Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s “They Eat Meat!”

This lecture discusses how Adivasis were largely absent from postcolonial Indian writing in English, and when mentioned, were juxtaposed against the idiom of troubled urban modernity. Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s work marks a departure by deconstructing, subverting, and reimagining these representations. His stories foreground the Adivasi consciousness as it grapples with modernity, modern ways of life, their position in the larger Indian society, as well as the postcolonial nation-state which exploits them and their lands. He also brings Adivasi lifeworld and multilingualism into English. The first story “They Eat Meat” narrates an upwardly mobile, middle-class tribal family’s negotiations with identity, belonging, and erasure, routed through their dietary practices and the notion of ‘cleanliness’ in a predominantly vegetarian city.