Mainstream WeeklyA symbiotic relationship exists between the humans, particularly the women, leading a spontaneous life away from the din of urban noise and the Mother Nature itself. These rural folk and forest dwellers are the true descendants of Wordsworth’s Michael and the Solitary Reaper, living in close proximity with nature. Like Michael, they know the ‘meaning of all winds’ [1] and ‘the heart of many thousand mists’ [2].
As one moves away from the core forest towards towards the cities, this relationship begins to lose the primal intensity of affection and becomes more mechanical, artificial and automatized. The movement from the jungle to the metropolitan / megapolitan town is divided into multiple and almost infinite zones. Every single step walked away from the core natural territory towards the civilized world indicates the loosening of the natural order of things and beginning of the man -made stratified control of the systems. Natural zones are marked by primary bodily instincts like hunger, thirst and sleep etc. Whereas urban territories indicate a systemic advance in the areas of logic, reason, scientific temper and rationality. However, both these territories are porous. The urban areas close to nature are prone to a symmetrical relationship with the primal world.
Similarly, a woman’s relationship with her kids and society is organic, whereas man’s connections with his surroundings are more impersonal. Woman’s natural and fetal affinity with her offsprings offers a sort of comparison with all things that exist courtesy mother nature. While father’s oedipal control and socialization of the kids may represent the onset of the colonial and mechanical hierarchy.
This man is the colonizer, who has plundered both the woman and the nature. He has also disturbed the symmetry between the two. This colonizer has also naturalized this social exploitation and hence the evil of colonial subjugation by man appears to be a normal phenomenon.
Prakash Thapaliyal’s Hindi short story ‘Chani’ talks about this symbiotic relationship between a highland woman Sobati and her buffalo Chani. It is the opening story of Thapaliyal’s short story collection Pahad Ki Pagdandiyan [3]. This Chani is not just a buffalo for Sobati. She is her soul mate. Prior to Chani, her mother Asadhi was fostering the family of Sobati. The locale of the story is a distant village of Uttrakhand. Sobati’s husband has married another woman and now she is leading a deserted life along with her kids and Chani. In times of distress caused by the second marriage of the husband, it is Chani’s affectionate company that soothes the woman.
Similarly, the husband also forces the indiscriminately unjustified sale of Chani to some other villager. But, the buffalo does not agree to this forced colonization of her self by the master and she refuses to give milk to the new master. The new colonizer is compelled to return the buffalo to its original place.
The story also talks of a terribly ghastly landslide, where a lot of man-made structures crumble like fragile playing cards. All this displays the sheer transitoriness of ephemeral human efforts. The plot of the story also brings a point to the notice that nature consists of both order and disorder. Life and death are closely intertwined.
In the midst of these natural disasters, Sobati and Chani help one another. Chani is sunk deep in the debris of the landslide. In this precarious situation, Sobati tirelessly removes all this mud surrounding Chani and when the buffalo is saved it begins to support the woman.
In a way, all the victims of the colonization must stand together.
(Author: Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal is Professor of English at Feroze Gandhi College, Rae Bareli. He is interested mostly in Contemporary Literary Theory. He had been a contributor to ‘Postcolonial Literature’ section of Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies under the editorship of Dieter Riemenschneider. )