She wrote what she lived: Mahaswetha Devi

Chennai: While the rest of the world happily anointed her as the inheritor of the literary genius of then undivided Bengal, Mahaswetha Devi considered, and used, her creativity as a weapon to fight the injustice and exploitation the most marginalised and dispossessed among Indian tribals faced daily. And she never hid her politics, openly declaring that her writings were indeed an extension of the rebellion she was carrying out through reports in newspapers, petitions, court cases, letters to the authorities, participation in activist organisations, advocacy and through Bortika, the grassroots journal she edited to tell the stories of the dispossessed. She was, in effect, trying to juxtapose the official history of this nation with that of its forgotten and invisible tribal history.  

Dissent was her way of life, and the honors and awards including Magsaysay, Padma Vibhushan and Jnanpith did not dampen her spirits a bit and she continued to be the daring and tireless social activist, academician, journalist and creative writer who registered her dissent at every given opportunity. A fighter till the end, she had dared to tell the world that “our Independence is false”, placing herself firmly amidst the rare breed of writers who declared that the idea of the nation’s independence carried little credence as long as millions of its citizens are deprived of their most basic rights.

I was attracted to her writings soon after reading her speech she delivered at Frankfurt Literary Festival in 2006; the speech that left many in tears. Each book surprised me and forced me to grab the other. It was hard for me to digest that an upper caste woman with an affluent family background wrote those raw stories of marginalised and dispossessed from central India.  “What crime have I done to you?”, asked Devi quite playfully, on a late evening in July 2014 when I said I selected her works for my research study after I had fallen in love with her writings. I was asked to reach her residence in Park Street, Calcutta after 9 pm as she had an appointment with doctor late in the evening. To my great surprise, I saw Devi, then in her late 80’s, re-reading her own children’s stories despite her ill health.

She was a keen observer of Kerala politics and expressed timely solidarity with people’s agitations in the red land, too. Later, she became a huge critic of the left government in West Bengal and her lenience towards Mamta Banerjee angered her followers no end. Mahasweta Devi once famously said, “When I die I don’t want to be cremated, instead I wish to be buried somewhere in Deogarh (Jharkhand) and a mahua (a tree in central India) sapling should be planted there. I haven’t given anything back to this earth; so I wish to offer myself to this mother earth”. When my friends from Kolkata say that the body will be cremated at Keoratala Mahasmasan, I am looking forward to see her last wish fulfilled.