The Difference that Matters

Representation of Caste, Gender and Violence in

Mahasweta Devi’s Bayen
Arunima Ray

Mahasweta thematizes difference in a bid to problematize the so-called unity of the Indian
nationhood. Even after the formal decolonization this difference as space evinced so much by the
tribal/dalit lifeworld especially of Bihar and Bengal represents an area outside the nation itself. It
is a space where bonded slavery, witchcraft, caste-based atrocities and poverty are part of
everyday life of the people. In representing this world and especially that of the gendered
subaltern, who is the subject of many of her works, Mahasweta interweaves these social issues in
her fiction to highlight the various sources of affliction for women living in these societies. Her
representation of this alternate or for that matter counter-space is very objective, for she
maintains the right balance of criticism and of appreciation of the different aspects of tribal/dalit
communities. Her active involvement with these communities is well known. While she
represents them in her fiction, she also represents them intellectually as a social activist, as an
authentic spokesperson for them. Her efforts have gone a long way to effecting a change in the
awareness of the mainstream society about them as well as contributing to the development of
what could be called ‘subaltern studies’. In Bayen her spotlight is on the witch-custom, a very
violent custom that exists among many communities, though here in the story the community
that is represented is the Dom community. It is one of the lowest in the caste ladder, one that
burns and cremates dead bodies. The story, a short one, evokes a multiplicity of questions and
has underlying it intricate layers of various politics at work exacerbating the already painful
existence of Dalit women in the society. My intention in this paper is to underscore these
complex social relationships that stem endlessly from the caste-gender nexus and to examine this
space of the gendered subaltern, a space marked by its difference produced as a result of endemic
caste, community and gender discrimination along with a deep-rooted superstition that is the
other name of violence itself. In this context of particularity and difference required to figure out
the reality, Chris Weedon’s emphasis on the specificities of women’s experiences and
differences is encouraging:
 Much early second-wave feminist theory, like radical feminism today, privileged
women’s lives and experiences as the basis upon which to construct theory.
Poststructuralist developments in feminist theory problematized this relationship by
complexifying the categories of experience and subjectivity. In the realm of both politics
and theory the increasingly audible voices of previously marginalized women, including
Third World women, have demanded recognition for lives and experiences which long
remained invisible in mainstream Western feminism. A complex understanding of
experience remains central to those forms of feminist politics and theory which speak to
the real conditions under which women live (Weedon, 180).

Mahasweta Devi’s prime preoccupation in her works has always been with this specificity, the
specificity of the subaltern and further specifically with the gendered subaltern. Her claim to
right representation of this space has been her thorough and meticulous research to understand
this specificity, this difference that matters. In fact, she herself maintains that writing for her is
social activism itself and that she is an activist writer. As she herself says,

…It is my conviction that a storywriter should be motivated by a sense of history that

would help her readers to understand their own times. I have never had the capacity nor
the urge to create art for art’s sake. (Bandyopadhyay, xii)

Mahasweta Devi writes largely to discharge this social responsibility and she reiterates this in
her interview with Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak as she says, ‘I think a creative writer should have
a social conscience. I have a duty toward society’ (Imaginary Maps, ix, hereafter IM). Her
involvement with the subaltern especially the tribal/untouchable communities is total. Dwelling
on the problematics of the ethics of representation, Spivak speaks of what she terms as ‘ethical
singularity’ on the part of the intellectual to be developed with the subaltern in order for an
adequate kind of communication to foster. But while Spivak considers such a communication as
desirable for right representation, she is also aware of the problematical nature of the mission. To
perceive the singularity of the subaltern, as Spivak claims, is nearly ‘the experience of the
impossible’ (IM, xx). Mahasweta’s position too is problematical in this sense. But she has
achieved the greatest possible success in this respect by any measure whatsoever. Her
relationship with the various tribal and untouchable communities has developed through personal
relationships, research and activism. According to Spivak, Mahasweta’s achievement rather lies
in exposing the various obstacles like caste, class, poverty, exploitation that stand in the way of
progress and participation of these various so-called backward communities in modern
democracy. Her role is commendable because her untiring efforts and journalistic activities could
turn them into the focus of attention, demanding responsibility from the authority and the society
at large. About her involvement with the tribal/untouchable people she says, ‘My house is full of
them, they write to me, they come and stay with me, I go and stay with them’ (IM, ix). Her
commitment is complete and is as effective as that of the ‘organic intellectual’, a term that
Gramsci once coined. She has travelled all of Palamu, one of the poorest and most inaccessible
districts in Bihar, on foot and has then written her stories and novels about this district from real
life experiences. In fact, many of her characters that we find in her novels and short stories are
real characters that she has met in real life. Her stories are thus real stories of the pain and
suffering of the so-called untouchables and the tribes, which she has skillfully interlaced in her
fictional works giving us a more authentic and moving picture of the Other in our society, a fact
that renders her stories a powerful social commentary on various forms of exploitation
perpetrated on the so-called lower castes. With reference to her portrayal of this exploited space,
Mahasweta Devi says, ‘Decolonization has not reached the poor. That is why these things
happen. Women are just merchandise, commodities’ (IM, xiv). In this context in her essay on
Mahasweta Devi in Outside in the Teaching Machine, Spivak rightly says,

Especially in a critique of metropolitan culture, the event of political independence can

be automatically assumed to stand between colony and decolonization as an unexamined
good that operates a reversal. But the political goals of the new nation are supposedly
determined by a regulative logic derived from the old colony, with its interest reversed:
secularism, democracy, socialism, national identity, and capitalist development.
Whatever the fate of this supposition, it must be admitted that there is always a space in a
new nation that cannot share in the energy of this reversal. This space had no established
agency of traffic with the culture of imperialism. Paradoxically, this space is also outside
of organized labor, below the attempted reversals of capital logic. Conventionally, this
space is described as the habitat of the subproletariat or the subaltern. Mahasweta’s
 fiction focuses on it as the space of the displacement of the colonization-decolonization
reversal (Spivak, 77-78).

We enter such an arena in ‘Bayen’, where caste, witchcraft, superstition bedevil the lives of
women.

‘Bayen’ is the story of Chandidasi Gangadasi, believed to be a descendent of the mythical

family of Kalu Dom, one who gave Raja Harishchandra shelter when he had lost his kingdom.
The King, later in gratitude, gave him all the cremation grounds of the world as gift. The
beautiful and proud Chandidasi falls in love and gets married to Malindar Gangaputta, a man
who has done fairly well for himself and is perhaps the most eligible man in the Dom
community. Malindar can sign his name and has a permanent government job at the government
crematorium. Chandidasi inherited her father’s job of burying dead children and, with great
commitment and devotion, both buries them and guards their graves. The husband and wife
were happy till Chandidasi has a child of her own. She now can no longer carry out the task of
burying dead children.

Chandidasi … (She strokes the sleeping child.) Before you were born, I never
knew I’d feel like this. Now it hurts so bad when I bury the little

ones under the banyan tree. O my son, do you feel your mother’s
woe? Men in general are so insensitive. Their children die. I bury
them. And they say I have the evil eye; if I stare at a child, it’s sure
to die. (Smiles sadly.) The other day in the dark someone hurled a
stone at me…! (Malindar enters.) You! (Bandyopadhyay, 81)

At this point Malindar enters the stage and Chandidasi tells him:

Chandidasi. It hurts to do the job these days, the job handed down to me by my
ancestors, my hands rebel, and yet I have to go on doing it. Can you
tell me what I should do? (Bandyopadhyay, 81).

Malindar understands her anguish but not fully. He understands that people are envious of his
family and his wife, but he lacks the capacity to be one with her in her pain. For Chandidasi, the
pain is both emotional and physical for if she stays in the graveyard for long, her breasts too start
oozing out milk at the thought of her own child and the children she buries. Chandidasi’s
afflictions started after she became a mother and motherly instincts as an overwhelming form of
emotion took over her entire being. Chandidasi’s loss of interest towards her work was evident to
the community and they had been keeping an eye on her for quite some time. However, the
fateful event of branding her a witch takes place on the day Tukni, Pakhi’s daughter dies of small
pox and Chandidasi warns the community that this would be the last time that she would bury a
dead child. But the incident is only an excuse for the community which perhaps all this time had
been looking for excuses to punish her. That very day she is declared a Bayen and ostracized
from the community. Malindar too with his entrenched superstitious beliefs and under the
pressure of the community chooses to be with the majority and not his wife. Chandidasi is left to
lead a lonely and deprived life away from her husband and child.

‘Bayen’ is a short play but brings up a multiplicity of social questions. Caste, gender, community
and superstitious practices are factors which transform the life of a normal woman from the state
of contentment and happiness to that of absolute misery. Violence is used to punish her and
restore the patriarchal structures. Again, not all women from the Dom community will share
Chandidasi’s misery, for she stands out when compared to the other women. As a woman,
Chandidasi always captured the attention of the community for obvious reasons. Her lineage is
high, a descendent of the great mythical Kalu Dom. She is a woman with striking beauty, one
who has light skin and bright eyes and a vibrant personality. Her good luck is again observable in
her marriage to Malindar Gangaputta, the only man in the Dom community who can sign his
name and has a permanent government job at the morgue. From what Malindar himself says, it is
evident that they have become the envy of the community. He makes the following comment
when Chandidasi complains to him of the aspersions cast on her character by the other people of
the community:

Malindar: Don’t I know that? At the primary school, they were always skipping classes.
I alone learnt how to sign my name, and they were all envious. I landed a government
job, more envy. I married a golden doll of a wife, a descendent of the great Kalu Dome,
still more envy. I built a hut and had two bighas of land for sharecropping, how could
they help being envious? Hey, where’s the fan? (Chandidasi brings in a palmyra fan and
 fans him.) Bastards, get as envious as you can. I can take it all, I, Malindar Gangaputta.
I’ll send my son to school- over there, beyond the rail tracks (Bandyopadhyay, 82).

Even though Malindar perceives Chandidasi’s problem, this envy of the community will not lead
to his victimization. It is always the woman who is seen as evil and is punished. So much good
fortune and over and above this Chandidasi’s own outspoken character will lead to her downfall.
The society does not allow its women to go out of hand. But Chandidasi ‘crosses’ all limits when
she refuses to carry on the task of burying dead children, a task which she has inherited and must
carry on. Not doing it would be defying the caste structure. The caste structure does not give one
the freedom to choose one’s occupation, and any kind of transgression from the norm is not
allowed and violence is used to control the transgressors. The Dalit communities, themselves
oppressed, stringently follow oppressive rules to subjugate their women folk. In this untouchable
community when Chandidasi dares to say ‘no’ to the work of her ancestors, the community is
outraged by her audacity. Patriarchal laws do not allow women to express independence of spirit,
for patriarchal structures thrive on subjugating the Other, especially its women. A defiant woman
is dangerous and may topple this very power structure. Chandidasi provokes her community by
choosing to give up her family occupation. She decides that Tukni is the last child that she would
bury and she openly announces it, for she can no longer bear the pain that is part of the work. As
she says:

Chandidasi (with queenly dignity): Go. I’ll come. And let the community know that this
will be the last time that I’ll do the job.

Chandidasi guards Tukni’s grave, sleepy and dreaming. Since the time before Bhagirath’s birth,
she had really loved Tukni a lot and now in her delirium she talks to the dead Tukni in the grave
lovingly. She thinks of Bhagirath, her suckling child, and her breasts ache and almost burst with
milk. She sings a lullaby for Bhagirath. Meanwhile, the villagers gather around her and observe
her strange behaviour. The most violent part of the play starts now when Chandidasi is pitted
against the whole community. She is all alone in her fight and frantically tries to defend herself,
but to no avail:

The Mob (awestruck, they point their fingers at her): You’re a Bayen.
 Chandidasi (her eyes wandering from face to face, in sheer bafflement): I came to
guard the grave.

The Mob (rising above their awe to savage violence): Yes, you’re a Bayen.

Chandidasi: No, No. I’m no Bayen.

Malindar: Then who was it with whom you were so lovey dovey? (His voice mounts.)
Why is your sari dripping with milk? Whom were you suckling? For whom was the
lullaby? (Bandyopadhyay, 86-87).

Malindar now gets a Dhol, beats it and declares:

Malindar (shouting at the top of his voice, crying heartrendingly at the same time):
I…Malindar Gangaputta…strike my drum (beats the drum frantically)…to declare that
my wife has turned into a Bayen, a Bayen! (Bandyopadhyay, 87).

Her own husband thus declares Chandidasi a Bayen and in doing so he reinstates himself as part
of the community and its beliefs.

The caste system views the body of women with much suspicion, often buttressed by
Brahmanical and patriarchal discourses. Brahmanical patriarchy views the body of a woman
whether upper-caste or lower-caste as a threat which needs to be controlled. Moreover, bodily
secretions from a woman’s body during menstruation, lactation, child birth etc., is said to make
her body impure and have various negative cultural implications. In other words, women in
general are seen as impure and inauspicious. In their book Dalit Women Speak Out, Aloysius,
Mangubhai and Lee bear this out as they observe:

Another linked assumption is of women’s inherently inauspicious character, as

manifested in accusations of them having caused misfortunes and deaths. The
significance of these accusations is that, first of all, women often have done nothing to
provoke them, and secondly, by and large, the accusations stigmatize women for life and
lead to constant violence (331).
Chandidasi is at a lactating phase when she is declared a Bayen. Her clothes are drenched with
milk, something natural for new mothers, but the superstitious people use it as an evidence to
dub her a Bayen. Here is an example of society and culture working in complicity with each
other, to the detriment of the woman. A beautiful and spirited woman is sacrificed for no
apparent reason. Very pathological, but that is how the society works. It invents various ways to
punish its disobedient members and the witch-cult is just one of them. It is a very severe and
violent type of punishment whereby the woman is objectified as evil and made to realize her
lowly and degraded status. She is ostracized from the community and lives away from the village
and her family. It is believed that anyone who looks into her eyes is turned into stone and that the
air she breathes is poisonous. The bayen is also a constant warning to the people of the
consequences of breaking the norms of the community. Meager food is given to her as part of her
punishment. Interestingly, it is the community which inflicts unbearable pain on the bayen. The
bayen suffers it, but it is the community which feels afraid of her evil powers. What evokes
greater pathos is that once dubbed a bayen, she will die as one. There is no scope for redemption.

Mother and son relationship is an important motif in the whole play and the lullaby sung by the
Bayen is a constant reminder of her human quality. Each part of the play contains the lullaby at
least once and sometimes even twice and Chandidasi sings the lullaby both as a human being and
as a witch. It only goes on to show that her apparent transformation from a human to a witch
does not change her essentially as a human being. It constantly ruptures the discourses that
sustain this age-old custom of witch-cult. Motherly instinct itself, which is said to be natural to a
mother, is used to indict her by saying that she suckles dead children. This is how illogical a
community can suddenly turn out to be. The lullaby which is like a painful wail travels far and
wide and accentuates the pathos of the mother-son separation. It only says that it is at the most
elemental level that this relationship that knows no politics of caste and community inheres.
Mahashweta Devi presents the conversation between mother and son with great evocation of
affects when Bhagirath, on hearing his mother’s story of her transformation from a human being
to a bayen, goes to meet her secretly. He wants to see his mother’s face for once in the reflection
of the water in the pond. Bhagirath informs his mother that he goes to school and that he is a
good student. He wants his mother to know about him. He too longs for a mother. But the bayen
constantly tells him to go away, for now she herself believes that her presence is an evil one. In
the midst of all this, we are allowed to glimpse a silver lining even in this space where all hopes
of a post-colonial nation appeared to have evaporated. Malindar could only sign his name, the
son goes to school and will perhaps study further. If Malindar could not support his wife and
gave in to the pressure of the community even after claiming to have loved her, Bhagirath dares
to meet his mother, talks to her and later declares in front of all the villagers that Chandidasi was
not a bayen. But the dark clouds and the silver lining co-exist at this stage. ‘Progress’ and
‘power’ can work both ways. These subjugated and exploited communities too have a system of
hierarchy and find their own victims for oppression from amongst their own tribe and it is
women who are most often the sufferers. It is a way for these so-called powerless societies to
feel powerful by inflicting pain on one of their very own. But, interestingly, the very evil forces
that they want to cleanse themselves of is itself an unyielding presence in their life in the form of
the lullaby sung by the bayen and the canister tin tied to her body. The song and the sound of the
canister is a constant reminder of the evil present in their lives.

On the fateful night when Chandidasi waits at the railway track to confront Malindar with her
complaints about Bhagirath coming to meet her, she finds the railway track blocked with
bamboo poles. The plan is to derail the train and rob it. The hypocrisy of the community stands
out when Chandidasi finds out that one of the conspirators of the train accident is no one but
Gourdas, one who played an important part in declaring her to be a bayen. Chandidasi gives up
her life in trying to avert the train accident. But at her death when it is declared that she will be
given an award for bravery posthumously, this very same community, which once disowned her
while she was alive, appropriates her to get fame and honour when she is dead. When the railway
guard enquires about the late Chandidasi Gangadasi who averted a major accident, this is what
Shashi, Chandidasi’s brother-in-law, says:

Shashi (looks around at everyone, clears his throat): She’s a Dom woman, sir, one of us.
(Bhagirath, in hurt wonder, looks at Shashi first, then at his father.) (Bandyopadhyay,
91).

Chandidasi’s death elevates her from total victimhood. She could not fight the community
which as a collective force was powerful, but her death comes as a form of resistance. It proves
false this very violent and superstitious practice called witch-cult, a tool in the hands of the
community, used to punish her.

Western modes of feminism fail in these situations. While women in the West talk of
reproductive rights, abortion rights, right to motherhood and various issues about the body,
Chandidasi does not have the right over her own child. She is forcefully separated from him and
she is declared as one who is harmful to children, a sly and evil witch, whose very presence is
poisonous. She has the chance to meet her son and talk to him just once before her death and that
too is possible because Bhagirath himself takes the initiative to meet her. Moreover, all this
cannot lead to resistance or make Chandidasi a subject of resistance, for if in the beginning she
firmly believed that she was not a bayen, as time passed, her beliefs that she is a bayen became
stronger. Even when her intentions are noble, that is, that of saving the train from the accident,
she only invokes her evil magical powers to come to her aid to stop the accident. As she says:

Chandidasi: … (She gets more and more restless as the train approaches closer, the
thunderous rumble louder.) But what can I do? I must do something. O God, if I’m truly a
Bayen, then all the creatures of the nether world should follow my orders. Why don’t
they? Why can’t I then stop that train? (Bandyopadhyay, 90).

Chandidasi’s problems then have to be understood in terms of her specificity by locating her in
her specific cultural sphere. Education still has not reached the untouchable community that she
belongs to and the place has not been part of the greater modernizing agenda of the nation. Most
of these communities have their own cultural uniqueness and generally develop their own
antidotes to various challenges that they face in life. For example, for problems like smallpox the
villagers try to appease a local goddess called Shitala. Mahashweta Devi in one of her activist
writings about the witch-cult had once said that at a time when the tribes were losing everything,
including their identity, due to aggressive economic, social and political changes, they held on to
the witch-cult as part of their cultural moorings. As Devi says:

Why should they lose everything? That is why they have embraced the cult with a new
vigour, to preserve their identity (Basu, 135).
This is where western rationalism and discourses of feminism breakdown. Here is a community
which even at the expense of sacrificing one of their own, can hold on to such beliefs as part of a
culture which they can identify with. Changes will perhaps take place with the coming of the
new generation of educated young boys like Bhagirath. The sacrifice of a spirited woman will
perhaps act as a catalyst for such changes.

Mahashweta Devi’s contribution lies in exposing this space, a rather problematical one, so to
speak, for concept of the nation. Bhabha in his book ,The Location of Culture, talks of such
spaces as ‘the scraps, patches and rags of daily life’ (209), the ‘unruly “time” of national
culture’, ‘the liminality of the nation’ and ‘the margins of modernity’ (211) which, unrepresented
as they are, challenge the pedagogical discourse of the nation by their repetitious and recursive
strategy of the performative. As Bhabha says:

We are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its
population. The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal self-generation, becomes
a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the
heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense
locations of cultural difference (212).

Mahashweta Devi’s ‘Bayen’ represents such a space of difference. The experience of Chandidasi
Gangadasi is of course a local one, that of a particular ethnic community. But such local
experiences can take global proportions, for exploitation along the axes of religion, caste,
community, sexuality, superstition and violence is widespread across the nation, and such
problems and especially those of women to be rightly addressed need to be seen in their
specificities which must be articulated rather than blandly totalized. It is these spaces, that is, the
spaces that show the temporalities of split and difference, where the re-writing of the nation
should properly begin. Devi’s text evokes these appropriate thoughts necessary to develop not
only the ethical relations we need to establish with the Other in question here but also to generate
the counter-discourses in order to bring into being the proper idea of the postcolonial
nationspace.

WORKS CITED
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Basu, Tapan. (Ed.) Translating Caste. New Delhi: Katha, 2002.

Bhaba, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Devi, Mahashweta. Imaginary Maps. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Calcutta: Thema,
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Devi, Mahasweta. “Bayen” in Tapan Basu (ed.) Translating Caste. New Delhi: Katha, 2002.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Irudayam S.J. Aloysius, Jayshree P. Mangubhai, Joel G. Lee. Dalit Women Speak Out: Caste,
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Weedon, Chris. Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference. UK: Blackwell Publishers,
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