Activist, Politician and the Bureaucrat

Illusions of Justice in Mannu Bhandari’s Mahabhoj

Abstract

Mannu Bhandari (1931-2021) is one of the foremost Indian novelists and short-story writers. She has been credited to have published four novels, two plays, and nine collections of short stories apart from writing screen plays and children’s books. Her first novel, Ek Inch Muskaan (1962), coauthored with the renowned Hindi writer Rajendra Yadav, was an experimental story involving a man and two women whose lives crisscross each other. Her next novel, Aap Ka Bunty (1971), seen through the eyes of the titular child, recounted how a failing marriage and the parents’ divorce affects the child. Her stories provide unusual expression to the intimate experiences of women and their world. She has forcefully expressed the everyday concerns of postcolonial modern Indian women, their search for agency and identity against patriarchal social stranglehold which does not allow them autonomy. Bhandari dares to touch unexplored areas of women’s lives, direct and indirect taboos they encounter which are ranged against their emancipation. Her creative power lies in the authentic representation of the lives of the middle class women looking for freedom from social and moral constrains. However, Bhandari’s writing is not limited to the world of women alone. Like other contemporary male writers, Mannu Bhandari has written powerful stories on almost all aspects of human life. This paper is a reading of Mannu Bhandari’s third novel Mahabhoj (The Great Feast, 1979) and examines how power operates in developing democracies caught between the contrary pulls of tradition and modernity. Borrowing from the conceptual frameworks from Weber and Zizek’s, it tries to understand how India as a developing democracy is still struggling to evolve a just and egalitarian social order.