48 SOCIAL SCIENTIST conventions of contemporary fiction ; and this requires the concretisation of the production relations which the peasant embodies. This alone is the guarantee against the incorporation of the constructed figure of the peasant into the ideological edifice of fiction. Manik shows that this concretisation of the relational position of the peasant is possible even while using the highly-developed realistic techniques of the fiction of his own time. Take the case of the peasant woman. The idea of "a woman's chastity' can be said to be historically linked with the phenomenon of the commoditization of women. The moral and emotional enormity associated with the loss of chastity has developed on this basis. It has come to be regarded as having universal, aprioristic implications, and this way of looking at such an incident conceals the dynamics of the commoditization of women. The naturalistic writer's treatment of the incident may be rich in physical detail and yet be nurtured by this aprioristic attitude to the notion of the loss of chastity. This suppresses the historic specificity of the situation where the peasant woman of Bengal offers her own body as a commodity. She becomes but a disguised representation of the values of the dominant classes in a semi-feudal society. The accumulation of realistic details becomes a self-defeating exercise, surrendering to the ideological limits of fiction. But Manik would make the same realistic details serve a different purpose. See how the sexuality of the peasant woman is represented in the story : ^Why did they not Grab and Eat ?'4 (Chhiniye Khaini Keno ?) This story was probably written in 1945, though published in 1947. It was written against the background of the 1943 Bengal famine which might have been checked but for the rapacity of hoarders and the ineffectuality of the food policy of the government.6 It perhaps takes its cue from a question which Nehru, exasperated by the passivity of the starving population of Bengal, reportedly asked. Even at the stage of the plotting of the story, Manik was clear about the answer : 'When the body is weak with starvation, the natural instinct for survival is also deadened ; people cannot unite, they cannot flare up . . .96 But we are interested more in the way in which this conclusion is reached in the story. The first person narrator is presumably a middle class political worker who has come to the village, after the ravages of famine are over and people are returning to their homesteads to settle down again. There is, however, a story within the story to which this narrator is a partly silent listener, asking questions or commenting in asides only occasionally. The main story which directly explores the reasons for the passivity of a staiving population is narrated by Jogi, a low-caste peasant who also has the reputation of turning to banditry from time to time. The famine is just over and Jogi who has just completed two years in jail for having looted a government consignment of rice and is now a settled peasant again, recounts his experience of going to the city in search of food.