registrar, identity card or employment card. The set-up is very cruel and very
cunning. It is impossible for an outsider to break into the fortress of the bhattas. The rejas cannot leave the bhatta
or talk to anyone without the prior permission of the owner. These unfortunate
beings live in jhopdis worse than pig holes. There are no sanitary arrangements
or any drinking water where they work through the summer days. (Devi 50)
The life of
these women contract-bound labourers was simply a savage one: 12-14 hours of
work a day, loading and unloading of bricks, compulsory sex with the owner or
his men in the early hours of the night and sleep in the jhopdi in the late hours. The women slave labourers in the big
farms of Punjab have been victim to a similar kind of destitution. They were
beaten, starved, tortured daily and were forced to undergo an abortion when
they conceived.
Mahasweta Devi, a politically
conscious and socially committed writer, journalist and social and
environmental activist dedicated her life to the welfare and improvement of the
lives of the denigrated and disregarded sections of people who belong to the
peripheral space in the hierarchical social fabric of India. Because of her
serious and sincere engagement in grassroots activism, she was well aware of
the politics of polarization that supports and sustains the mechanisms of
devaluation, humiliation and pauperization meted out to the ‘dalitized’
adivasis by the capitalist-colonial-development apparatuses in India. Her only
concern behind creative and journalistic writings was to explore through the
mirror of history the lives of Santals, Hos, Oraons, Mundas, and other
underprivileged communities invisible to India’s mainstream society and unsung
by the mass media.“If one were to sum up in a word the recurring of Mahasweta
Devi’s works and the motive force of her life, it invariably would be: FIGHT
AGAINST EXPLOITATION” (Arya 80). Mahasweta Devi came forward with her
extraordinarily powerful literary and journalistic oeuvre to bring to the
surface the helpless agonies of these triply marginalized subalterns to give
them a kind of voice and agency.
With an authenticity of experience
and sincerity of expression Devi pens down the stark reality of ruthless and
barbaric maltreatment of these tribal women and provides their suppressed
feeling and suffocated pangs ample voice in the four short narratives
translated into English by Sarmistha Dutta Gupta and included in the volume “Outcast: Four
Stories”. The life stories of four women in for different narratives in the
book have one thing in common: the unending class, caste and gender oppression
which makes their lives a relentless struggle for survival. Mahasweta’s acute
and perceptive pen, as Debasis Chattopadhyay says: “reveals the virtual slave
trade that festers under the facade of the democratic society of India and
clearly indicates the plight of these women” (Chattopadhyay 105).Devi’s
powerful narratives “bring them to life with a deep sympathy and sensitivity
which makes these women step out of the margins of the society to live in our
minds, impressive in their quiet courge and tenacity, their will to survive.”1
The ironic
fairytale “The Fairytale of Rajabasha” depicts the plights of two tribal couple
trafficked from one farmer to another in the prosperous farms of Punjab and the
victimization of the woman as female sex slave by the farm owners. The story is
based on a real life incident of Gurumohan Rautia and his wife Ratni being sold
to Sardar Niranjan Singh of the Firozepur district of Punjab by a middleman
named Phagu Sahu. Devi came to know of this hapless incident from her encounter
with the indigenous people of Bihar. The couple in the story, namely Sarjom and
Josmina are from the Kol tribe and they are sold to Niranjan Singh, an “adarsh
Kishan” of Punjab, by the contractor Nandlal Sahu for four hundred rupees.
Sarjom, a bonded labour working for free on Nandlal’s farm to pay off his debt
was enticed by this middleman who was “in search of the necessary maal” (Devi
60) to send to Punjab to make huge profit by sending ‘fresh’ and ‘sturdy’’
goods. They feel prey to the enticement little knowing the plight that awaits
them. The fairytale which started with the promise of new hope turned into a
nightmarish account of ruthless subjugation and oppression as soon as Sarjom
and Josmina reached Punjab. Within no time they are introduced to the
“efficient system” of Niranjan, where, they, like thousands of migrant
labourers and contract labourers across the state, were subjected to relentless
physical and mental torture, 16-18 hours work a day, meagre amount of food and
minimum wage. They were kept locked up at night as it is the custom to keep the
buffaloes, cows and bonded labour under lock and key.
This inhuman practice took an extra
toll on the life of women like Josmina. There in the small hut in the middle of
the field Niranjan, along with his other male relatives and friends, used to
rape Josmina every day, even in front of the child Masidas: “To Niranjan she
was just fresh meat; dark, junglee flesh which he had paid for” (72). And when
Josmina became pregnant by this diku, Josmina
was forced to undergo an abortion. As they escaped from the clutches of
Niranjan, forsaking their pay, they were retrafficked from one adarsh kisan to
another until a benevolent farmer sent them home. And in all the places Josmina
was victim to sexual exploitation in an identical manner. But Josmina’s
suffering doesn’t end here. To save her family from the custom of social
ostracization, she committed suicide as she was carrying the child of a diku. Thus, Josmina was “doubly wronged
by being marginalized even by those usually regarded as marginalized in a
society” (Chattopadhyay 105).
The story “Sanichari” explores the
plightful condition of the rejas
recruited as contract-bound labourers at the brick-kilns of West Bengal. The
narrative unearths the medieval existence of rejas like Sanichari who live far beyond the reach of statutory
labour law benefits and democratic rights. This representation of the helpless
exploitation and victimization of an unfortunate Oraon girl, Sanichari is based
on the revealing account of the recruitment of adivasi women as rejas by a
middle-aged social activist Purnendu Mazoomdar, whom Devi encountered during
her grassroots activism in Bihar. Adi Jati Raksha Morcha movement and the
subsequent thirst for azadi, turned out to be a threat to the mainstream
outsiders and the struggle was violently suppressed by BMP, CRP, and BSF with
the active cooperation of the Govt. officials resulting in the total
destruction of the means of sustenance for these communities of people. This
victimization by the atrocities of police and the administration and this
deprivation of the fundamental needs of life led girls like Sanichari to give
herself up voluntarily to the sardar,
Gohuman’s fangs: “Scores of young girls were bitten by Gohuman’s fangs. There
isn’t just the one Gohuman, after all, hundreds of similar snakes are
slithering around, now that they sense an opportunity…The local police got a
cut. The GRp, too, got their share” (47). In the brick –kiln of Barasat they
faced incredible mental and physical harassment. They became subjected to
Indeed, barbaric humiliation and subjugation as soon as they entered Rahmat’s
brick-kiln:
The wall
surrounding the brick kiln was as high as a jail wall. Inside were Rahmat and
his goons’ pucca houses…A single tubewell. One tubewell for three hundred
people. They literally became prisoners in an alien land under alien
circumstances. Far from their home, these poor adivasi girls were compelled to
work as a bonded labour in an unhealthy atmosphere near ‘a row of pigsties’
with no medical facilities, no off day, no festival.(Devi 48-49)
Of course, Sanichari was provided
with fine clothes, but only to be stripped and raped by the owner of the
brick-kiln: “Rahamat would dress Shanichari in good clothes and nice jewellery,
rub fragrant oil in her hair-and then tear into her ruthlessly” (51). As
Chattopadhyay writes: “Underpaid, half-fed, treated at best as sub-human and
impregnated by the owner of the brick-kiln, Shanichari returns at last to her people
to discover that she is an outcast in her own community” (Chattopadhyay 109).
Thus the tragic story of Shanichari also reveals the double marginalization of
women first by a diku who raped and impregnated her and then by the patriarchal
system in her own community which didn’t accept Shanichari in the village for
the ‘sin’ of carrying a diku’s child. Thus she became a helpless victim to
androcentric aggression both within and outside her community.
Thus, the two narratives explores
the hapless condition of the tribal women in India who became triply
marginalized under the shackles of caste, gender and slavery: first, as
‘dalitized’ tribals, they were the victim of the rhetoric of exclusion based on
the subaltern politics; second, as women, they were subject to androcentric
aggression both within and outside their community, and the barbaric system of
‘contract labour’, a modified version of ‘bonded labour’ was like the final
nail in the coffin of injustice and oppression for them. They “would be considered
victims of the modern of trafficking. They are recruited and transported by the
abuse of position of vulnerability if not for deception, for the purpose of
exploitation, including servitude” (Kotiswaran 383). They were denigrated to
the position of mere sex slaves getting disrobed of all their honour,
individuality and identity. Actually Devi’s representation of the triple
marginalization of tribal women as delineated in the two tragic short stories
is an outcome of her social commitment and sense of responsibility as a writer
to give a kind of voice and agency to these exploited and voiceless victims.
Because she believed: “A responsible writer, standing at a turning point in
history, has to take a stance in defence of the exploited. Otherwise history
would never forgive him” (Devi VIII).
Notes
All references
to the narratives “Shanichari” and “The Fairytale of Rajabasha” are taken from
2002 Seagull’s edition of the book Outcast:
Four Stories and are indicated with page numbers in parenthesis.
1. This quotation
is taken from the blurb from 2002 Seagull’s edition of the book Outcast: Four Stories.
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