Narrating the History of Violence and Resistance from India’s Margins: A Study of Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood and Mahasweta Devi’s Chotti Munda and his Arrow

Abstract

Many renowned writers like Temsula Ao, Easterine Kire and Monalisa Chankija have been expressing the insider’s view of the often neglected and conflict-ridden region of Nagaland through their versatile literature. Among them all Easterine Kire deserves special mention. Although almost all her novels are extremely localized, yet somehow the themes of violence and resistance portrayed in them cross the boundary of the state and make her readers ponder upon the greater issues of globalization, mass migration, war and peace. At the same time the adivasis belonging to Chotanagpur belt also underwent misrepresentation or no representation at all in post-independence India. Mahasweta Devi, the social activist and a writer having spent most of her life among these people had voiced the real terror of life in the periphery. At present both communities are at the verge of cultural extinction due to their repeated history of colonization, religious conversion and subsequent modernization that now threatens to homogenize all cultural distinctions. Thus automatically the writers from the region had taken up the cause of the deprived marginalia. The novels under discussion can be considered under ‘resistance writing’ and in my paper, I find it most relevant to do a comparative study, to analyze their problematized representation of the process of decolonization of India that puts to question the basic foundation upon which the nation was formed. In the larger context, a major section of the indigenous communities all around the globe, have been subjected to exploitation and exclusionism in one way or the other, for a very long time now. Comparative study of such texts may bring clarity in perspective about the problems encountered in their day to day interactions with the mainstream society and its tentative solution that we may consider for further research.