War Widows and Banana Massacre: Cultural Memory as Resistance in After Kurukshetra and One Hundred Years of Solitude

Cultural memory is ingrained in every individual and each person serves as a carrier of memory, inscribing and incorporating different types of social practices. Mahasweta Devi’s After Kurukshetra and Gariel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of solitude reflect the silence of mainstream narration. Through reframing voices and use of magical realism, they transform literature into a counter archive. Devi revisits the Mahabharata, not through the voice of kings and warriors but through tribal women, widows and concubines whose grief and rituals reshape the perspectives of war. On the other hand, Marquez uses magical realism to narrate the history of Latin America. He introduces the Latin America’s history in the saga of Buendia family, where memory, repetition and erasure shape the fate of the family as well as their town, Macondo. The banana massacre erasure in the mainstream history survived through the oral tradition which is reflected in Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude. Glancing Through Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory, this paper argues that both texts demonstrate the power of literature to hold culture, history and memory as counter archives of master narration. Yet with different strategies, Devi reconstructs the narration from below and Marquez builds a new mythical city, this paper highlights how both these writers enhance cultural memory which in turn enables diversity, inclusion and identity in literature.