The Conscience of the Margins

On the centenary of her birth, Mahasweta Devi’s work endures as a reckoning with power and neglect.

Born in 1926, Mahasweta Devi remains, even after her death in 2016, one of India’s most formidable literary presences. Few writers have so insistently fused literature with moral urgency or treated writing as an act burdened with responsibility. Prolific she certainly was, producing over a hundred novels, hundreds of short stories and thousands of pages of reportage. As we take stock of this great conscience of the margins on the centenary of her birth, we find that productivity alone does not explain her stature. Mahasweta Devi wrote as if words carried consequences, and lived as though they did.

She was born into an illustrious family. One of her uncles, the late Ritwik Ghatak, became one of the most radical filmmakers India, and perhaps, the world has ever produced. Having migrated to Calcutta during her student days, she did her Master’s Degree in English.

Her early immersion in political theatre through the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) shaped her understanding of art as agitation. Her first marriage, to Bijon Bhattacharya, whose play Nabanna became an explosive indictment of famine, colonial callousness and capitalist exploitation, placed her squarely within the cultural left. IPTA believed theatre should confront power, not flatter it. Her marriage to Bijon did not last long. He passed away after the estrangement. She married again but that marriage too, fell by the wayside. She never blamed her husbands for their ill-fated marriages.

She was a deeply political social activist who has been working with and for tribals and marginal communities like the landless labourers of eastern India for years; the editor of a quarterly Bortika, in which the tribals and marginal people themselves document grassroots level issues and trends; and a socio-political commentator whose articles appeared regularly in The Economic and Political Weekly, Frontier and other journals. Mahasweta Devi made important contributions to literary and cultural studies in this country. Her empirical research into oral history as it lives in the cultures and memories of tribal communities was the first of its kind in India. Her powerful, haunting tales of exploitation and struggle are seen as rich sites of feminist discourse. Her innovative use of language has expanded the parameters of Bengali as a language of literary expression, by imbibing and interweaving of tribal dialects into her writing.

She turned Bortika 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. Her empirical research into oral history in the cultures and memories of tribal communities was the first of its kind in India. Her powerful, haunting tales of exploitation and struggle are rich sites of feminist discourse. Her innovative use of language has expanded the parameters of Bengali as a language of literary expression, by imbibing and interweaving of tribal dialects into her writing.

“It is not new for my literature to spring from a fight for the rights of these oppressed and downtrodden people. The tribal revolt against the British at the turn of the century formed the backbone of ‘Aranyer Adhikar’ (Rights of the Forest), which the Sahitya Akademi singled out for their awards. My social activism is the driving force of all my literary activities, be it literature - which brought me into the good books of Jnanpeeth (which bestows the highest literary award in India for outstanding work in Indian languages over a sustained period of time to a single writer every year) - my newspaper columns or the journal I edit with writing of members of different tribes. The lives of the bonded labour provided me with a character like Dopdi. Perhaps their stories also impart a narrative immediacy to my language,” said Mahasweta Devi about her work. The reference to Dopadi is a comment on Draupadi, one of her most shocking short stories. It is about Dopdi Mejhen, a tribal revolutionary, who, arrested and gang-raped in custody, turns the terrible wounds of her breasts into a counter-offensive.

Aranyer Adhikar reconstructed the life and rebellion of Birsa Munda, the late-19th-century tribal leader who challenged British authority and missionary intrusion. The novel is neither hagiography nor historical fiction in the conventional sense. It is an act of historical reclamation, restoring agency to a figure marginalised in nationalist narratives.

Her longer novels like ‘Hazaar Chaurasir Maa’ (‘Mother of 1084’) demonstrate a different register of political engagement. Set against the backdrop of the Naxalite movement, the novel follows a middle-class woman confronting the execution of her son by the state. Here Mahasweta probes not tribal marginality but bourgeois complicity, exposing how comfortable lives are insulated from systemic violence. The novel’s power lies in its restraint: outrage simmers beneath an apparently domestic narrative, implicating readers who might otherwise claim neutrality.

She tried to look at society and judge history from the grassroots level, from the people’s point of view that holds true of her first book, Rani of Jhansi. This process eventually took her to the tribals and other marginalised non-tribal people in the 1970s. She turned her attention to the marginalized tribals and untouchable poor of eastern India, particularly Bihar and West Bengal. She travelled widely across Palamau, Chhota Nagpur, and the Santhal Parganas, living with and building an intimate connection with them.

Her Verrier Elwin Memorial lecture in Baroda in 1998 led to the setting up of the Denotified Tribes and Communities Right Action Group. The group brings out a bulletin named Budhan. When Budhan Sabar, a member of the Sabar Khedia tribe of Akarbaid in Purulia district West Bengal, was killed by the police on 17 February 1998, Mahasweta Devi, as president of the Paschim Banga Khedia Sabar Kalyan Samity (of which Budhan was also a member) filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Calcutta High Court. The responsible police officers were suspended, a CBI inquiry was initiated, and Budhan's widow was awarded a compensation of Rs.100,000. She championed the cause of 25 million tribal people in India, who belong to approximately 150 different tribes.

Her world in writing and in lifestyle was too difficult to enter, imbibe and translate without knowing, understanding and internalising the struggles of the marginalised adivasis – the Hos, the Mundas, the Oraons, the Shabars and the Santhals she wrote about. Their social structure is different from our own. The language they speak in, the food they eat, their lifestyle, their customs and rituals, the clothes they wear or do not wear, the sources of livelihood and even the gods they worship are a mystery to mainstream people like us and the filmmakers.

“In my writing, there is a mukti, a liberty. They (the characters) are acting on their own. With liberation, they have freedom to act independently which they do not get in their real lives. I feel this should have been the norm. I just want things to be the way they should have been. So, the question of justice comes in. This process of writing...it comes from so many things: childhood rhymes, proverbs, containing so many stories,” she said.

At a time when Indian writing is increasingly severed from social consequence, her work endures as a reminder that literature, at its most serious, is not an escape from history but an argument with it.

(The author is a noted film scholar who writes extensively on social issues. Views personal.)