The Book of the Hunter

Book excerpt: This charming, expansive novel set in the sixteenth-century medieval Bengal draws on the life of the great medieval poet Kabikankan Mukundaram Chakrabarti, whose epic poem Abhayamangal, better known as Chandimangal, records the socio-political history of the time. In the section of this epic called Byadhkhanda the Book of the Hunter he describes the lives of hunter tribes, the Shabars, who lived in the forest and its environs. Mahasweta Devi explores the cultural values of the Shabars and how they cope with the slow erosion of their way of life as more and more forest land gets cleared to make way for settlements. She uses the lives of two couples, the brahaman Mukundaram and his wife, and the young Shabars, Phuli and Kalya, to capture the contrasting socio-cultural norms of rural society of the time. Mahasweta Devi acknowledges her debt to Mukundaram, who wrote about men and women, gods and goddesses. The hunter tribes refusal to cultivate and settle down, as described by him, is true of surviving forest tribes today. The villages and rivers mentioned by him still exist. Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Sagaree Sengupta is translator based in the USA. She translates from Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. She has collaborated on this translation with her mother, Mandira Sengupta, an artist who maintains an active interest in her native Bengali. The two of them earlier translated The Queen of Jhansi in this series.