Summary
Bhagirath is a young boy when his mother, Chandi, is declared a “bayen,” or a witch. She is now a pariah and has to live by the railway tracks, and Bhagirath stays with his father, Malindar, and a stepmother. Bayens are said to be very dangerous, and they have to warn people of their approach.
Chandi’s shed has a red flag on the top of it and she wears red as well. One day she leaves the shed and comes to the edge of the pond. Malindar orders his son away and asks angrily why she came. She says she needs oil for her hair and kerosene and is afraid to be alone. She is crying and says her food was stolen by the dogs. Malindar yells at her and throws a handful of mud and stones in her direction.
Later he is distressed, remembering how much he loved her. Bhagirath is astonished and frightened that his father talked to a bayen, as doing so is supposed to mean sudden death. He has heard bayens are not human beings and he cannot fathom how he can be the son of one. Malindar tries to explain that she was once a woman but is no longer one, and thus Bhagirath does not have a mother anymore.
Malindar is a Dom, who works in the cremation grounds. He can sign his name, which has elevated him above his family, and now he is respected in the community.
Malindar explains that Chandi had everything when she was his wife, and he is sad that fate made a witch out of her. She is better off dead, he tells his son.
Bhagirath puzzles over his father’s words and he thinks a great deal about his mother. He is too afraid to go to her, though, wondering if he will never come back or be turned into a tree or a stone.
The saying is that “If you ill-treat a bayen’s son, your children will die,” which Bhagirath’s stepmother takes to heart. She is not mean to him, but cares only for her daughters and has a very “formal” and emotionless relationship with her stepson. She often fears the bayen will work a spell on her daughters. She is an ugly woman, which Malindar sought specifically because his first wife was beautiful and turned out to be a witch.
One day Malindar and his son are walking home along the railway tracks. Malindar is carrying meat, as he cannot kill the pigs he raises himself. He invites his son to sit down under the banyan tree.
Bhagirath notices the place is the one the robbers visit. Lately there had been a string of robberies of the evening trains, and the robbers often hung out by this banyan tree. He then thinks about school. He knows that the Untouchability Act of 1955 got rid of the castes and that there is a Constitution that talks about equality, but at school he and the others like him still sit apart.
Malindar is thinking about his first wife. He feels the irony of his situation, which is that God came and turned the tables—he was a hard man and his wife was lovely, but then she became a bayen and he became a gentle man. He decides to tell his son about Chandi.
He begins by explaining she believed she was a descendent of Kalu Dom and belonged to the Gangaputras, a race of cremation attendants. Her father used to dig the graves and spread thorn bushes over them to keep the jackals out. He was a frightening man and villagers kept children away from him. One day Chandi came among them and announced her father was dead and she would now bury the dead and guard the graves. When people asked if she was afraid, she only scoffed.
Malindar during those days was in bone-business with the morgue official, as bones were used in fertilizer. One night he came across Chandi by the banyan tree and asked if she was afraid of the dark. She laughed uproariously. They married and had Bhagirath.
Not long after Bhagirath was born Chandi came home crying, saying people stoned her and said she meant evil. Malindar was indignant, and said that he knew how envious people were of him. Chandi sighed that she did not have the heart to do her work with the graves anymore but it was God’s will. If there was a male member of her family he would do it, but she was the only one.
Chandi could not reject the traditional occupation, but her fear grew every day. Even after she covered the graves she worried and wept. She prayed for all the children in the village and her breasts ached with milk. When she complained she was not fit for this anymore, no one listened.
Malindar’s sister and her daughter, Tukni, came to visit. There was a smallpox outbreak and Tukni fell ill and died. Chandi was blamed; she never had vaccinations but instead went to the temple for the goddess Sheetala. The people talked about how milk spilled from her breasts while she stood over Tukni’s grave. Their superstitiousness exasperated Chandi, and she finally quit her job guarding the graves.
At home Chandi talked to Malindar about his potential new government job and wanting to move. He laughed and teased her about being a bayen but she was horrified and told him not to utter that word. She cried and begged him to run away. A feeling came upon her and she was afraid that she would never see her husband and son again. For a few days she acted dazed and strange.
Two months passed and things appeared peaceful. Chandi “became whole again” but worried about the dead children. She said it seemed like she could hear her father raising his old call. This bothered Malindar, who was beginning to wonder if she was slowly changing into a witch.
The Dom community did not forget Chandi. They came out one stormy night and yelled for Malindar. His courtyard filled with people, Malindar was shocked when Ketan, an “uncle of sorts” to Chandi, said he was keeping a bayen for a wife. Malindar saw Chandi with a sickle and a lantern, and asked what she was doing. She said she was just trying to cover the children’s graves. The village began to pronounce her a bayen. She protested that she was just doing her forefathers’ job and was not a bayen since she had her own son. When she asked Malindar to defend her, his mind was seared with pain and he heard a voice telling him not to go near her or something terrible would happen. Malindar yelled out that she was a bayen, and she let out a terrible cry.
Bhagirath, listening to the story, asks what happened next. Malindar explains how she went to live alone at Beltala. He pauses, and they can hear her singing. The song “entered [Bhagirath’s] soul, mingled in his blood and reverberated in his ears like some inscrutable pain.”
A few days later Bhagirath rushes to the pond, having heard his mother. He asks her if she would like a new sari or his dhoti. She replies that he should not talk to her and should not be out in this heat. He says he has heard her crying. She tells him to go home and never come near him again or she will tell his father. She turns away.
Alone that night, the bayen reflects on how she is only a shadow of herself. It has been a long time since she has thought of anything. Suddenly she has a thought that the child is in terrible danger; Malindar is clearly a thoughtless parent. She grabs a lantern and heads out along the railway tracks.
There are people on the tracks piling up bamboo, and she addresses them. The robbers look up at her and she tells them she knows what they are doing. They flee in fear from the bayen. As the rain pours down she tries to clear the tracks and prevent disaster but cannot. She wishes she actually had supernatural powers. As the train nears she runs toward it and flails her arms and screams for it to stop, but “the train’s light swallowed her up.” Her name becomes associated with self-sacrifice and heroism, as she prevented a major train disaster.
The government announces she will receive a medal and asks who will receive it on behalf of the brave woman. People look around at each other. This surprises Bhagirath, who comes forward and announces Chandi was his mother. He names her and himself and his father and begins to cry. He says she was never a bayen.
The officer doing the writing stares at him and the crowd. The Doms are silent, “as people condemned. The silence was suffocating and unbearable.”
Analysis
“Bayen” may not be as well-known as some of Mahasweta Devi’s other short stories, but it deals with the same theme of patriarchy and its deleterious effects on women. In this story, a woman who does not quite fit into society’s and her caste’s expectations of her behavior is labeled that age-old, condemnatory label for women of “witch,” thus leading to her exile. Society can only see and accept her again once she has sacrificed herself and died.
Chandi is a Dom, part of the caste that works in the crematory and burial grounds, and her particular job is to deal with the burial and grave maintenance of children. A mother herself, this becomes increasingly depressing for her, even though she tries to honor her ancestors. Her “fear grew greater every day” and after every burial she would “weep softly and rush back home. She would light a lamp and sit praying for Bhagirath. At those times she also prayed for each and every child in the village that each should live forever. This was a weakness she had developed of late.” Characterizing this as a “weakness” is a result of the patriarchy’s insidious classification of emotion and sympathy as feminine, and thus inferior, traits; furthermore, when Chandi quits her position she also interferes with capitalism’s assignment of value to people only when they are involved in the marketplace.
Chandi’s behavior and her choice to quit her job are concerning to the Doms and the village at large. When she is caught suspiciously going to the graveyard in the night to check on a child’s grave, the people couple this with the recent death of her niece from smallpox and how Chandi’s breasts oozed milk on her grave, and conclude Chandi is dangerous because she is deviating from society’s gendered boundaries. The Dom community is “keeping an eye on her” and come to Malindar and Chandi’s house one night to condemn Chandi. As her own husband sometimes feared that “Chandi was slowly changing into a witch,” he falls sway to peer pressure and abandons his wife, shouting out before everyone, “’I, Malindar Gangaputta, hereby declare that my wife is a bayen, a bayen!’”
One of Devi’s points with this story is that defying Hindu caste norms, especially for a woman, is a death sentence (if not literally, then at least in terms of societal acceptance). Arunima Ray writes, “The community, powerful as it is, literally transforms her into Chandibayen. Once she becomes their target, there is no way left for her to escape the wrath of the community. Only an excuse was needed to brand her a witch.” Though the story is set in post-colonial India, it is a community not yet modernized; it is full of suspicion and superstition. Malindar is seen as elevated because he can sign his name, and vaccines are not always common. Devi “punctures the false pride of the so-called elites of the nation who take pride in the ostensible progress of the nation by exposing these areas which still remain in the dark.”
Devi also demonstrates how women internalize the views of the patriarchy. P. Shahanaz notes, “ridiculously, [Chandi] too gets convinced psychologically and starts believing herself as a Bayen.” This is observable when her son visits her and she sends him away, wondering how Malindar could let the child associate with a witch. She “endures patiently the label [which is] the best testimony for the suppression and subjugation of women in the patriarchal society.”
Chandi is only redeemed in the community’s eyes when she throws herself in front of a train to save the passengers and the cargo. B. Charanya sees this as “the nature of a typical Indian woman. At critical situations, women never think about themselves rather about the around her and are even ready to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others”—which is why the community hails her a hero and the Doms are chagrined.
