One hundred years of Mahasweta Devi: Stories of subaltern heroes who live on in memory

Picture a classroom in rural India. The textbook chapter on the freedom struggle lists your regular names – Gandhi, Nehru, Bose, Patel – with familiar photographs. In such a setting, it’s natural that a young tribal girl once asked Mahasweta Devi, “When we go to school, we read about Mahatma Gandhi. Did we have no heroes? Did we always suffer like this?”

The question assumes its own answer. If your stories aren’t told, your gods are not worshipped in temples, your warriors are not commemorated in statues, then perhaps – or so the logic goes – you had no stories, no gods, no warriors.

Just like how they inspire millions, stories can also disempower millions. India has always had a strange relationship with its stories and mythologies. Our mythologies afflict the afflicted, uplift the uplifted. They maintain the status quo, console the powerful, and justify caste and gender hierarchies.

In this land of the high and mighty, of the divinely chosen, of victors writing the stories of victories, lived Mahasweta Devi. In the preface to Jhansir Rani, Devi writes, “Those who usurped the throne also controlled the pen. So we have studied, learned, and believed only what they wrote, what they taught us, in whichever manner it pleased...

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