MOTHER OF 1084

MAHASWETA DEVI

VIJAYALAKSHMI C S
2020-2021
PLOT SUMMARY

■ The play Mother of 1084 (1997) is the original translation of Mahasweta Devi’s
Bengali playHajar Churashir Ma that has the best illustrations for the marginalized
category. The neglected and suppressed plight of the woman is represented by
Sujata Chatterjee, mother of the protagonist of the play Brati Chatterjee whose
ideology i.e. , commitment to the revolutionary and Communist Naxalite movement
has labeled him as a rebel, and led to his ruthless killing by the police in an
‘encounter’.
■ In the play Mother of 1084 Sujata Chatterjee, a traditional apolitical upper middle
class lady, an employee who awakens one early morning to the shattering news
that her youngest and favourite son, Brati, is lying dead in the police morgue
bearing the corpse no. 1084. Her efforts to understand her son’s revolutionary
activism lead her to reflect on her own alienation from the complacent, hypocritical,
bourgeois society against which he had rebelled. The play moves around Sujata, a
middle-aged woman belonging to a ‘bhadralok’, bourgeoisie Calcutta  family .
■ Born into a conservative, affluent family, Sujata is advised to pursue her B. A.
so that it helps her marriage prospects, but is ultimately married off to
Dibyanath Chatterjee, a chartered accountant, despite his unsound financial
situation. In thirty-four years of their married life, Sujata gives birth to four
children, two sons (Jyoti and Brati) and two daughters (Nipa and Tuli). When
the novel opens, two of her children are already married, Jyoti to Bina and
Nipa to Amrit.
■ In the eyes of the world, all of them are leading perfectly happy and settled
lives, but as Sujata goes on to discover later, that this happiness is only
superficial. Significantly, Sujata makes several other discoveries, only after
the sudden and mysterious death of Brati, her younger son, with whom she
had always shared a very special relationship. For instance, she discovers
that all her thirty-four years of her married life, she has been living a lie, as
her husband, being an incorrigible philanderer, always cheated her with his
mother’s and children’s tacit approval.
■ He fixed up a petty bank job for her, when Brati was barely three years old,
not out of any consideration for her economic independence, but essentially
to help the family tide over a temporary financial crisis. And, as soon as the
tide is over, he wants her to give up the job, which Sujata simply refuses.
Later, she also discovers that her children, too, are leading lives very similar
to her own. If there is someone who has dared to be different, it’s Brati.
Sullenly rebellious, right from his childhood, Brati has made no secret of his
disregard, even contempt, for his familial code and value-system.
■ Turning his back upon this decadent and defunct code, Brati decides to join
the Naxalite movement sweeping through the State of West Bengal in late
1960’s and early 1970’s. Unaware of his secret mission, Sujata is not able to
dissuade her son from joining this movement. During his period of struggle,
he comes into contact with a young girl, Nandini, who is also a member of
the underground movement and with whom he shares his vision of a new
world order. On being betrayed by one of his comrades, Brati and three of his
close associates, Somu, Parth and Laltu, are brutally murdered by the
assassin of the police.
■ Later, the police call up his father, asking him to come and identify the dead
body of his son, who, has in the meantime been divested of his identity as a
person, and given another ‘dehumanized identity’ as corpse number 1084.
Not only does the father refuse to go, but he also forbids other family
members from doing so. Outraged at the manner in which his associates, his
immediate family and the state have abandoned the dead Brati, his mother,
Sujata decides to go, throwing all pretensions to false social respectability
and the fear of public censure, to winds.
■ Dibyanath Chatterjee, father of Brati Chatterjee is represented, as an honest
representative of the male dominated society. As soon as he comes to know
about the news of his son, instead of rushing to the police station he tries to
hush up the matter. Sujata is aghast to see the indifferent behaviour of her
husband. He was least bothered to talk about this matter to his wife Sujata.
The following sentences reveal very clearly how much she was neglected by
him: Sujata : (uncomprehending, in a panic). What will you hush up? What are
you talking about? Dibyanath: Jyoti, there is no time to waste.
■ He goes out. Sujata : Jyoti! (Jyoti busy in dialing a number. He does not reply)
Jyoti! (Reproving). Jyoti! What’s Happened? (04) From the above lines one
can easily conclude that Sujata was neglected though she was the second
important member of the family. Dibyanath Chatterjee bothered to consult
his son Jyoti rather than his wife, Sujata. Sujata felt shocked when Dibyanath
Chatterjee refuses to go to the police station with the fear of stigma in the
society for his son’s involvement in anti - government affairs. In the words of
Sujata: But that soon? Even before the body’s been identified?
■ A father gets the news on the telephone and does not even think of rushing
to have a look? All he can think of is that he’d be comprised if his car went to
Kantakapukur? (09) The four chapters in the play mark a new stage in the
evolution of Sujata’s consciousness, as it enables her to re-order her
fragmented and chaotic life in search of a cohesive identity. Every time she
visits her own past or that of Brati, Somu’s mother or Nandini, her long-
suppressed personal loss is slowly released into the ever-widening, spirals of
betrayal, guilt and suffering.
■ From a weak-willed, hopelessly dependent and a non-assertive moral
coward, Sujata is transformed into a morally assertive, politically enlightened
and a socially defiant individual. In the first chapter, significantly titled ‘Dawn’,
Sujata primarily returns to her interior, private world of personal suffering,
torture, betrayal and loneliness. Negotiating the inner time in relation to her
immediate familial situation, she becomes aware of how she and Brati were
not just fellow sufferers but also soul mates.
■ In the second chapter, ‘Afternoon’, Sujata’s visit to the bank to get jewellery
from the locker is only a pretext for her to visit the house of Somu’s mother.
A close associate of Brati, Somu had been killed in the same encounter.
More significantly, Brati had spent his night in Somu’s house before his
mysterious disappearance and death. While Sujata goes to Somu’s mother
with the specific aim of retrieving the memories of Brati’s last few hours, it
turns out to be her entry and initiation into another world altogether.
■ It is the world of primitive squalor, filth, poverty, degradation and subhuman
existence that only hovers tentatively on the margins of ‘bhadraloks’
consciousness. She enters into the little known world of slum dwellers. The
sight of Somu’s ageing mother, her disgruntled daughter and that of their
ramshackle tenement with a straw roof is enough to complete the rituals of
initiation. In the third chapter, titled ‘Evening’, she visits Nandini, who apart
from being Brati’s comrade-in-arms was also his beloved.
■ It is Nandini who reconstructs for Sujata all the events leading up to Brati’s
betrayal and murder. In the process, she also initiates Sujata into the little
known world of the underground movement, explaining to her the logic for
an organized rebellion, giving her first hand account of state repression and
its multiple failures. It’s through Nandini that Sujata is finally able to
understand the reasons for Brati’s political convictions and his rejection of
the bourgeoisie code.
■ All this leaves her so completely bewildered that she openly admits to
Nandini, “I didn’t really know Brati. ” (87). In the last chapter of the novel
titled ‘Night’, we meet a transformed Sujata, one who is more self-assured,
morally confident and politically sensitive. She decides to leave the house in
which Brati never felt at home, where he wasn’t valued while he was alive,
nor his memory respected after his death. Having found a soul mate in Brati,
she turns her back on Dibyanath and his decadent value-system.
■ Bound by a sense of moral responsibility, she does go through all the rituals
and ceremonies connected with Tuli’s engagement, but during the party, she
maintains stiff, studied silence. Her insistence on wearing a plain, white sari
for the party is also a significant gesture. The feelings of Sujata were not
respected but misinterpreted by the members of the family. The given
conversation between Sujata (Tuli, the second daughter of Sujata) and Tuli
represents this thought: Tuli : Didn’t Brati laugh at other people’s beliefs?
■ It is a well known fact in the society that father and mother play an important
role in bringing up the children. But it is ridiculous to notice that when the
children get spoiled, complete blame is thrown on mother. Being physically
weak and fragile, (for a few years, she had been living with a rotten appendix
inside her system), and traumatized by her younger son’s death and
subsequent repression of grief, she simply gives up on life. When she
screams and collapses into a heap, her husband is quick to react that her
“appendix” has burst.
■ Whatever the symbolic overtones of his statement, she certainly succumbs
to the slow process of inner-outer rot and decay. Finally, as she herself says,
“Now that Brati is dead, I, too, wouldn’t like to go on living. ” She discovers
her inner self but on the whole loses her will to live and survive. Time
constantly swings back and forth, and so does the pendulum of two
interconnected, intertwined lives, that of Sujata and her son, Brati.
Interestingly, it is death that unites them both, irrevocably asserting the
authenticity of their lives, too.
■ Mahasweta Devi’s predominant concerns are the tribal backwaters, the
“exploitations of the Adivasis by the landed rich or the urban-administrative
machinery callously perpetuating a legacy of complicity with the colonizers,
bonded labour and prostitution, the destitution and misery of city dwellers who are
condemned to live at the fringes and eke-out a meager livelihood, the plight of
woman who are breadwinners and victims of male sexual violence, dependent
widows, ill-treated wives, and unwanted daughters whose bodies can fetch a price
– are adequately represented”. Sen).
■ From the above situations, one can infer the insignificant role of Sujata in the play
Mother of 1084, as a woman who has been relegated to the position of a neglected,
suppressed, ill-treated, mechanical and marginalized in all forms in the male
dominated society who consider woman as an object of sex, only to reproduce,
bring  money when needed and does not possess even a voice to express her own
concerns.