Mahasweta Devi

[Bjorn]

Mahasweta Devi (Bengali: মহাশ্বেতা দেবী Môhashsheta Debi) is an Indian social activist and writer.

Biography:
She was born in 1926 in Dhaka (now Bangladesh) to literary parents. After the partition of India she moved to West Bengal in India. She joined the Rabindranath Tagore founded Vishvabharati University in Santiniketan and completed a B.A. (Hons) in English, and then finished an M.A. in English at Calcutta University. She later married renowned playwright and actor Bijon Bhattacharya.

In 1964, she began teaching at Bijoygarh College (an affiliated college of the University of Calcutta, primarily for working-class women students) and combined it with working as a journalist and as a creative writer. Recently, she is more famous for her work related to the study of the Lodhas and Shabars,the tribal communities of West Bengal, women and dalits. She is dedicated to the struggles of tribal people in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. In her elaborate Bengali fiction, she often depicts the brutal oppression of tribal peoples and the untouchables by potent, authoritarian upper-caste landlords, lenders, and venal government officials. She's won several awards for both her fiction and her journalistic work.

Bibliography:
Devi, according to an interview in the book I'm currently reading, claims to have written "somewhere between 100 and 150" books from children's books to novels, "about 30 of which are good." Wikipedia provides the following rather messy list:

• Hajar Churashir Ma (No. 1084's Mother, 1975)
• Aranyer Adhikar (The Occupation of the Forest, 1977)
• Agnigarbha (Womb of Fire, 1978)
• Choti Munda evam Tar Tir (Choti Munda and His Arrow, 1980)
• Imaginary Maps (translated by Gayatri Spivak London & New York. Routledge,1995)
• Dhowli (Short Story)
• Dust on the Road (Translated into EnglishBy Maitrayee Ghatak. Seagull, Calcutta.)
• Our Non-Veg Cow (Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1998,Translated from Bengali by Paramita Banerjee.)
• Bashai Tudu (Translated into EnglisBy Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and Shamik Bandyopadhyay. Thima, Calcutta, 1993)
• Titu Mir
• Rudali
• Breast Stories (Translated into English by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak. Seagull, Calcutta, 1997)
• Of Women, Outcasts, Peasants, and Rebels (Translated into English By Kalpana Bardhan,University of California, 1990.)
• Ek-kori's Dream (Translated into English by Lila Majumdar. N.B.T., 1976)
• The Book of the Hunter (Seagull India, 2002)
• Outcast (Seagull, India, 2002)
• In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (Translated into English by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak. Methuyen and Company, 1987. New York, London)
• Till Death Do Us Part
• Old Women
• Kulaputra (Translated into Kannada by Sreemathi H.S. CVG Publications, Bangalore)
• The Why-Why Girl (Tulika, Chennai.)
• Dakatey Kahini

Links:
Mahasweta Devi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1997 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Journalism, Literature, and the Creative Communication Arts - Mahasweta Devi

IMDb: Mahasweta Devi (I)

[kpjayan]

Thanks Bjorn for starting this thread.

Mahasweta Devi is a prominent writer in India for last 3-4 decades. I have read few of her writings in my mother tongue, being translated and have fallen for them. Many of her works have been adapted into movies ( not the Bollywood type movies, but by those art-house directors ).

Of late, she has been quite active in Social issues in Kolkota (Calcutta) and in many issues around the country.

She was awarded the Jnanpith ( Indian equivalent of Nobel for Literature! ) in 1995.


Here is an interview with the writer : Rediff On The NeT: The Rediff Interview/Mahasweta Devi


Some more reading:

proXsa: Inspiration: Mahasweta Devi

Mahasweta Devi | outlookindia.com ( you might have to register once)

[Bjorn]

I finished a short story collection by Devi a while back, and was quite impressed. It mostly consisted of stories she wrote in the 70s - Fishermen, Breastgiver, The Hunt, The Statue and a few others. This is pissed-off literature; Devi writes about the tribal and castless people in the Bengal region who, she claims, have fallen through the cracks in modern independent India - and none fall further than the women. It's certainly a far cry from the romanticized take of Slumdog Millionaire - with her sober, seemingly objective reporter's eye that still retains a hint of oral tradition, as if to point out that these are stories that have been going on for centuries, she chronicles the way the weak kick downwards with much the same disillusionment and righteous anger as, say, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood. Just steps in and chronicles the lives of her characters; the fisherman who's working for the police, pulling bodies out of the river and not saying anything about the truncheon marks on them; the girl who executes her would-be rapist and dances all night; the holy Indian mother who breastfeeds entire generations of both her own and others' children until she's eaten up by cancer from within. Strong stuff.