Indian · 1926–2016
Mahasweta Devi was born in Dhaka into a Bengali literary family, studied English at Visva-Bharati and Calcutta University, and spent decades living and working among the Lodha and Shabar tribal communities of West Bengal, Bihar, and Jharkhand. She wrote roughly a hundred novels and twenty story collections in Bengali, most of them built from field reporting on bonded labour, land seizure, and the police killing of Naxalite students. Her fiction refuses consolation: bodies in her stories are worked, sold, raped, and counted, and the state is always present as an accountant. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak translated her into English and made her central to postcolonial and subaltern studies worldwide. She won the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Jnanpith Award, the Ramon Magsaysay Award, and the Padma Vibhushan, and used the prize money for tribal welfare organisations she ran herself. She campaigned against land acquisition at Singur and Nandigram into her eighties. She is read as much as an activist document as a novelist.