Chotti Munda and His Arrow- A Struggle for Identity and Protection of Environmental Habitat

Abstract

Among the many fictional works of Mahasweta Devi Chotti Munda and His Arrow has been translated by Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak into English and thus it has received a global readership and critical attention. Though the story revolves around the main protagonist, Chotti Munda, but as we read the novel it unfolds not a story about a Chotti Munda but a tale about the tribals of India. It is a story which maps the growth of India from British imperialism to independence and beyond with its foreground as the tribal sector which has been unduly exploited over the years by people having vested interests. Chotti Munda and His Arrow portrays the pathetic predicament of an entire world of tribals who are sometimes referred to as the citizen of a ‘Fourth World’. Through the portrayal of the tribal struggle one may witness how the novel has unfolded many ecocritical perspectives which have been interwoven in the entire fabric of the story. Many of the ecocritical concerns like bioregionalism, environmental justice, oikopoetics and ecocide are to be discovered in this novel. There is no doubt that while writing the novel Mahasweta Devi was overtly concerned about the tribal struggle and the exploitation that they have faced, but as Timothy Clark has pointed out, ‘ecological problems are seen to result from structures of hierarchy and elitism in human society, geared to exploit both the people and the natural world as a source of profit’. (Literature and Nature, 2) Thus while she was writing about the Mundas or Kherias or Gonds or Nagesias she was equally ecologically concerned. Her concern for the environment and the man-nature relationship maintained by the tribals become clear when in an interview with Gayatri Chakroborty Spivak she informs her that just like the Native American ‘the Sobors (the hunting tribes) will beg forgiveness if they are forced to fell a tree: You are our friend. I do this because my wife doesn’t have any food, my son doesn’t have any food, my daughter starves. Before they killed an animal, they used to pray to the animal: the bird, the fish, the deer.’ (Imaginary Maps, ii) Thus Mahasweta Devi understood that the relationship that the tribals share with nature and animal is not based on the greed that is the dominant driving force in this world of globalization.