The impact of Mahasweta Devi’s literary work is far from having been confined to her lifetime. In her centennial year, it is clear that the questions she raised in her work are even more resonant, more searing, in their penetration today. Recalling her as writer and activist does not adequately indicate that her writing was itself activism, exemplifying what committed literature should really mean. She forced her readers into the unfamiliar and certainly less palatable worlds of the oppressed — tribal people, landless labourers, survivors of gender violence, into forests, quarries, prisons and courts. Her writing aimed to give voice to the marginalised and lay bare their suffering under the humiliation, exclusion and deliberate inequality created by the State and mainstream society. Mahasweta Devi did not merely make her readers face the realities that lay
outside the boundaries of accepted culture, she also made these part of their experience through the power of her portrayal. Her language moved away towards a starkness with underlying tribal intonations and her descriptions were almost like reportage within the fiction. There could be no turning away.
The writer fought to give excluded people agency, forming bodies such as the Pashim Banga Kheria Shabar Kalyan Samiti — she worked most with the Shabars — and editing the journal, Bortika, to bring out stories from below that would help fill out her social critique. Her work outside her writing was of a piece with it, creating narratives and drawing out voices as a form of resistance. The best-known of her work, such as “Draupadi”, Hajar Churashir Ma or Aranyer Adhikar, are unforgettable and comfortless. Her writing exposes the acute suffering of those marginalised and the birth of reckless resistance in those who have nothing more to lose. But she worked in a world yet different from today. In today’s India, Mahasweta Devi would probably have been labelled an ‘urban Naxal’, a unique term for dissenters coined by the ruling regime and its faithful followers.
That, however, becomes unimportant in the context of the greater
relevance that her work has acquired today, precisely because of the kind of world India has turned into. Inequalities — economic and social — have increased, the State’s power has grown, laws have been weaponised and injustices, often against dissenters, have become routine. Tribal people and foresters are losing their traditional rights, displacement is common as is impoverishment, the environment is no longer a priority with mining permissions being repeatedly granted, most undertrial prisoners are tribal or underprivileged persons. Against this, Mahasweta Devi’s writing is both report and resistance, an unrelenting analysis of possession and dispossession, of the cruelty of the State machinery, of greed, violence and pain. It shows how dissent and criticism can remain relevant beyond the time of their occurrence. Telling stories then becomes a mission to reveal the hidden and the silenced and narratives an alternative source of power.