Mahasweta Devi’s novella Bedanabala: Her Life. Her Times is a saga of sinful, silent suffering emanating from the margins. The story is spoken in the first person but the writer is all-pervasive as an omniscient narrator. Bedanabala recounts and reminiscences the life and the times of her mother Kamalini, known as Kamal and also as ‘Ma’ to her. Though the central character is Kamalini, it as much tells the story of several women who are ‘fallen’ and are castigated by the society as they are labeled as ‘whores’ by the society as they are defiled. It also delineates the tumultuous times when freedom movement was on its upbeat with several young men, even those hailing from rich, noble backgrounds were ready to sacrifice everything of their own to liberate the country from foreign yoke. This paper, apart from attempting to explore the lives of the defamed women of Calcutta during the beginning of the twentieth century, also studies, on a larger canvas, the stigma, the social repression that the damned women confront for apparently no fault of theirs. Though the story is rooted in the early 1900s and carries itself even to two or three decades later to that, the subject taken for disquisition by Mahasweta is relevant even to the contemporary times. Kaminibala Dasi, also known as Did’ma is an infamous prostitute by profession who abducts a small girl child of year and a half from an aristocratic family and brings her to her multi-storeyed house with an intention of bringing her up to engage her too in flesh-trade. She names her ‘Kamalini’. However, after she grows up, she becomes so close to Kaminibala that Kaminibala begins to instrospect into the her own life and the sins that she has committed and resolves to provide Kamalini a decent household life. She thinks it as a way of cleansing her sins by doing a noble work and also as a way of penitence. She also decides to shun her profession later. Kaminibala comes into contact with Swami Sadananda Maharaj who had started Nabya Hindu Mission with the aim of serving the society. There they are introduced to Balaram Babu, an aristocrat who is a great nationalist helping the Swadeshis. He is a reformer who is of the conviction that inner purity is more important than external affiliations and hence seeks the permission of Did’ma to marry Kamalini which he gets. He marries her and takes her to his bungalow where he provides her with all the comforts, in particular, the human dignity and love and caring affection of a husband. Thus, a marginalized girl enters into the mainstream because of the magnanimity of Balaram. They, as wife and husband render valuable services to the freedom fighters even after they confront the stigma on an occasion. They begin a girl child and name her Bedanabala. Mahasweta through this novella succeeds in delineating the excruciating pain that is harboured in the ‘fallen women’ who do not enter the profession by choice but rather are compelled to. The novella, however, ends on an optimistic note with Bedanabala feeling that only education can dispel the ‘darkness of sin’ and the cherished dream of her mother in the form of a school for destitute children (which Bedanabala runs) named – ‘Aalo-r-Adhikar’ – ‘The Right to Light’ can be instrumental in that. Mahasweta, through the words of the main narrator Bedanabala seems to convey that it is only through education that women can get enlightened and become empowered.
Key-words: Marginalisation, Child-trafficking, Flesh-trade, Fallen-women, Devadasi System, Swadeshi Movement, Purana, Mainstream.
