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Mahasweta Devi is a legendary figure among the Indian Writers. She is one of the greatest contemporary writers, who used to write in Bangla. Till the last breath of her life, Mahasweta Devi raises her voice against illiteracy, displacement, ignorance, and other issues related to exploitation. The Play Bayen was published in 'Five Plays', with other four plays - Mother of 1084, Aajir, Urvanshi and Johnny and Water in 1997. Mahasweta Devi's play Bayen exposes exploitation of women, caste, and gender. I would like to discuss the situation of a lower caste woman Chandidasi and gender discrimination in this play. In this play, there are many dimensions, where women are shown as victims. Samik Bandyopadhyay comments on Mahasweta devi's Bayen, "The metaphoric core of Bayen...lies deeper than the obvious protest against the inhumanity of superstition...Mahasweta touches the larger space of the social forces that separate mother and son in a male-dominated system". This paper attempts to see the struggling woman figure in Mahasweta Devi's play Bayen and discuss how a lower caste woman is accused as a Bayen. According to village people bayen is a woman, who has ability to curse others and breastfeed the dead children. Chandidasi is separated from her son and family. The purpose of this paper is to examine the identity of a woman, which is constructed by the society and fake beliefs of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designating the connection between literature and environment this paper highlights Mahasweta Devi's Chotti Munda and His Arrow from the standpoint of postcolonial ecocriticism where it highlights how the survival of the tribal is ecologically related and how much they are concerned about their own ecology. As a mother of a sustainable society, Mahasweta Devi shows her anxiety for the tribals. She binds their history and their closeness and bonding with nature in such a way that it may explore their involvement in constructing a sustainable environment as she believes that an author must have a social responsibility. Postcolonial ecocriticism not only just echoes history rather it has also brought changes in the physical environment they belong to. Here Mahasweta Devi focuses on how on one hand, the exploitation of the tribals at the hands of the landowners brings ecological degradation physically, socially, and psychologically and on the other hand she explores how that degradation is alleviated through the tribals' sense of responsibility and their ecological wisdom and the empowerment they achieve through the culture of archery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lives of Aboriginals, as an indigenous form of a subaltern identity, have been less documented in narratives so far. Indigenous subaltern identity forms an alter-identity in which indigenous women's identity is even more silenced in the social order of gender hierarchy. Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in their book Ecofeminism locate the "Third World Woman" (in India) as a stakeholder of indigenous identity. The knowledge of Third World women in nurturing biodiversity drastically differs from both the Androcentric and Eurocentric models of bio-conservation. Indigenous women and the indigenous flora are both objects of genocidal violence, identity dissolution, and cultural extinction as their contribution to conservation is not recognized. As Gayatri Spivak in her seminal book Can the Subaltern Speak? voices, "The subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in the shadow." Mahasweta Devi, renowned Indian author and social activist, portrays the marginalized Indigenous and their struggle for survival. The Indigenous are dispossessed and the indigenous women are even more displaced. Indigenous women characters of Devi's selected works such as The Book of the Hunter and The Witch, belonging to the Shabar, Santal, Oraon, and Munda tribal communities, live in tune with ethnocentric ecological order. They are the forest dwellers who think of the forest as a unique bio-habitat in harmony with women, thereby preserving Mother Nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their affinities in criticizing the Cartesian subject, contextualizing texts, and upholding dialogue as integral to interpretation, there are differences between the hermeneutic projects of Gadamer and Habermas. While Gadamer emphasizes real dialogue and continuity with tradition, Habermas highlights ideal communication and critical distance. With regard to the underexplored feminist intervention in their debate, it can be said that there are greater affinities between feminist thought and Gadamer arising from their commitment to historically situated thought. But the vantage position of tradition in Gadamer has generated its set of feminist apprehensions. The paper scrutinizes the consequences of intervening in the Gadamer–Habermas debate on the hermeneutics of tradition from a feminist perspective. Analyzing women characters in the Indian epic Mahabharata, it argues that the intersectionality between their gendered identity and varied social locations of class and caste leads to diverse feminist perspectives. In conclusion, the paper ponders over whether they are all equally critical and the extent to which they can be reconciled.

Mahasweta Devi, as an activist and renowned writer devotes herself to write about the tribal. Through her writings she shows her concern over the rights of the oppressed tribal communities as well all the sections of the society who are mute. Even she delivers social messages through her fictional works. She ponders that as a writer it is her duty to capture their struggles in her writings so that their histories cannot vanish. In the novel Chotti Munda and His Arrow, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Mahasweta Devi shows her attention over the sustenance and survival of the tribal who are not only very intimate with nature and the culture of archery but also know how to survive in spite of being exploited by the landlords and money lenders. Even, the tribals are enriched with ecological wisdom which is very unique. All of her writings are impregnated with the tribal ecology, their struggle and survival. This paper intends to focus on the various types of exploitation from the viewpoint of postcolonial ecofeminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers traumatic representations of violence in the stories of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi that do not readily fit into trauma studies discourses which emphasise the aporia and unspeakability of trauma. Instead, the protagonists of these stories gesture towards defiance and agency in the face of trauma, thereby calling for justice and social change. Such portrayals offer us opportunities to decolonize cultural trauma theory by focusing on the unexpected arising of agency and empowerment from victims of gendered violence. The article explores the complex ways in which the trope of rape operates in Devi's work and posits that it is used by Devi to empower her female protagonists and make them powerful critiques of patriarchal systems of exploitation. In doing so, the article argues, these stories also decolonize established discourses of trauma. In "Draupadi", the protagonist Dopdi Mejhen is a tribal revolutionary who is arrested and gang-raped in custody. In "Behind the Bodice", Gangor, a Dalit woman, is gang-raped by policemen. In these stories, rape functions at two levels: firstly, it functions as a critique of the stark reality and extent of the violence perpetrated daily on the bodies of women; secondly, it works as a trope in which the violation of the woman's body becomes symptomatic of the violation of the land and its oppressed people by the ruling elite under decolonization. Thus, rape in Devi's fiction can be read allegorically as a critique from within of nationalism and decolonization. By constituting the female subaltern as a complex figure of femininity whose body is not simply the site of exploitation and torture, but a transformative figure of resistance, Devi's fiction radically destabilizes the basic premise of female vulnerability and the violent objectification of women in the context of rape as well as the expected traumatic aftermath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breastfeeding, both in its literal consequences on a woman's body and its symbolic associations with attachment, highlights the simultaneously powerful yet servile position of the maternal figure. I trace this ambivalence in Mahasweta Devi's story "Breast-Giver," exploring women's literal and metaphorical hungers, as well as the hunger their children experience, arguing that breastfeeding often serves as a means of showcasing a woman's physical limitation based on her familial status as "feeder." However, I also argue for a profoundly embodied version of the breastfeeding trope, one that negates prior conceptions of breastfeeding as a "taking" and establishes it as a "giving" that not only nourishes one's family, but also one's self, as mothers circumvent hierarchical systems of cooking and food preparation. Ultimately, I both lay bare the interconnection between a woman's body and food-based labor systems and reveal literary methods for their extrication, through narrative instances of breastfeeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The socio-economic marginalization faced by the subaltern domestic worker woman is a unique position in which class, caste and gender intersect to create a multiply marginalized subject who is marked by a sense of precariousness experienced on a daily basis. In the short story "Giribala'' written by the renowned writer and activist Mahasweta Devi, and in the autobiography A Life Less Ordinary by Baby Halder, the central female characters are subaltern women who fight against gender based and economic marginalization to develop an individual identity. This paper closely analyses the intersectional nature of the overlapping marginalizations faced by subaltern women like the fictional character Giribala and the real person Baby, to draw parallels in the challenges they face from their unique socio-economically subaltern position. This paper focuses on the power struggle of negotiating/creating a space for themselves by the women subjugated by the male-dominated social structures and enquires whether it is even a possibility for a woman belonging to the economically marginalized class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep Ecology is one of the newly emerging areas in ecocritical studies. Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess has coined the word in order to promote ecological consciousness and encourage a feeling of shared identity between humans and the biosphere. Studies in Deep Ecology propose that the human being is just one more among the many species in nature, and not the supreme one; the belief that humanity is somehow exceptional is swiftly leading us towards the anthropogenic depletion of the environment. Mahasweta Devi, a well-respected author and social activist, shows great concern for the health of the ecosystem and its importance for the continuity of the human species, to the extent that a significant amount of her work can be used as apposite study material for eco-critical analysis. The novel considered here, The Book of The Hunter, incorporates salient features of the concept of Deep Ecology. Consequently, the present study reviews the novel with an ecological perspective, all the while discussing the author’s efforts to create eco-consciousness among the readers. The story follows the lives of two couples, the medieval poet Kabikankan Mukundaram Chakrabarti and his wife, and the youngsters Kalya and Phuli. While the novelist aims to capture the different socio-cultural conventions of XVI century rural society (in this Devi acknowledges her debt to Mukundaram’s 1544 epic poem “Abhayamangal”), she nonetheless offers a significant commentary on the deep-seated, beneficent attitude of the forest-dwelling Shabar community of Odisha and West Bengal towards ecological management. At the same time, the author illustrates the effects of the growing number of settlements encroaching upon the forest.

Copyright of Phainomena is the property of Phenomenological Society of Ljubljana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper is an attempt to make sense of the notion and ideal of nonviolence in these ultra-violent days. The paper is a dialogue with three "specialists" of violence, who nevertheless aspire to a different, brighter horizon: Ramchandra Gandhi (henceforth R. Gandhi), Saadat Hasan Manto and Mahasweta Devi. R. Gandhi is one of the most intriguing voices of twentieth-century Indian philosophy. Manto and Mahasweta are writers, the former known for his short partition stories in Urdu; the latter for her gut-wrenching literature in Bengali. All three dare to look violence in the eye, implying that nonviolence can only emerge from deep reflection on violence as an inherent human tendency. Violence is part of me as much as of anyone else. R. Gandhi argues that partition, the cradle of violence, is in the eye, and suggests that we can train the human gaze, our gaze, to prioritize the common denominator between you and I, which hides under the obvious differences between us. For Manto, the remedy is to be found in language. He implies that an ethical dimension is concealed within language, waiting to be excavated. Mahasweta gives voice to those unheard. Acknowledging the unacknowledged, she and Manto show us, is an act of nonviolence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neel Mukherjee’s second novel The Lives of Others deals with the story of a family during one of the most controversial chapters in the recent history of West Bengal, namely the Naxalite movement and its subsequent repression by the State. The novel examines the reasons why so many young middle-class students decided to join the movement, and the actual impact of their activism. In doing so, it questions Bengali society and the relationship between different social classes. Above all, The Lives of Others is a bourgeois novel which explores and criticizes the contradiction and conflicts within the Bengali middle class. Although the subalterns, especially the peasants, played a significant role in the Naxalite movement, they are at the margins of the novel and are rarely given a voice.This paper will read The Lives of Others as an allegory of Bengali society. Such a reading will primarily look at the dialectics of society in the novel, thus providing a context in which to discuss class conflicts and the paradox represented by a bourgeois novel about a subaltern revolution. The comparison with a well-known novel of the time, Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084, will also be fundamental for the discussion.

Drawing upon the insights of Rabindranath Tagore, who coined the term viswasahitya to express his own understanding of comparative literature, this essay resituates translation as the cornerstone for new directions in world literature. While conventional understandings of world literature tend to reconfirm existing power structures and hierarchies, translation opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the national/global binary by interrogating the lines along which such binaries are conceptualized. Translation operates at the borders that are seen to divide cultures, languages, worldviews and geographies. This essay explores the dynamic relationship between translation and world literature within contemporary South Asian writing, through an analysis of heteroglossia, multilingualism and 'translatedness' in selected texts by Mahasweta Devi and Amitav Ghosh, opening up larger questions about multilingualism and also about the very discipline of comparative literature. Highlighting the role that translation has historically played in shaping power relations in the world, this paper projects the transformative potential of translation as the key to a radical reconceptualization of a world literature for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep Ecology is one of the newly emerging areas in ecocritical studies. Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess has coined the word in order to promote ecological consciousness and encourage a feeling of shared identity between humans and the biosphere. Studies in Deep Ecology propose that the human being is just one more among the many species in nature, and not the supreme one; the belief that humanity is somehow exceptional is swiftly leading us towards the anthropogenic depletion of the environment. Mahasweta Devi, a well-respected author and social activist, shows great concern for the health of the ecosystem and its importance for the continuity of the human species, to the extent that a significant amount of her work can be used as apposite study material for eco-critical analysis. The novel considered here, The Book of The Hunter, incorporates salient features of the concept of Deep Ecology. Consequently, the present study reviews the novel with an ecological perspective, all the while discussing the author's efforts to create eco-consciousness among the readers. The story follows the lives of two couples, the medieval poet Kabikankan Mukundaram Chakrabarti and his wife, and the youngsters Kalya and Phuli. While the novelist aims to capture the different socio-cultural conventions of XVI century rural society (in this Devi acknowledges her debt to Mukundaram's 1544 epic poem "Abhayamangal"), she nonetheless offers a significant commentary on the deep-seated, beneficent attitude of the forest-dwelling Shabar community of Odisha and West Bengal towards ecological management. At the same time, the author illustrates the effects of the growing number of settlements encroaching upon the forest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tribes own individual identity as 'adivasis' with their own language, religion, festivals, dance and music. Tribal history shows elements of subjugation, passive acceptance of suffering, humiliation and starvation. 'Subaltern' refers to the lower rank in the military. In literature subaltern studies mirror the sufferings of the voiceless sections of the society. Mahasweta Devi, (1926-2016) is a chronicler and social activists documenting the sufferings of the adivasis. She explores troubling motifs in contemporary Indian life through the figures and narratives of the indigenous tribes of India. Her stories map, in both delicate and violent style, the experience of the tribals and their lives under decolonization. She links the specific fate of the tribals in India to that of the marginalised peoples everywhere in the world. The moneylenders, the landlords, the bureaucrats and the politicians benefit from the welfare schemes and push the tribals to lead lives of poverty, suffering, humiliation, oppression and exploitation. The aim of the paper is to show attempts for liberation of tribals subalternity through resistances by individuals, groups and intellectual thinking. The social activist touch of Devi incorporates the consciousness of the individual raising a voice of revolt against the oppressors. The possible solution to end tribal afflictions is the collective revolt driving the tribals to liberate themselves and their race. Devi's "Aajir", "Water", Titu Mir, Chotti Munda and his Arrow, "Seed" and Dust on the Road bear testimony to this consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Dalit literature is marked by revolt and negativism, since it closely associated with the hopes for freedom by a group of people who as untouchables, are victims of social, economic and cultural inequality" (Mukherjee 1). Dalit writing is a post-independence literary phenomenon. Dalit literature has its own significance. Dalits were always considered as marginalised people, oppressed and others by the Indian society. Inequality is the root cause for this marginalisation. The word Dalit is not new to us, it was used in the 1930s as a Hindi and Marathi translation of "depressed classes', a term the British used for what are now called the Scheduled castes. The word "Dalit" has originated from Sanskrit 'Dalita' which means 'oppressed'. Dalits have various names in different parts of India, such as 'dasa', 'dasya', 'raksasa', 'asura', 'avarna', 'nisoda', 'panchama', 'chandala' etc., There are varieties of nomenclatures such as 'untouchables', 'harijans', 'weaker sections', 'atishudras', 'dalits', 'depressed classes', 'others', 'servile classes', 'avamas', 'antyajas', 'scheduled castes'. Mulk Raj Anand novels reveal consciousness for the Dalits all over the places. Mahasweta Devi is very much committed to society, and she hopefully tried to remove the evils of the society for the oppressed and the downtrodden. This paper attempts to give the Dalit consciousness in the select novels of Mulk Raj Anand and Mahasweta Devi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Less of a feminist and more of a humanist, Mahasweta claims that a woman should be judged as a human and not from the point of view of gender, race, caste and class. Devi portrays the true face of feminist assertion, whereas Draupadi uses her wholeness of mind and body to fight against her marginalized identity. Mahasweta Devi's stories speak of this unspeakable truth of women's misery and their power for enduring and resistance. Mahasweta gives voice to the characters. She speaks the 'unspeakable' truth of these characters. In this paper I am going to discuss some of her short stories, namely, Breast-Giver, Draupadi, The Hunt, "Behind the Bodice" to explain that her women are strong and that they have a tremendous sense of self-respect and are prepared to fight all their battles to the end, even if the end is death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Indialogs, Spanish Journal of India Studies is the property of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Man is inserted in a society which depends on participation and reliance. This structures social relations that are basic components for developing self-sufficient autonomous self. Autonomy is to be managed in its relational terms. A study of the psychological trauma of three prominent characters namely Sujata, Somu’s mother, Nandini in Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 accentuates their sufferings out of choking oppression and their struggles to free themselves from repression for self-assurance. Mahasweta Devi’s characters show diverse faces of self-governance in its social terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Mahasweta Devi's short-story Giribala in order to demonstrate the paradoxical condition and representation of women in society as well as their crumbled voices. It also looks at their endurance and resistance. Women's positions in society, specifically those of marginalized ones positions are very much obsessed with the sense of negligence and docility. Marginalized women, the tribe or the poor women and the outcast or the rebellious women, do not acquire any respectable position and identity in society. Their agonies have long been neglected, and are not even regarded as erroneous but the usual happenings of day-to-day life. Every woman does not belong to the upper class or challenge the fate of misery or not, every single woman has the same tragedy to sustain but most of them have resemblances. They have similar experiences, impervious pronunciation and different situations. Devi's stories address this unspoken reality and truth of women's pain and their power of enduring and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a close reading of Mahasweta Devi’s ethnographic reportage in her short narratives “Giribala” and “Dhowli,” in Women, Outcastes, Peasants and Rebels and “Douloti the Bountiful” in Imaginary Maps to show how ecological marginalization, reproductive rape and unequal resource access have depleted Adivasi female reproductive spaces, disposing them to sexualized and commodified 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.

This article discusses the close relationship between Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi’s literary work and her activism in support of indigenous people in India, and considers the two activities as interventions in the field of law. Devi’s emphasis on the continuity between colonial and postcolonial legal frameworks invites us to look at law as a governing discourse that stigmatized Adivasis. The criminalization of indigenous people via the Criminal Tribes Act (1871) and the presumption that they belonged to a “state of nature” form part of an orientalist bias against the tribals that was legally sustained during colonialism and also through Nehru’s discourses on the modern nation. Through analysis of the short story “Operation? – Bashai Tudu”, where law appears as a non-democratic instrument for governing the poor, and using extracts from a hitherto unpublished conversation between the author and Devi, it argues that Devi’s work can be considered as a crucial analytical tool with which to explore the genealogy of Adivasi marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mahasweta Devi is a distinguished writer of Bengali fiction, as well as being a prominent activist who works on behalf of the most oppressed communities in India. This interview focuses on the interaction of these aspects of her public life. Mahasweta argues that the separation of creative and social objectives is a contemporary phenomenon in Indian literature, but also maintains that her activism chronologically and significantly follows her creativity. Drawing a clear distinction between “theoretical” and “real” concerns, Mahasweta expresses her commitment to realism. Though her work has been subject to intense theoretical scrutiny, especially through the lens of Subaltern criticism, Mahasweta emphasizes a critical humanism that views the very purpose of literary study to be the knowledge and sympathy for people in different contingent circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I begin this commentary by considering Walter Benjamin's idea of history alongside that of Mahasweta Devi, in her long story, ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’. The goal is to bring various ideas of temporality and historical periodisation into relief, ranging from the narrowly conjunctural, to ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernity’, and on to the notion of ‘universal history’. I then attempt to periodise postcolonial studies as a form of ‘third worldism’, and conclude by examining some of the claims being advanced today that enjoin us to think about ‘post-Soviet’ in relation to ‘postcolonial’ studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers a close reading of Mahasweta Devi's ethnographic reportage in her short narratives "Giribala" and "Dhowli," in Women, Outcastes, Peasants and Rebels and "Douloti the Bountiful" in Imaginary Maps to show how ecological marginalization, reproductive rape and unequal resource access have depleted Adivasi female reproductive spaces, disposing them to sexualized and commodified 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]