Mahasweta Devi has just passed away. The internet is awash with obituaries, so I won’t
add one of my own. This is just to say that she was precisely the sort of
liberated and socially valuable woman that I respected, and I have seen very
few in my lifetime. I say this despite her legendary foul mouth, her chain
smoking of beedis, her two failed marriages, and because of the
fact that she never had to bare her body or wear anything but saris to assert
her independence and freedom of choice. ‘Feminists’ who are utterly
materialistic, completely selfish, obsessed with exhibitionism and have nothing
beyond shopping, dressing up, partying and abusing men to live for – no real
purpose for being alive – might want to learn a thing or two from her, not just
about how to be a remarkable woman, but, far more importantly, how to be worthy
of the proud name of human. I saw her at close quarters only once, during my
sojourn as a young volunteer at the Calcutta Book Fair in the mid-80s; I heard
from an old boy who was escorting her in a cab, and when he started talking about
her books, she burst into tears, saying ‘orey,
era akhono amar boi porey!’ (Hey, these kids still read my books), and my
sister the historian once got a great deal of unstinted help from her in
connection with her research. A deep thank you to the departed soul, one of
those rare few in this age I can call ‘noble’ and take inspiration from.
And
now Hillary Clinton has won the Democratic Party’s nomination for the Presidentship of the United States. If she is elected, it will be a double
whammy for the US to crow about – first black POTUS followed by the first
woman. Maybe they will decide on a black woman soon? Tokenism, yes, but given
the prominence and power of the post, tokenism of the highest significance.
However, I read that while a large part of the electorate will probably vote
for her because they want a woman in the Oval Office, a very large number of
them have strong misgivings about her worthiness as a candidate, because she is
widely unpopular as a person, and considered to be too much of a Washington
insider to be likely to bring about major policy changes that have long been
hoped for. We Indians could tell them that profiles don’t really matter – we have
had Dalits and Muslims for Presidents, lived under a woman Prime Minister for nearly
two decades, and several women are running several states at this moment. Their
caste, religion and gender really don’t make much of a difference.
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