Postcolonial Theory and Literature

Mahasweta Devi was born 1926 in Dhaka, then in British India, to parents who were nationalist intellectuals. She was educated at a school and college established by anti-imperialist poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Devi earned her M.A. in English from Calcutta University in 1963.

Exposing exploitation and domination in the postcolonial state, Devi's writings are different from the literature of diasporic nostalgia for the place left behind. Between 1956 and 1965, Devi published nineteen titles. Among these was Jhansir Rani (The Queen of Jhansi, 1956), a novel about young princess of a small princely state losing her life in the Mutiny of 1857 against the British, based on archival sources as well as oral history collected by Devi herself.

From 1966 to 1975, Devi published three historical novels. One explored a low-caste boy's struggle for human rights; another, the Maratha cavalry raids in the eighteenth century. Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) provided a feminist and urban perspective on the Naxalite movement of the early 1970s that brought peasants and intellectuals together. This was Devi's first major book.

Between 1976 and 1985, Devi's work focused on the aboriginal and the (post)colonial state. Her fiction about the Indian "aboriginals" (remnants of ethnic groups already living on the Indian sub-continent when the pastoralist economies, speaking Indo-European languages, spread to the area between 6000 and 2000 B.C.E.) include the novel Aranyer Adhikar (1975; Right to the forest), on Birsa Munda and the anti-British Munda rebellion in the late nineteenth century; the short story collection Agnigarbha (1978; Womb of fire); and the novel Chotti Munda Ebong Tar Tir (1980; Chotti Munda and his arrow).

In 1980, Devi started the Bengali quarterly Bortika (Torch) as a forum for peasants, agricultural and factory workers, the urban subproletariat, middle-class activists, and conscientious government workers. It was the first significant alternative publication in Bengali. In 1980 and 1981, she initiated investigative and interventionist journalism against every social ill in the postcolonial state. In 1981, Devi became involved with bonded labor (rural landowners charging exorbitant interest for small, often imagined, and invariably undocumented, loans, so that generations give free labor in "exchange"). Active in national and state-level human rights, Devi masterminded the first public interest litigation against the state on behalf of the aboriginals in 1998.

Devi is a one-person resource center for people in distress, tenaciously holding the state to its accountability. Her activism is thus different from the international civil society—self-selected moral entrepreneurs, controlled by the dominant states of the world, who bypass the dominated states. She is "postcolonial" against this new and unacknowledged colonialism. Devi approaches administrative machinery at all levels. In her fiction, she presents the aboriginal in her otherness and singularity. In her activism, she is careful that those whose suffering she foregrounds should not suffer because of her intervention.

Devi was named Padmashree (distinguished citizen) by the government of India in 1986 for work among aboriginals. In 1996, she received the Jnanpith (a literary award presented by the government of India) and the Ramon Magsaysay award (for literature, given by the government of the Philippines). In 2003, Devi was named to the Légion d'honneur (second order, by the government of France).