She Opened The Sluices

At a seminar, acclaimed Malayali author Sarah Joseph heard about Budhini for the first time from poet and political activist Civic Chandran, who had written a poem on her. He asked Sarah Joseph if she could elaborate it into a story. It was a theme that touched Sarah deeply and stayed in her mind for long.

Chandran found the story of Budhini in an article, ‘Recovering Budhini Mejhan from the silted landscapes of modern India’, by Chitra Padmanabhan, published in The Hindu on June 2, 2012. Sarah Joseph read the article several times and then emb­arked on extensive research rel­ated to the subject.  

On December 6, 1959, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru went to Dhanbad district in Jharkhand to inaugurate the Panchet Dam across the Damodar river. A fifteen-year-old girl, Budhini, chosen by the Damodar Valley Corporation, welcomed him with a garland and placed a tikka on his forehead. When these ceremonial gestures were interpreted as an act of matrimony by elders in the orthodox Santhal society she came from, Budhini was ost­racised by her village and let go from her job as a construction worker, citing violation of age-old tribal traditions. Budhini was thence outlawed for ‘marrying outside her community’.

Budhini Mejhan’s is the tale of an uprooted life, refracted here through the contemporary, and fictional, lens of Rupi Murmu, a young journalist distantly related to her and determined to exc­avate her story. In this reimagined history, Sarah Joseph evokes Budhini with vigour, authority and panache in her novel Budhini, conjuring up a robust and endearing feminine character and reminding us of some of the lives and stories too precious to be forgotten.

Translated by her daughter and novelist Sangeetha Sreenivasan, Sarah Joseph’s novel powerfully invokes the politics of our relentless modernisation and the dangers of being indifferent to ecological realities. Sarah, once intrigued by her subject, went back and read more about Budhini. She decided to visit the place where her character lived. However, her journey had an unexpected and dramatic twist when she met the still alive Budhini—Sarah, all this time, had the idea that Budhini had passed away years ago. Thus, uniquely, the protagonist of a future novel herself welcomed the writer.

“Our people would like to believe that the woman committed suicide years back,” Rupi Murmu told her friend Suchitra, a freelance photographer. They were talking about Budhini Mejhan on their way from Calcutta to Dhanbad. Rupi had received a text from her cousin, Mukul Murmu, who worked in a crockery shop in Dhanbad, saying that Budhini was still alive. The message had literally shocked Rupi.

Much before a newspaper report reached Rupi and made her resolve firmer, she had started her research on Budhini, her village and the many other neighbouring villages, thanks to her Dadu, Jagdip Murmu. It had disappointed Rupi when she had to introduce Budhini’s story to the editor. The name hadn’t captured his attention. “Who is she?” he had asked.

Then there is the fictional rendering of that rarest of meetings with Budhini—one of those literary wonderments. Sarah Joseph writes about this precious moment with consummate novelistic skill­—her first encounter with a character of her novel who she thought had died long ago.

Sarah writes: “When Rupi had described Budhini as the wife of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the editor had burst into peals of laughter. ‘Illegal?’ he had retorted. Rupi didn’t smile, but her colleagues had joined the editor in laughing out loud. She didn’t want to make it a laughing matter. She knew her blood was rushing to her face, making her cheeks burn.”

Budhini Mejhan was probably the first labourer in the country who got the opportunity to ina­ugurate a dam. But, at the same time, there are so many aspects to Budhini’s story, intertwined as it is with India’s development history and other different aspects. When Budhni returned to her village, Karbona, village elders told her that by garlanding Nehru at the function she had in effect married him. Since the prime minister was not a Santhal, she was no longer a part of the community. Budhini was told to leave the village. The inflexibility of the community ensured that the excommunication was complete. The cruel banishment turned out to be tragic for Budhini.

The youngster was given shelter by a resident of Panchet, Sudhir Dutta by whom, it was said, she had a daughter, born to a destiny of exile like her mother. In 1962, Budhini was fired from her job at the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) and reduced to doing odd jobs. In the 1980s, she travelled to Delhi. She met the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of the prime minister she had garlanded, with a req­uest: she wanted to be reinstated at DVC.

Sarah Joseph delves deep into ascertaining the immense human losses that the development of the country at various stages has resulted in. In Budhini, she also writes about the thousands of people who were evicted from their homes and scattered to the winds at the whim of the state and its officials. Different studies suggest that about 6.5 crore people have been evicted from their own land since 1947. Is the government concerned at all for these people; has a method of their effective rehabilitation been formed in independent India? During the British rule land acquisition was easy. They would merely throw people out of their homes and take over the land. But in independent India too, land has been taken over for many big projects. What then happens to the people who are evicted from these lands?

In the novel, Rupi Murmu began her research to get to the bottom of the story. Nehru was excited about dams—he famously thought they were the structures that would determine the destiny of the nation. Was there other places more sac­red and sublime than these—crucibles of the creation of modern India? About seven or eight thousand families were evicted for the Panchet dam project. “I started writing it as a story of Budhini who was dead. While writing it, I took utmost care on how to blend history with fiction, and how to merge news and fiction. The life Budhini lives in my novel may not be the life of the original Budhini. The original Budhini’s life wasn’t what my character called for. That I left to imagination and possibilities. My assessment is that imaginative power will help make historical facts truthful,” Sarah Joseph said in an interview at the Kalinga Literary Festival (KLF) Bhav Samvad.

Sarah Joseph’s Budhini is a well-researched novel with a perfect blend of nostalgia and reality. Its plot and characters stand for the lives of extremely marginalised people of our country. Budhini Mejhan was labelled as the bride of India’s first prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and was later boycotted by her community. Modern India should never forget her.

(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bangalore-based management consultant, literary critic and advisor with Kalinga Literary Festival)