Writing for the Stage

Abstract

Mahasweta Devi’s deep social and political commitment defined her long and prolific career. Her fiction bears witness to this, as do her journalistic writings and more directly polemic texts. She wrote about the exploited and dispossessed, the tribals, outcastes and lower castes, the landless rural poor, and the migrant workers who are forced to leave their villages to eke out a pittance in the cities. To her, writing and activism were intricately linked, and she used her writerly skills to work tirelessly for the people and causes close to her heart. This was a conscious, deliberate strategy: Through reports in newspapers, through petitions, court cases, letters to the authorities, participation in activist organisations and advocacy, through the grassroots journal I edit, Bortika, in which the dispossessed tell their own truths, and finally through my fiction, I have sought to bring the harsh reality of this ignored segment of India’s population to the notice of the nation, I have sought to include their forgotten and invisible history in the official history of the nation. I have said over and over, our independence was false; there has been no independence for these dispossessed peoples, still deprived of their most basic rights. 1 She was prepared to use a variety of media and forums to reach out to the people, to the authorities, and to her readers, so that this ‘forgotten and invisible history’ could be brought to their attention. She wrote in the newspapers, in little magazines, and in journals, and she explored a wide variety of genres, from novels, novellas, and short stories to children’s stories and nonfiction articles.