Nature and nurture in Mahasweta Devi's dystopia: A study of Mahdu: A fairytale

This paper is an attempt to present Mahasweta Devi's ecological concerns as revealed in her short fictional narrative Mahdu: A Fairytale. It is a sad narrative of the disposed Korju tribes who lost their will when their forests were destroyed in order to make way for the railway during the British rule. By employing the fairytale technique, she shows how Mahdu, a sixteen-year-old boy, who is on the brink of death due to a century old malnutrition, emerges into a powerful monster ready to devour almost anything that stands for civilizational advancement at the end of the story. Mahdu embodies the profound ecological loss, which in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's words is “loss of forest as foundation of life” and its tragic aftermath. He also stands for humanity's disconnection from the natural world brought about not only by the technological advancement but also by the presence of those tendencies that fail to recognize the interconnectedness of things in this world. Woven into an allegorical texture, the moral message that we get is to understand the man-nature relationship in order to survive in an age of environmental destruction.