Why nobody is playing (with) Water? Setting the stage for revolution in Mahasweta Devi's play 'Jal'

This article attempts a reading of the dramatic text Jal (Eng. Water), by Bengali writer and social activist Mahasweta Devi (Dhaka 1926-2016), as a site for writing subaltern history and for rehearsing revolution. Devi’s stories are popular as instances of engaged literature, which focus on the plights of the indigenous people (ādivāsī) and the untouchables (Dalit) in India. Her writings, especially when devised or adapted for the theatre, acquire an even more powerful dimension due to the dynamism of the bodies on stage that make possible the transposition of the text into a performed historiography. Theatre, as devised in her plays, becomes a potential site for performing dissent and effecting social change. As Rustom Bharucha has claimed, the telling of stories matters not just because ‘they enable us to illuminate particularly elusive realities, but because they help us to deal with the aporias of pain’ (2001, 3764). In this sense, Devi’s literary and dramatic texts, especially when brought on stage, force the spectators to become a ‘partakers’ (Schechner, 2003) of the drama which unfolds through the body as a performative site of violent struggle and defiance. Hence, her plays might be considered as ‘some experiments in truth and conflict resolution on the borders of theatre and public culture’ (Bharucha, 2001, 3763) and Devi, as a committed writer ‘meandering’ into tribal life, could be counted as one particularly sensitive writer who meanders into subaltern histories as ‘a pilgrim and a cartographer at the same time’ (Geertz, 1998, 11).