Mahasweta Devi

Mahasweta Devi’s well-known novella, _Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha_, within the collection, _Imaginary Maps_, is a careful meditation on the implications, both personal and political, of representing another’s cultural history. The story examines notions of misunderstanding, authenticity, and truth, as well as the interconnectedness of narrative and history. Analyzing the story in terms of narratology, I consider the author herself, the English translator, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and the characters of the pterodactyl, Bikhia, and Puran as different kinds of storytellers with unique perspectives on, connections with, and responsibilities to the fictional village of Pirtha and the conditions of life there. Reading these figures through both the textual and paratextual material reveals a multilayered narrative matrix. Each storyteller is an interpreter with a different discursive understanding and set of tools with which to re-present a narrative. Together they comprise a similarly multilayered political project that explores those difficult questions that occur again and again within wider post-colonial literary contexts: What does it mean to enter, and therefore forever alter the trajectory of someone else’s story? Is it possible to recount someone else’s history, to translate another’s past while avoiding presumption and consumption? What is true in history? What is true history? Mahasweta's celebrated work explores these questions in relation to indigenous Indian people, calling attention to the issues they face in the current neoliberal climate of decolonised India, such as famine, drought, discrimination, and exploitation.

Of identities, of experiences, of struggle: Manoranjan Byapari's book, "Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit", translated by Sipra Mukherjee from Bengali, despite being an engrossing read, is not an easy book to review.
First published in print in National Herald On Sunday, dated 08-April-2018.
This review may be read online, here:
https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/reviews-recommendations/a-dalit-writers-journey-of-multiple-identities-and-struggles

Sommaire:
Majeure 29. Narrations postcoloniales
- Antonella Corsani, Christophe Degoutin, François Matheron, Giovanna Zapperi: Narrations postcoloniales
- Fatimah Tobing Rony: Le Troisième oeil
- Nirmal Puwar: Architectures de la mémoire Image, son et pierre
- Romaine Moreton: Quand la parole libère (de) l écrit, et l écrit (de) la parole
- Gloria Anzaldùa: Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan
- Alessandra Gribaldo et Giovanna Zapperi: Un autre regard Ethnographie, narration et postcolonialisme
- Mahasweta Devi: Draupadi
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: « Draupadi »: Avant-propos de la traductrice

Abstract:
To use the word ―subaltern‖ casually is to empty it of the extent to which its subject is oppressed, for the truth is the subaltern cannot speak and hence must be spoken for. This can be extremely problematic as it begs certain questions like who is speaking and why and thus the reader must be wary of the tendency to glorify so called ―subaltern literatures‖. Prof. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak in her essay ―Three Women‘s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism‖ exposes some of these hazards, especially the role of literature in the perpetration of fallacies which justify why certain groups of people are more equal than others. Unfortunately, often it is the native informant who inadvertently provides the dominant group the obscured information that results in their own marginalization. However colonization is not the prerogative of the west and every reader and writer must introspect and examine the very same tendency within themselves; for even sensitive nascent feminists fighting against their own oppression have within their narratives contained the oppression of the subaltern. The thesis being argued is that all reading must be done with caution and suspicion and the most reliable voice is of an eastern feminist organic intellectual and activist, whose ―responsible resistance‖ doesn‘t stem from the past but looks to a future where the subaltern rather than being magnanimously saved, liberates the self through a life and death struggle. An analysis of various feminist texts including a central focus on the short story ―The Hunt‖ by Mahasweta Devi reveals that with care the subaltern can speak for everyone and tells a story far more revolutionary and path breaking and through the tangent narrative that escapes the text enters a world brimming with potential and opportunity.
Keywords: worlding, suspicion, organic intellectual

This article o ers a close reading of Mahasweta Devi’s ethnographic report- age in her short narratives “Giribala” and “Dhowli,” in Women, Outcastes, Peasants and Rebels and “Douloti the Bountiful” in Imaginary Maps to show how ecological mar- ginalization, reproductive rape and unequal resource access have depleted Adivasi female reproductive spaces, disposing them to sexualized and commodi ed sites of exploitative ideological values. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, I argue that Devi’s cultural production provides an ethnographic venue for examining how power relations shape reproduction and reproductive decisions and how women struggle daily to reproduce their livelihoods under local levels of political duress.

If the twentieth  century afforded great change due to wars and decolonization, a great deal of the twenty-first century’s upheaval comes from globalization and technology on one hand and a new kind of warfare labelled terrorism on the other.
The purpose of the research is to examine against the backdrop of this development, to what extent the image or construct of a woman has changed in India for readers, particularly by studying the way it has been depicted in the writing of Indian women authors. The fact that recently these authors have received international acclaim in the form of awards makes it even more important to understand how readers all over the world and India perceive the image of an Indian woman. In short how are Indian women being positioned?
The texts studied are: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, who is a second generation immigrant; The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, a first generation immigrant; Ladies Coupé by Anita Nair and Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur,  both of whom are Indian nationals residing in India with a certain amount of western education, the latter being  a ‘traditional’ intellectual. The last chapter deals with the ‘organic’ intellectual focussing particularly on two contrasting short stories—“The Hunt” and “Statue” by Mahasweta Devi. However, to substantiate the hypothesis and for the purposes of comparison, the study also takes a brief look at other novels by Arundhati Roy, Sudha Murty, Lalithambika Antherjanam, Sharmila Rege, Baby Halder and P. Sivakami, keeping in mind that many of these works are translations.
The approach adopted is a close reading of the texts focussing on the female characters, themes and attitudes. On this basis, the theoretical approach adopted is the writer’s interpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectics and Fanon’s reinterpretation of the same, Freud’s love-hate binaries, Gramsci’s differentiation between the ‘traditional’ intellectual and ‘organic’ intellectual and Spivak’s vision regarding the role of the humanities. 
According to Hegel, consciousness does not exist in isolation but is always dependent on another for a sense of selfhood. As there is injustice and an imbalance of power in this world, the two consciousnesses engaged with each other will assume the roles of master and slave with respect to each other. The injustice inevitably results in a struggle for selfhood on the part of the slave; one way this selfhood can be attained is through recognition of the slave’s labour. A defining emotion in this relationship is fear and it is only by overcoming fear that the slave can break free.  The ultimate fear is that of death. In addition to the instinct for domination, Freud does not see the true self as one entity but as in Marx, it is a balance between contradictory forces and in this case the dialectic is between Eros—the love instinct, and Thanatos—the death one. 
For Antonio Gramsci, a solution or an instrument of change is the ‘organic’ intellectual. The purpose of an intellectual is not to be “specialised” but to become “directive” that is one who is political and driven to bring about change. However, in the face of globalization and the crisis that it brings with inequality, war and terrorism, according to Spivak, hope is available through education in the humanities, for it is through the humanities that one can bring about “the empowerment of an informed imagination” (Spivak, “Righting Wrongs” 2).
The aim of the research is to try and understand whether western education helps to envision a new-age woman, whom this study defines as self-reliant, able to question roles and norms society has set for her, thinks independently and uses her own free will to choose to live life for herself rather than be subservient to the needs of her husband and family, or is this education an impediment. Thus in addition to intellectual and economic independence, she must be emotionally independent as well. It must be stressed that this concept of new-age is an ideal which is strived for but never actualized because it is dynamic and constantly changing over space and time. Also one must be wary of the tendency to generalize women who vary on the basis of geography, race, economics, caste and so on.
The thesis statement explored is that although in some cases western educated Indian women may ostensibly live more liberated lives, the characters or images of women in the novels by the selected writers are more circumscribed as women.
Another concern of the study is the difference between lived and written reality. A questionnaire based on the movie The Namesake taken by a community of informed readers in Pune indicated that in reality the image of the woman may have changed on the page but not in the minds of women and hence paradoxically in reality the concept of ‘new-age’ is a myth.
The key women protagonists analysed are Ashima and Moushumi from The Namesake; Sai, her grandmother Nimi and her mother along with Noni and Lola in The Inheritance of Loss; Akhila and her companions in the coupé in the novel Ladies Coupé and Mary in ‘The Hunt’ and  Dulali in ‘Statues’.
The research hopes to indicate, that the most revolutionary change in the image is captured in the characters drawn by the Indian woman who is an ‘organic’ intellectual. By working intimately with the subaltern, she is aware of the urgency for change unlike a more privileged woman. She functions as a “permanent persuader” who is an instrument of change. Thus perhaps one answer to the conundrum could be that the writing of the ‘organic’ intellectual has the potential to capture one of the myriad images of a new-age Indian woman. As for a definite final one, perhaps it can never be found as it will always be dynamically changing and evolving and hopefully aspiring towards an ideal concept akin to the one defined by the study

Cyber Literature, a bi-annual journal of English Studies vol. (issue) 38, is a special issue on Mahasweta Devi consisting of 11 research papers on her works. There are four papers in general section, three poems and four book reviews. All this make it an important reference work for Indian English fiction in general and Mahasweta Devi in particular.

The history of tribal oppression in India is an older one. “The Sanyasi Revolt”, “The
Wahabi Movement”, and “The Naxalbari Rebellion”, are evidence of the tribal outcry that
appropriately foregrounds their requirement for fundamental rights as citizens of the country.
Even after sixty six years of independence, India’s rural poor and tribals are lamenting under the
curbing effects of destitution, unemployment, undernourishment, illiteracy and human
trafficking. For these people, the notions of liberty, equality and democracy have no meaning at
all.

«Il 2016 tristemente registra la scomparsa dalla scena letteraria e artistica di due dei più grandi esponenti del panorama culturale e politico dell’India contemporanea. La morte di Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016), scrittrice e attivista sociale bengalese di fama internazionale, e la successiva scomparsa del regista teatrale manipuri Heisnam Kanhailal (1941-2016), hanno lasciato un vuoto che difficilmente potrà essere colmato. Il loro impegno artistico, personale e sociale per una letteratura militante e un teatro di trasformazione sociale costringono chi resta sulla scena politica e artistica dell’India di oggi a confrontarsi con la loro eredità, a raccogliere una sfida che si rivela, giorno dopo giorno, sempre più pressante.»

In: Marianna Ferrara, Alessandro Saggioro, Giuseppina Paola Viscardi (a cura di). Le verità del velo. Società editrice fiorentina 2017, pp. 281-322.

See: www.sefeditrice.it/scheda.asp?idv=3993

The Indian short story is not merely a derivative of the Western genre, but owes much to the great story-telling tradition of Indian antiquity. The mythical and legendary tales as well as folktales have provided a fertile soil for the modern Indian short story to germinate. Beginning towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Indian short story flourished in the twentieth century. It became evident by the end of the past century that the canon is attuned to Indian landscape whose heterogeneous people and their diverse experiences it reflects so faithfully. The Indian short story as a distinct genre resembles a “multicoloured glass” scattering myriad hues which is analogous to the diversity of our country itself. The variegated and unbeaten genre righteously deserves critical attention which it has been deprived of.

With twenty-seven scholarly articles by academics, professors and researchers, the present critical volume is a tribute to an affluent but neglected genre of Indian literature. In accord with the genre itself, the scope of the book allows for such diversity as the classic writers like Tagore and Manto; the feminist writers like Ismat Chughtai, Kamala Das, Shashi Deshpande and Indira Goswami; the dalit writers like Bama and Ajay Navaria; the diaspora writers like Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri. The reworking of myth by Mahasweta Devi, the nature lore of Ruskin Bond, the saga of exile by the Kashmiri Pandits, the satire of Hari Shankar Parsai, the macabre tales of Satyajit Ray, the problematics of identity in Manoj Das and memory in Temsula Ao—all are taken into consideration within the structure of a single volume to make this a stimulating overview for students and scholars of Indian literature.

The concept of ‘Other’ is an essential part of Postcolonial theory and literature. In Postcolonial studies, ‘Other’ always comes in contradiction with ‘Self’. The struggle between the ‘Other’ and the ‘Self’ is an ongoing process between the influential and the influenced and it hardly seems to be off and out of existence from our society. This continual and endless process of struggle has been going on since the very origin of our civilization. Lack and deprivation, subjugation and subordination, loneliness and alienation, resilience and neglect, resignation and silence are the very signs of the ‘Otherness’ against which many sensible writers and theorists have come to challenge with a voice of protest. However the way the concept ‘Other’ has been treated by Mahasweta Devi in “Mother of 1084” is an achievement in itself. Based on the Translated version of Samik Bandyopadhyay “Mother of 1084”  from its original Bengali version entitled as “Hajar Chaurasir Ma”, this present paper tries to present the struggle between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ on the dramatic surface against the backdrop of Naxalite Movement of 1970s.

Bharat Mata, Melodrama and the Mediation of the National Subject

This chapter will critically examine specific dominant aspects of some familiar and iconic representations of Bharat Mata that are available in popular culture in order to analyse the politics of these icons and the discursive apparatus that they mobilize and enable. While doing this, it will offer the illustrated argument that the iconic and mythogenic figuring of the nation as Mother India/Bharat Mata, contrary to enduring assumptions about it, is, strictly speaking, not a ‘national’ or representative one at all. The figure of Bharat Mata is highly exclusive and elitist, and its claim to representativeness is in fact a function of its elitism: the elite claim to be the norm. The chapter will argue that the iconography of Bharat Mata typically invisibilises and marginalises the vast and highly heterogeneous majority. Powered by symbolism, the Bharat Mata icon renders the social hierarchies that it literally incorporates, as influential and as desirable. Furthermore, these are reinforced as normative within dominant notions of community and nation, a move that in turn promotes the social, discursive, cultural and institutional hierarchies of caste, class, religious majoritarianism, and orthodox sexual politics. While doing this, the paper will demonstrate the libidinal investment this figure, the use of melodrama, and the ways in which notions of desirability and legitimacy grid this argument.

This is the introduction chapter of my monograph, "Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave 2020). The chapter argues that British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and industry. These programmes resulted in a long-term agrarian and food crisis which then led to a number of catastrophic events in the long twentieth century. The book is about three such events from India’s late-colonial and postcolonial periods—the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the 1967–1972 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975–1977 national emergency. The chapter contends that these events are all linked with the historical crisis and yet distinct in their nature and orientation. It further argues that such a condition of relation through difference can be better understood via a reading of form and mode of the novels of these events. Showing that writers have predominantly used the realist form to represent the long-term historical crisis, the chapter then points to their employing a range of modes—from social realist, critical realist to metafictional, urban fantastic, gothic, and others (many of which are conventionally understood as anti-realist or non-realist). These modes have shaped their realisms into a deeply heterogeneous and dynamic form, and, in so doing, composed the aesthetic framework of catastrophe-prone, crisis-ridden condition of life and living in postcolonial India, which is called here as “catastrophic realism.” The chapter situates the link between crisis and event by drawing upon the works of Fredric Jameson, Veena Das, Shahid Amin, and Louis Althusser. Its take on catastrophic realism is mediated through a thorough reading of realism, form, and mode in the European and postcolonial/Indian contexts, where Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s pre- and post-partition stories are offered as examples.

Mahasweta Devi’s literary sexual reportage in Breast Stories documents how women’s tortured bodies become the historical battleground of deeper socio-economic and political issues, their reproductive systems a discursive site for the examination of insurrection, resistance, and decolonization. In this analysis, I probe the socio-economic and cultural signification and commercialization of the breast in order to examine how women often employ them in their bare life struggles to combat poverty and starvation.

Biopolitics—the strategies and mechanisms through which human life processes are managed and regulated under regimes of authority—is ordinary currency in society, and ruling political systems exercise surveillance, incarceration and killings to a great extent in this regard. Michel Foucault's work on the regulation of human beings through the production of power serves as an initial medium of investigation into biopolitics. Yet, Giorgio Agamben probes the covert and overt presence of biopolitical violence in society, particularly through his concepts of state of exception and bare life. The Indian playwright Mahasweta Devi's Anglophone play-text Mother of 1084 (1973) enables scholars to participate in a critical forum on biopolitical praxis, because of its pervasive and explicit representation of state violence and rebels. Nonetheless, the play-text is often renowned for its reference to feminist ideology and mother-son relationship. Existing scholarship has overlooked the manifestation of torture and dead bodies on-stage represented in it. The play is also on the periphery of the mainstream literary criticism. By engaging with a textual portrayal of the play through Foucauldian and Agambenian critical lenses, this article interrogates the ways in which biopolitics coerces populations within the contemporary socio-political milieu. The analysis implies a potential to understand the biopolitical logic more meaningfully, and to be resistant to its stratagems of coercion. It adds to the existing body of literature on biopolitics by creating a specific account of life-politics as characterised in postcolonial theatre, provides a supplemental standpoint to debates on biopolitical subjugation and specifically contributes to current discussions of the play.

Biopolitics-the strategies and mechanisms through which human life processes are managed and regulated under regimes of authority-is ordinary currency in society, and ruling political systems exercise surveillance, incarceration and killings to a great extent in this regard. Michel

Witch-scares have been interwoven in the fabric of mankind as a period reminder of
the existence of the overpowered under the yoke of dominant ideologies- whether political or
religious, or the united force of both. While mainstream global media focuses inordinately more
on Westernized literary representations of the phenomenon, this paper shall closely examine
witchcraft allegations and their orchestration working as pretext to discriminatorily circumscribe
subalternity encoded in the dehumanization of lower-caste Hindu women in rural India,
simultaneously inspecting the interplay of myths and folklore in the same, via a critical study of
two short stories by Mahasweta Devi and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay.
Keywords: witch, famine, caste, misogyny, sexuality, fertility, subaltern, myth

The Barabaig peoples are vulnerable economic and ecological refugees pushed to the furthest corner of the Bosutu Plains of Eastern Tanzania to eke out a subsistence existence amidst encroaching capital and globalizing forces. In many ways, the Barabaig face struggles similar to those encountered by the tribals in Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha." In this essay, I offer my own ethnographic research to survey the anguish of the Barabaig peoples who try to hold onto their cultural traditions and ways of life in a world geared towards globalized progress. In so doing, I demonstrate how the construction of tribal songs and mythohistories challenge global dynamics and renegotiate gendered positions within dominantly indigenous patriarchal contested spaces. These powerful stories and songs reflect how indigenous mothers imagine and control their own gendered history and preserve their cultural identity and traditional livelihood.

Exploration of the dilemmas of rural guerilla organization among India's landless poor (subaltern and tribal groups) during the continuing Naxalite movement. I argue that the 1960s leadership's "annihilation" project in particular (targeted assassination of landlords and wealthy peasants) raises questions of epistemic excess and epistemological difference that are not easy to resolve. How do these questions relate to the instrumentalization of affect (class hatred) as a tool of someone else's struggle?

Contribution to a book edited by Pradip Basu.

Throughout the globe, the subaltern reproductive body has become an ideological battlefield of patriarchal control and reification in which women’s bodies fall prey to a host of gendered, racialized and economic forces. I contend that a close reading of Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Strange Children” exposes how Neo- Malthusian mal-development projects aimed at undermining adivasi reproductive systems and subsistence livelihoods have subverted urgent policy discussions of redistributive social justice. I specifically read Devi’s documentary narrative to testify to how mal-development projects have led to reproductive collapse and human rights violations and how adivasis have begun to assert their rights against the many layers of corruption and continuous oppression.

This Bangla paper is on the translations of three stories of Mahasweta Devi by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the book 'Breast Stories. The author  of this paper analyzed the discursive formation of three narratives, viz. ‘Draupadi’, ‘Breast-giver’, ‘Behind the Bodice’ along with the translator’s strategic multiple interpretations of these three stories by pointing out the problems of migrated third world intellectual’s gaze(s), which is trying to penetrate the problems of post-colonial condition of the subaltern females (as protagonists or not) as speaking subjects.

The Malayalam essay in Sahitya Lokam explores the subversive fictional narratives of Mahasweta Devi and contextualizes her overall work. With all the powers of creative fiction and imaginative reflections on society and polity Devi critiques and reforms the reality from a unique ethical and aesthetic vantage sans parallel. The problems and complexities of her fictional narration and the interventionist authorial subjectivity are critically contextualized and textualized as a homage to this great champion of fiction and master story teller of reality in India, who has become a model for the whole world as far as creative writing is concerned.

Religion can foster inspiration and creativity, but it can also be linked with violence, civil war, partition, majoritarianism, and communalism, especially in the framework of the modern nation-state. Given these crises, how can the need for ethics, faith, awe, wonder, and enchantment that religion fulfils find expression and significance in a newly secular context? The Postsecular Imagination presents postsecularism as an affirmational political possibility emerging through the potential and limits of both secular and religious thought. Manav Ratti analyzes the novels of Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje, in addition to key works by Shauna Singh Baldwin, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, and Allan Sealy as they engage with a variety of religious formations—animism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism—found in South Asia. Ratti shows the dynamic risk, courage, and experimentation animating the radical imagination of these postsecular works. Tackling the most provocative contemporary debates in secularism and religion, The Postsecular Imagination will be important for readers interested in culture, literature, theory, and politics.