Mahāśvetā Debī

This cluster of short fiction has a common motif: the breast. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out in her introduction, the breast is far more than a symbol in these stories. It becomes the means of a harsh indictment of an exploitative social system. In Draupadi , the protagonist Dopdi Mejhen is a tribal revolutionary who, arrested and gang-raped in custody, turns the terrible wounds of her breasts into a counter-offensive. In Breast-Giver , a woman who becomes a professional wet-nurse to support her family dies of painful breast cancer, betrayed alike by the breasts that for years became her chief identity and the dozens of sons she suckled. In Behind the Bodice , migrant labourer Gangor s statuesque breasts excite the attention of ace photographer Upin Puri, triggering off a train of violence that ends in tragedy. Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, the title of Officier del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Translator, critic and scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, introduces this cycle of breast stories with thought-provoking essays which probe the texts of the stories, opening them up to a complex of interpretation and meaning.

Breast Stories

Weaving history, myth and current political realities, these three collected stories by reowned Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, lead us subtly through contemporary Indian life.

Three Stories

Imaginary Maps

Is An Insightful Exploration Of The Complex Relationship Between The Personal And The Political.The Novel Written 1973-74. The Novel Written 1973-74, Deals With The Psychological And Emotional Trauma Of A Mother Who Awakens One Morning To The Shattering News That Her Beloved Son Is Lying Dead In The Police Morgue.

Mother of 1084

Sagaree Sengupta

HISTORICAL FICTION. Lakshmibai, the Queen of Jhansi, a legendary Indian heroine, led her troops against the British in the uprising of 1857, which is now widely described as the first Indian War of Independence. The image of the young warrior queen who died on the battlefield but not in the minds of her people captured the imagination of novelist Mahasweta Devi, who undertook extensive research that encompassed family reminiscence, oral literature, local histories, and more traditional sources. From these she wove a very personal history of a heroine. Devi's resulting work traces the history of the growing resistance to the British, while building a detailed picture of Lakshmibai as a complex, spirited, full-blooded woman. Simultaneously a history, a biography, and an imaginative work of fiction, this book is a valuable contribution to the reclamation of history and historiography by feminist writers.

The Queen of Jhansi

Spoken In The First Person, These Reminiscences Of A Woman Whose Mother Was Rescued From A House Of Ill-Repute Construct A History Not Often Documented. A History That Runs Parallel To The Official Narrative Of India`S Modernism And Nationalism: That Of Women Outcast Because They Are `Fallen`. Starting From The Late Nineteenth Century, The Voice Of Bedanabala Bears Witness To The Experiences Of Many Women Who Find Themselves Outside The Safety Of Domestic Walls And Thereafter Make Their Lives In The Only Ways Open To Them In A Society Where Women Did Not Work Except As Domestic Servants-Entertaining Men, Developing Liaisons, Interwining Their Dreams And Passions With The Destiny Of A Country Struggling For Independence And Questioning Oppressive Time-Worn Social Custom. Bedanabala, Written In 1996, Seeks To Empathize With A Segment Of Society Condemned Even By Other Women As Beyond The Bounds Of Decency And Social Acceptance.

Her Life, Her Times

Bedanabala

Moyna Lives In A Little Tribal Village. She Cannot Go To School Because She Has To Tend The Goats, Collect The Firewood, Fetch The Water& But She Is So Full Of Questions That The Postmaster Calls Her The 'Why-Why Girl'! Mahasweta Devi Is One Of India'S Foremost Writers. In This Delightful Story, Her First Picture Book, And The Only Children'S Book She Has Written In English, She Tells Us How She Meets Moyna (And Her Mongoose!) And Helps Her Find Answers To All The Why-Whys - In Books, That Moyna Herself Learns To Read. Some Of The Translations Have Been Done By Well-Known Writers: Malayalam By Paul Zacharia, Tamil By Ambai, And Kannada By Girish Karnad.

A Story by Mahasweta Devi

The Why-why Girl

Devi Mahasweta

In the late seventies, Mahasweta Devi turned her attention to the marginalized tribals and untouchable poor of Eastern India, particularly Bihar and West Bengal. She travelled widely, living with and building an intimate connection with them; and she began to contribute articles to several leading newspapers and journals, drawing on firsthand experience. In 1980, she started editing a Bengali quarterly, Bortika, which she turned into a forum where poor peasants, agricultural labourers, tribals, factory workers, rickshaw pullers and all those who have no voice elsewhere could write about their lives and problems. This volume is a collection of her activist prose written between 1981 and 1992, including most of her articles in English from journals and newspapers like Economic and Political Weekly, Business Standard, Sunday, and Frontier, several Bengali pieces in translation and editorials from Bortika. The selection has been careful to include all her important writings on the issues which have preoccupied her over the years: short-sighted rural development projects, the degradation of tribal life and the environment, land alienation, and the exploitation and struggles of the landless and small peasants, sharecroppers, bonded labour, contract labour, and miners. She bears stern testimony to the harsh reality of their lives. Maitreya Ghatak, who has edited and introduced this collection, is a social researcher with considerable field experience, who has been closely associated with Mahasweta Devi s activism over the years. Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities.

The Activist Writings of Mahasweta Devi

Dust on the Road

Our Incredible Cow

Bashai Tudu

Novel based on the life of Birsa Munda, 1874-1901, Indian freedom fighter.

Araṇyera adhikāra

English translation of two Bengali short stories Måurti and Mohanapurera råupakathåa.

Statue and the Fairytale of Mohanpur

Old Women

Ma, from Dusk to Dawn is the story of a woman from a nomadic tribe, catapulted by her circumstances into the role of a spiritual mother whose so-called mystical powers depend upon her denial of maternal affection towards her own son during daylight hours. Sindhubala describes the anguish of a childless woman forced to play the role of a semi-divine healer called upon to save other people s offspring. Jamunabati s Mother offers a stringent critique of a consumerist society indifferent to those on the margins and Giribala presents the plight of a village woman whose daughters are trafficked by their own father, to pay for the house he dreams of building. The stories in this volume are linked by a common thread: the idea of the mother. They represent a range of responses to the concept of the maternal, exposing how the traditional deification of motherhood in India conceals a collective exploitation and attempts to restrict women to their socially prescribed roles while denying them the right to articulate their individual needs and desires. At the same time, they also show the strategies evolved by women to survive and circumvent the repression inflicted on them by social norms. The maternal thus emerges as an ambivalent concept with both restrictive and emancipatory potential. Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, and the title of Officier Del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Radha Chakravarty is an academic and a translator. She teaches at Gargi College, University of Delhi, and is currently working on English translations of major Bengali writers. She has contributed essays and review articles to various journals and critical anthologies.

Four Stories

Bait

The image of this love-crazed hero haunts Khoimala, the gentle Brahman girl, and her low-caste sweetheart, the young boatman, Golak, as they live out their doomed love story: doomed because social and religious taboos damn their forbidden love. On the one hand, eighteenth century rural Bengal, quickening to the pace of urban development, undergoes swift change, as local markets thrive and traders flourish; on the other, a destitute woman who is trapped in the darkness of harshly prescriptive custom to the despair of the boatman lad who can neither rescue nor declare his love. In this masterful and deeply sensitive tale, Mahasweta Devi once again interweaves a social tapestry and the detail of human lives, creating a powerful tale of love, longing and passion set in a time when the British are beginning to consolidate their hold on Bengal. Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, and the title of Officier Del Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Pinaki Bhattacharya, the translator, is a consultant, teacher, and actor who lives and works in Calcutta.

Dewana, Khoimala, and the Holy Banyan Tree

The Glory of Sri Sri Ganesh shows the lives of the underdogs the Lachhimsa, the Rukmanis, the Mohors and the Haroas as a contrast to the lives of their all-powerful overlords the Medinis and Ganeshes. Lachhima, whose leashed bitterness and anger of a lifetime against Medini and Ganesh is liberated at the end of the novel when Ganesh begs her to save his life, decides to save him, but on her own terms. The title of the work itself becomes a tool for subversion in this sprawling novel which takes the reader through a multilayered narrative into the socio-economic malaise of post-independence rural India. Mahasweta Devi s corrosive humour and cryptic style are at their best as she takes on issues of agrarian land relations, inter-caste violence, so-called rural development and position of women in rural India. Considered one of Mahasweta Devi s most important works, this novel, written in 1981, appeared shortly after her seminal Chotti Munda and His Arrow. The hope of liberation contained in Chotti Munda continues in this book. As the author says, Chotti Munda talked of the dream of the dispossessed tribals uniting in struggle with the equally marginalized low caste communities; while this novel shows how being landless and being born low caste is almost inevitably linked in India . Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Ipsita Chanda is a translator who also teaches Comparative Literature in Jadavpur University.

The Glory of Sri Sri Ganesh

In the seventies, Mahasweta Devi dramatized one of her major novels, Mother of 1084, and four of her finest stories, convinced that as plays they would be more accessible to the largely illiterate audience she wanted to reach. In the five plays in this anthology, the mother of a Naxalite martyr discovers her son (and in the process her self) a year after his death; a slave enslaved by an ancient bond discovers too late that the bond has turned to dust years ago; a ventriloquist intensely in love with his speaking doll loses his voice to throat cancer; a son, too late, acknowledges his mother who has been outcast and branded a witch by the community; and the traditional water-diviner rises to a different role, immediately becoming a threat to the administration. These plays are rooted in history and folk myth as well as in contemporary reality. The socio-economic milieus range from the urban bourgeoisie to the urban underworld, from rural untouchable settlements to tribal communities offering a view of India rarely seen in literature. Mahasweta Devi is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Samik Bandyopadhyay, who has translated and introduced these plays, is an eminent critic and scholar who has translated several of Mahasweta Devi s works, and has been closely connected with her career for several decades.

Five Plays

Nairr̥te megha

On Tarasankar Banerjee, 1898-1971, Bengali litterateur.

Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay

Usha Ganguli

Based on the life struggle of Sanichari, a poor low-caste village woman.

Mahāśvetā Debī

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