Development and Welfare Discourses, Marginality and Cultural Interventions in Mahasweta Devi’s <i> Aajir<i>

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to study the position of the marginalised communities in India caught in the web of the politics of development and welfare programmes, through a reading of the cultural and political ramifications of Mahasweta Devi’s Aajir (Devi’s dramatisation of her short fiction of this title in Bengali). The objective is to show how the text is a kind of cultural intervention with political implications in favour of the marginalised – low class caste people, untouchables, bonded labourers, tribals and women. It is to demonstrate not only how the context gets embedded in the text but also how the text participates in the context in reflecting on and influencing the context, revealing the text-context reciprocity.