The Nexus Of Politics And Dalit Consciousness: A Critique Of Mannu Bhandari’s Mahabhoj As A Dalit Literary Text

Abstract

Mannu Bhandari, the only woman writer among the pioneers of the Navi Kahani movement, was a prominent figure in Hindi literature. Often considered as a spokesperson of the feminist issues, it was her novel, Mahabhoj, published in 1979 and translated as The Great Feast by Ruth Vinita, which established Bhandari as a revolutionary writer; a writer who dared to raise hardboiled and grim Dalit issues lucidly, with her witty and satiric writing style. Mahabhoj, a political satire on caste and class politics, is set in an unnamed rural village, about 20 km from Saroha city, in the backdrop of urban politics and dying media ethics. It is in this context of caste and class politics, politics of vote-banks and opportunism, I will study Mahabhoj as a play problematising Dalit discourse as well. This article, while attempting to critique Mahabhoj as a satire on contemporary politics, will also strive to raise a pertinent question as why the realistic representation of the Dalit exploitation and the suppression of Dalit consciousness by the power system as given by Mahabhoj, at that time when Dalit writing was not an established genre in the canon of Hindi Literature, is still not regarded as a work of Dalit literature like many other contemporary mainstream Hindi literary texts which dealt with Dalit issues?