Etched in Memory

“MASTER SAAB learned nothing from the outside world. Everything he knew, he taught himself.” This is a line from Mahasweta Devi’s novella Master Saab, in which a mother narrates the story of the eponymous hero to her son. The maxim is meant to kindle intrigue: why does she say that Master Saab did not learn from the outside world? What did he learn by himself? And who were his students?

First published in a Bangla literary journal in 1979, Master Saab is an intricate, embedded novella. The mother’s tale is framed by a prologue introducing the narrative time and place: Bhojpur in the early 1970s. It recounts the story of Jagdish Mahto, a renowned teacher and revolutionary from the village of Ekwari.

The novella belongs firmly to Mahasweta’s writings of the restless 1970s. Unlike the urban setting of Mother of 1084, published in 1974, or the mythic canvas of Operation? Bashai Tudu, published in 1978—her well-known novels that explore Naxalism—Master Saab is set in the fertile flatlands along the Sone Canal. Well after Independence, Bhojpur’s agrarian social order was characterised by its oppressive, casteist landed gentry and the exploitation of the Dalit peasantry. The mother’s story narrates the people’s revolt, led by Mahto, for rights and dignity against this violent feudal system. She weaves together his life’s trajectory and the long durée of Bhojpur’s militant past, stretching back to the 1930s and further back to Kunwar Singh’s exploits during the 1857 War of Independence. A fascinating literary exploration in which oral tropes blend with contemporary history, Master Saab is a tribute to collective memory and the people who created and continued the legend of the teacher.

Thirty years ago, when Mahasweta received the Jnanpith Award, the Bharatiya Jnanpith proposed a translation of one of her works. She chose Master Saab. Since then, there have been several editions of Ranjit Saha’s Hindi translation, first published in 1997. And yet, despite its significance, Master Saab has never been translated into English. Even the Bangla original continues to be anthologised in Mahasweta’s collected works but is not available as an independent work. The novella has escaped critical attention, remaining, perhaps, one of Mahasweta’s least talked about literary achievements within the formidable canon that has developed around her work on gender and identity. The unevenness of its reception testifies to her changing readership as well as to how the robust Hindi translation garnered recognition and helped retain the relevance of an episode in Bhojpur’s revolutionary history.