Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf: Sindhubala
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 17 March 2021
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The rights of tribal people, the lives of ordinary workers and the depiction of female desire were amongst the themes explored by the writer Mahasweta Devi. Born in Dhaka in 1926, she attended the school established by Rabindranath Tagore and before her death in 2016 she had published over 100 novels and 20 collections of short stories. Sindhubala is one such story, which traces the tale of a woman made to become a healer of children and for New Generation Thinker Preti Taneja, Mahasweta's writing offers a way of using language to explore ideas about power, freedom and feminism.
Preti Taneja is the author of the novel We That Are Young. She teaches at Newcastle University and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. You can find other Essays by Preti available on the Radio 3 website including one looking at Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001kpc Creating Modern India explores the links between Letchworth Garden City and New Delhi https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08j9x3h You can also find her discussing Global Shakespeare and different approaches to casting his plays in this Free Thinking playlist on Shakespeare https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06406hm And a Free Thinking interview with Arundhati Roy about translation https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b5hk01
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Hello, I'm pretty teenager and in this essay episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast I'm going to talk about one of the |
| 0:38.6 | writers I think you should make space for on your bookshelves. |
| 0:42.3 | BBC Sounds Music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:46.3 | In Sindhubala, Bengali writer Mahashwetadavi tells the story of a girl, playing a face, |
| 0:52.3 | darker skin, who enters the world auspiciously, |
| 0:55.3 | feet first. She is given in marriage, but abandoned by her husband, and sent back home, |
| 1:01.4 | where her mother sets her up as a local goddess who can apparently heal children by touching |
| 1:06.1 | them with her bare feet. Sindhu knows it's a lie. From behind high walls she watches time pass, children |
| 1:13.6 | grow, she feels desire in her body and wonders how God has decreed she must live. |
| 1:19.6 | One day, Sindhubala is 40. She decides, enough. She refuses to continue to sacrifice her own |
| 1:26.6 | needs and desires for money. |
| 1:29.2 | If you're human, you must burn. If you're holy, then you too must burn. If life has the same |
| 1:35.5 | end for both, then why should the woman Sindhu spend her days pretending to be a goddess, |
| 1:40.9 | she asks herself? This moment shows the writer's awareness of mortality |
| 1:45.8 | as the great equalizer, and Mahashveta Devi uses this emancipatory realisation to resist, |
| 1:52.6 | in the only way her character can, centuries of exploitation that patriarchal Indian culture |
| 1:58.0 | enacts on women. This combination of art and activism makes Mahashveta's writing |
| 2:03.6 | worth constant revisiting, so vital and contemporary does it feel. Maheshweta Devi was born in |
| 2:10.8 | 1926 in Dhaka, British India, the territory which after partition, war and independence became Bangladesh. Her literary |
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