From Sati COMMENTARY AND TRANSLATION FROM BENGALI BY RANJANA ASH

This excerpt from the last part of a short novel by Mahasweta Devi is concerned with Molina Mishra\u27s sense of self-betrayal, faced as she is with her failure to lead a meaningful life. A middle class Bengali, a Hindu widow, an old woman of 70, he has seemed to family and friends an exemplary figure. She has lived a life of utmost simplicity, even austerity, denying herself the comforts now common among India\u27s urban middle class while enabling her three daughters to b well educated and well married. She has spent her resources on a school for girls, and on helping abandoned and destitute women. Above all, she has remained faithful to the memory of her husband, Bejoy Mishra, a revolutionary communist of the 1930 who died a long ago as 1940 while she was still only 22. She could have remarried as there were men who loved her and her father would have had no objection. Yet she refused their offers, endured the loneliness and difficulties of life, remaining loyal to old communists who did not change their views or lifestyles amid the new politics of post­- independent India

Imaginary maps.

Londonxxix, 212 p.; 21 cm

"Where is the time to sleep?" Orientalism and citizenship in Mahasweta Devi’s writing

This article discusses the close relationship between Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi’s literary work and her activism in support of indigenous people in India, and considers the two activities as interventions in the field of law. Devi’s emphasis on the continuity between colonial and postcolonial legal frameworks invites us to look at law as a governing discourse that stigmatized Adivasis. The criminalization of indigenous people via the Criminal Tribes Act (1871) and the presumption that they belonged to a “state of nature” form part of an orientalist bias against the tribals that was legally sustained during colonialism and also through Nehru’s discourses on the modern nation. Through analysis of the short story “Operation? – Bashai Tudu”, where law appears as a non-democratic instrument for governing the poor, and using extracts from a hitherto unpublished conversation between the author and Devi, it argues that Devi’s work can be considered as a crucial analytical tool with which to explore the genealogy of Adivasi marginalization

Arjun

In The Lotus Singers: Short Stories from Contemporary South Asia. Written by Mahasweta Devi, translated into English from Bengali by Mridula Nath. Adivasi tribal identity is challenged and forced for sale yet again in a discomforting story of environmental exploitation and inextricable social ties

Music for Euro-Maoists: On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among Pop Stars

This article takes up the appearance in the club circuits of Europe of cultural matter derived from radical peasant insurgency in West Bengal. It asks why the political content of cultural performance is so often glossed as exotica, and writes back some of the history of transnational, or internationalist, politics into this forum. Linking this to the celebrated Booker Prizewinning text of Arundhati Roy, and Gayatri Spivak's translations of Mahasweta Devi's writing, the contradictions of cultural politics are foregrounded