Opinion Mahasweta Devi’s questions still resonate

Mahasweta Devi’s work began where official histories fell silent. Her fiction and reportage veered out of drawing rooms towards forests, quarries, railway embankments and police outposts, places where India’s development story frays and exposes its human costs. Her writing insisted on giving voice to the dispossessed, shaped by history, humiliation and the burning embers of resistance. Paring Bengali down to its most elemental, it made room for the cadences of tribal speech and oral memory, wielding it as a tool of confrontation, forcing the literary centre to reckon with lives it preferred to keep peripheral. In short stories such as ‘Draupadi’ (1978) or novels like Hajar Churashir Maa (1974) or Aranyer Adhikar (1979), she rendered suffering with a hard, almost documentary clarity that refused consolation.

For Mahasweta Devi, literary imagination was inseparable from activism. She wrote not as an observer passing through unfamiliar worlds, but as someone who listened, argued, and organised; who recognised how violence could be normalised. She built societies such as the Kheria Sabar Kalyan Samiti to nurture agency, edited the magazine Bortika to amplify voices from the grassroots, filed petitions, and accompanied landless labourers to courtrooms. Through it all, she recognised narrative as a form of power. ‘Rudali’ (1979) offered a sharp anatomy of how grief is commodified under feudal capitalism. Hajar Churashir Maa widened the frame, linking individual loss to the brutal state machinery.

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Nearly a decade after her death and in her birth centenary year, Mahasweta Devi’s writing does not allow the reader the comfort of distance. In a world of rising inequality, the questions she asked about land, labour, gender and state power remain pertinent as ever. They are a reminder that justice is not an abstract ideal but a daily, contested practice — and that storytelling, when done honestly, can be a form of resistance.