Mahasweta Devi and Indian Literature from Below

Abstract

Abstract This chapter surveys the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi’s influential and less-remarked texts, including her novels, short stories, and nonfiction. Utilizing Sisir Kumar Das’s notion of Indian literature as a dialogic formation, it situates Mahasweta’s retelling of regional, national, and world history—such as her sprawling historical fiction ignored by most critics—with particular attention to literary form and experiments with style and idiom. Translated into multiple Indian languages, Mahasweta’s writings signal an awareness of what is here termed Indian literature from below; departing from recent discussions that view Indian literature as an offshoot of 19th-century orientalist discourse, this chapter illuminates an ebullient strand of decolonizing intellectual thought and practice that in remarkable ways reworks classical and premodern traditions and juxtaposes folk-popular culture with the global modernist avant-garde. In doing so, it bridges the gap between urban educated classes and marginalized populations in India: anti-state rebels, women, Dalits, and Adivasis.