Mahasweta Devi

Author and historian Urvashi Butalia details the life and words of an activist and feminist force

IN the mid 1980s, when people of my generation were relatively young feminists, we fought many battles focusing largely on violence against women. It was in the course of our activism that we came across the work of Mahasweta Devi, one of Bengal’s most important writers, who died a year ago at the age of 90. At the time, women’s groups across India were demanding changes in the law on rape and dowry (these laws were changed in 1983 as a result of the activism), and the battle they were fighting was a lonely one. This is why it was so exciting to find a writer who wrote about the sorts of issues we were thinking about.

The first of Mahasweta Devi’s books I discovered was her iconic novel, Hazar Chaurasi ki Ma (Mother of 1084), translated into Hindi. We could not believe that a writer would be writing about Naxalbari and focusing on a woman. Many of our women friends had abandoned their education to join the Naxalite movement, but their story was hardly known, as the narrative was mostly male. Mahasweta’s book changed that.

Over the years, we were to get to know much more about her and her work; she became one of the strongest voices for the downtrodden in India.

EARLY DAYS

Born in Dhaka in 1926 into a literary family – both her parents were writers, and her mother, like Mahasweta in later life, was also a social activist –Mahasweta began her professional life as a journalist, and a teacher. Her early life wasn’t easy, as the expectations heaped on young girls at the time were extremely restrictive, and Mahasweta’s family sometimes did not know how to deal with her.