Reading Notes W17: Devi, Part B

Mahasweta Devi (1147-1165)

  • Mahasweta Devi is the most important fiction and prose weiter in the Bangali language since India's decolonization (1147)
  • she is also the premier social activist in Asia of the past fifty years dedicated to the cause of aboriginal peoples, having worked tirelessly for the little-known Lodhas and Shabars on West Bengal
  • her unflinching novels, stories, plays, and essays about these and other disenfranchised people provided the literary foundations for what would later be called "subaltern studies"
  • Devi was born in 1926 into a Hindu brahmana family in Dhaka, then in East Bengal in British India, and now the capital of Bangladesh
  • her proper name is is Mahasweta, as devi is simply an honorific term attached to many Indian female names
  • she was educated in schools in East Bengal and at Viswa Bharati, the experimental institution established by Rabomdranath Tagore
  • her graduate studies in English literature at Calcutta University, in the mid-1940s, were interrupted when she married Bijon Bhattacharya (1917-1978)
  • their son was born in 1948, but the marriage was struglling because since Bijon was preoccupied with theater and politics, he was rarely at home, and had no regular income, while Mahasweta lived in poverty and near-starvation, developing glandular tuberculosis because of malnutrition (1147)
  • the story "Giribala" (1982), combines many features of Devi's short fiction, including her ideal of documentation
  • the story offers a sharply etched picture of rural life in the north-central region of West Bengal around 1975
  • the story has a an impact of its social organization, cultural practices, and economic problems on the life of an illiterate, vulnerable girl barely past the age of puberty (1148)
  • the power of the story lies in the precise, detailed picture it paints of Giribala and Aulchand's desperate world
  • all of the characters are found fictional, in the sense that they are inventions of Mahasweta's imagination

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