Skip to main content

Dudiya


Book Review


Title: Dudiya: In Your Burning Land

Author: Vishwas Patil

Translator: Nadeem Khan

Publisher: Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2023

Pages: 220

According to official data, 25% of India’s land is forest. In reality, only 12% is forest. The rest has been encroached on by the corporate sector with the permission of the government. Even the Modi government which pretends to be corruption-free and idealistic has altered the forest laws in order to hand over certain forest land to some corporate bigwigs under various guises including environment protection!

The people who are most affected by these shady deals between the Indian government and the corporate sector are the tribals and Adivasis living in the forests. This novel by Vishwas Patil, written originally in Marathi, is about these shady affairs in the forests of the country, particularly in Dandakaranya in Chhattisgarh.

Dudiya is a real character, an Adivasi woman whose people were betrayed first by the government and then by the Naxalites. Vishwas Patil, the author, is a retired IAS officer who was once given election duty in the troubled areas of Chhattisgarh where he met Dudiya. In this novel, he tells the moving tale of this hapless woman who is condemned to live out a pathetic existence even if she is ready to work hard for a better destiny.

Right in the beginning, one of the characters tells the narrator – Dilip Pawar, an IAS officer on election duty in Dudiya’s land – that “our government babus from various departments had let loose a campaign of naked exploitation of the poor tribals, subjecting them to mercilessly high-handed behaviour.” The Naxalite movement is a natural offshoot of that exploitation, he says.

Not only was their land snatched from the tribal people, but the various government schemes meant for them were usurped, and these people’s very livelihood was taken away for the sake of coal, petroleum, minerals, and even to build so-called ‘special environmental projects.’

Dudiya’s brother manages to complete school education and become a police constable. He thus saves himself. But his family is hounded by the Naxalites because of that. Dudiya has no choice but become a Naxalite herself because she, being a girl, was deprived of any education. At the age of 17, the pretty Dudiya takes up AK-47 to fight for the rights of her own people.

The Naxalites turn out to be not much better than the government officials. Jaisekhar is the leader of the group to which Dudiya belongs. He is in his sixties. But he is unable to control his lust when he sees the sensuous charms of young Dudiya. She is forced into physical relationships with him. Later when she becomes pregnant, the man blames her for irresponsible behaviour. When his own wife, a professor in Hyderabad, turns up unexpectedly after an absence of ten years, Dudiya becomes a scapegoat. Dudiya realises that even these Naxalite leaders have no ideals. Jaisekhar’s wife is a rich professor, his son is working in America, and his daughter studies in JNU, Delhi. Reality is not what it appears to be. The Naxalite leaders from the plains of Andhra and Bengal are also exploiters of the tribal people in Chhattisgarh’s hills.  

Dudiya realises that there is a huge nexus of very powerful people working together: the government, the corporate sector, and the manufacturers and dealers of arms and ammunition. Nobody is interested in solving the problems – whether of the tribals or of Naxalite violence – because too many people are reaping profits from the criminal violence. Violence is a productive industry!

This short novel shows us the ugly side of that industry and how it works. Dudiya has a very moving personal history. She becomes the ultimate symbol of the ordinary woman’s utter helplessness in India. Woman empowerment is just another of the umpteen beautiful slogans thrown to citizens like dogs get their share of bones.

The author has written this novel from his personal experience in the Naxal-affected areas of Chhattisgarh. He is also a prolific writer who has some 40 books to his credit. He has won many awards too including the prestigious Sahitya Akademy Award. Yet I was left with a strong feeling of something missing from the novel. It is written rather unimaginatively. It reads like a journalist’s account of the problems in the Bastar hills. Could it be a drawback of the translation? I’m not sure.

In spite of that drawback, the novel – which I read in less than two days – is worth reading. It is an insider’s account of how the powerful government and its accomplices on the one hand, and the rebellious leaders of the tribals on the other, can be equally exploitative when it comes to the helpless tribal people themselves.

 

Top post on Blogchatter

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Perhaps the author was playiing a little safe by couching as 'novel' what is really meant to be documentary? Reducing risk of pointed fingers in today's publishing environment of India? YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Power corrupts. And those in power want to keep power and make a profit. Sad. It's the way everywhere, it seems.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Politics may be the same everywhere. Maybe there are some genes which are common to all politicians.

      Delete
  3. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Tragic.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The gap is widening alarmingly. People are driven to suicide.

      Delete
  4. we have lot of federal and state forest land here. Not all that much private lands here. Both advantage and disadvantages.
    I can enjoy the woods.
    It raise cost of private lands.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Depletion of forests is doing much environmental damage in India. Apart from injustice to tribal people.

      Delete
  5. I commend the author for atleast having the courage to put this story out there. Sadly, Dudiya is not alone in this exploitation. We can only hope someone out there with power and good intentions does the right thing for once~

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, the author does have some courage to write this. But apropos of your hope [I love that colonial phrase apropos these days for some mysterious reason which is actually not mysterious considering the return of colonialism to Bharat], well I can only say no chance.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Subhuman Social Media

Illustration by Copilot Designer I disabled Facebook on my phone yesterday. There’s too much vulgarity, subhuman crudity, on it. And the first thing I read this morning was a Malayalam weekly – Samakalika Malayalam from the Indian Express group – whose editorial lamented the treatment meted out on social media to Dr M Leelavathi, renowned Malayalam writer. Leelavathi refused to celebrate her 98 th birthday because she said she was distressed by the pictures of innocent children dying of human-made hunger in Gaza. She was trolled by the Hindu right wing in Kerala for saying that. The editorial mentioned above requests the “Hindutva handles” to leave alone Leelavathi. If Kerala’s beloved poet and educationist was moved to tears by the sight of little children behaving like insane creatures as soon as they espy some food, it only reveals the deep humanity that sustained her poetry as well as her world vision. The editorial went on to mention that 20,000 children were killed by Is...

Death of Humour and Rise of Sycophancy in India

Front pages of Newspapers in Delhi on Modi's birthday Yesterday the newspapers in Delhi (and many other places too) carried full page photo of Narendra Modi to celebrate his 75 th birthday. It was sycophancy at its zenith in the history of India’s print media. At no other point in the country’s history had the newspaper industry stooped so low. The first Prime Minister of the country was a man who encouraged the media to be critical of him. Nehru appreciated cartoons that caricatured him mercilessly. Criticism, particularly in the press, helped Nehru keep his ego under check. Shankar’s Weekly was the best cartoon magazine of those times. Launched in 1948 by K Shankar Pillai, the weekly featured political cartoons, satire and humorous articles. It criticised politicians mercilessly by caricaturing or satirising them. Nehru was a prime target. And the PM wasn’t upset. On the contrary, he appreciated Shankar Pillai’s efforts to make the nation, particularly its political leade...

A Man Called Ove

Book Review   Title: A Man Called Ove Author: Fredrik Backman Translation from Swedish: Henning Koch Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, London, 2015 Pages: 295   Ove is a grumpy old man. Right in the initial pages of the novel, we are informed that “People said he was bitter. Maybe they were right. He’d never reflected much on it. People also called him ‘anti-social’. Ove assumed this meant he wasn’t overly keen on people. And in this instance he could totally agree with them. More often than not people were out of their minds.” The novel is Ove’s story It is Ove’s grumpiness that makes him a fascinating character for the reader. Grumpiness notwithstanding, Ove has a lot of goodness within. His world is governed by rules, order and routines. He is superhumanly hardworking and honest. He won’t speak about other people even if such silence means the loss of his job and even personal honour. When his colleague Tom steals money and puts the blame squarely...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...