Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar

The Jharkhand government has banned ‘ The Adivasi Will Not Dance ’, a collection of short stories by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar . Shekhar, who won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2015 for his novel, ‘The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey’, is accused of denigrating Adivasi culture and portraying Santhal women in a bad light.

Shekhar himself is a Santhal, and works as a doctor in Pakur, close to Ranchi. One of the stories in his collection, ‘November Is the Month of Migrations’, was about a Santhal woman who trades her body for Rs 50 and a couple of bread pakoras. The campaign to vilify Shekhar’s work has been gathering force, with trolling, open letters, Facebook parody pages, threats and effigy burning. The literary and cultural activists who led that campaign had wanted to get his award revoked, even though it was for a different book.

The opposition Jharkhand Mukti Morcha called for a ban on Friday in the assembly, and by evening, BJP chief minister Raghubar Das had ordered all copies to be seized, and legal action taken against the writer. Another group of Adivasi writers and academics who wrote a strong letter protesting the persecution of Shekhar, said they passed the allegedly “pornographic” story around to several Santhal friends. “All of them, without exception, said the story was painful, disturbing and sad, which made them reflect on the difficult, complex lives our Adivasi women live. This story could be about exploitation, choices borne of desperate conditions or free will, but all it did was evoke tears, a lump in the throat and profound grief. Not one of the readers said the story sexually aroused them,” said the letter.

Shekhar has been accused of writing in English, of hurting the image of the Santhal community, of Christians among them, of women, and worse, doing all this for profit. “As one of the few Santhal women to have read his books, I thought this particular story was deeply moving and depicted the reality for some of our women. That’s why I opposed this harassment,” says Ruby Hembrom , founder of the publishing house adivaani, dedicated to Adivasi writing.

