Mahasweta Devi’s Titu Mir: A Story of Subaltern Solidarity

Abstract

Life narratives are often interwoven with the social, economic and political history of the times. In mainstream history, the lives of the underprivileged who contributed to the Indian freedom struggle are barely recorded. The discourse of history is based on written evidence. Since the history of the subaltern classes largely exists in the form of folk-tales, legends and oral narratives, history cannot accommodate these lives in its discourse. Ranajit Guha points this out: “What clearly is left out of this un-historical historiography is the politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country-that is, the people” (Guha 4). I wish to examine how Mahasweta Devi depicts the life-story of Titu Mir who brought the subaltern classes together to fight the British and how the fictional discourse provides an alternative as well as opposition to the historical discourse.