Unravelling realities

From ancient epics to contemporary short fiction, land has figured as a symbol, a trope, a function, an extension and an obsession in the individual and collective imagination. Land can be a source of memories, impressions and dreams that constitute a person's consciousness. It is also the physical space that marks the two determining phases of life – birth and death – and is, therefore, intrinsically symbolic. What happens when people are forced out of their land? Handsa Sowvendra Shekhar's collection of 10 short stories and sketches in The Adivasi Will Not Dance highlights the various spiritual and emotional disturbances that forced displacement can create in the human consciousness.

Shekhar's writing has contributed to the emergence of the figure of the adivasi or indigenous dweller in Indian English fiction. Part of the adivasi experience is linked to struggles of forced migration, displacement and uprooting in the context of modern, urbanised living. While in the popular imagination, adivasis are stereotyped as bestial men and semi-naked women who prance around trees and fires, the actual indigenous person in India is resisting and mourning the loss of identity and rights in a pattern that is horrifying and sadly predictable. In poetry and drama, one hears these voices of loss and anger, but in prose, Shekhar's writing, with a tenor and texture that is as acerbic as it is poetic, has filled a much needed gap between 'great and little histories of people', to draw upon A K Ramanujan's critique of the dichotomous 'great/little' model in the context of Indian literature.