Museumization of Subaltern History in Mahasweta Devi’s Chotti Munda and His Arrow

Abstract

This research focuses on the area of subaltern study, especially of Munda tribes living in Bihar, Jharkhanda and Uttar Pradesh States of India. It tries to understand why Mahasweta Devi includes many oral narratives of the Munda people and raises their issues. Understanding this is important in order to document the oral history of subaltern people as they are in the verge of extinction because they do not have their own written scripts. For this purpose, this research carries out a review of relevant literatures based on library and internet sources, and the text itself. As a theoretical perspective, this study makes use of different concepts of subaltern studies developed by Dipesh Chakravorti and Ranjit Guha. As a conclusion, this study finds that the subaltern themes extensively permeate the text “Chotti Munda and His Arrow” and it is found that the Indian aboriginal people are subaltern not merely because of their caste, language and location but also due to illiteracy and the lack of written history. Mahasweta Devi’s sketch of the subaltern characters, agency of the subaltern voices, her tones and language, her documentation of the oral narratives, her representation of voice of the marginalized people persuades the researcher to conclude that her novel “Chotti Munda and His Arrow” constructs an alternative history which posses itself as an alternative to the Indian colonial history..