From Silent Suffering to Militant Resistance: Evolution of Women in Mahasweta Devi’s Select Stories

Abstract

Mahasweta Devi has been a painstaking artist as well as a staunch social activist. She has taken up the cudgels to explore and exhibit the vast magnitude of suffering unleashed upon the dregs that live below the abject level of poverty in the socio-economic totem pole. Coupled with socio-political activism, Mahasweta Devi has taken her serious stance to represent the situation of women who are subordinated, merchandised and kept within the margins. As for women, her focus basically sheds upon the tribal women – the subaltern women for whom oppression is a common fate in a stratified hegemonic patriarchal frame of society. The nature and extent of suffering of a tribal woman is categorically alien to a woman in the mainstream. What is remarkable in Mahasweta Devi’s representation of woman is that along with the depiction of suffering she strategically objectifies the progressive attitude in the women characters. Her women characters as individuals are not merely sufferers in the society. Gradually they grow in awareness, attitude, independence and self assertion. A tribal woman who is doubly and triply marginalized by caste, class and gender, ultimately ascends the ladder of integrity. Astrategic progressive attitude to establish womanhood is evident in her writings if we carefully notice some of her characters one after another. They move on from a stagnant pallid sufferer trying to establish selfhood to a woman seeking resistance and even militant resistance against the male-oppression. So the journey of woman is one of empowerment and the writer as an activist has very deftly done her job through the power of her mighty pen.