Writing as intimacy. As ‘surrender’, as in totally drowning in the act of writing. ‘Loving’ the language enough to completely immerse yourself in it. No place for the self as ‘ego’ or ‘personality’ with its own views. To be ‘possessed’ by the spirt of the language of literature. Writing, therefore, as ‘activism’.
Writing also as relationship. Not just between two people. But with the freedom she allowed her characters. Or mukti as she called it. Often in the context of the belief that her characters had the right to dream their own paths. Choose their own fates. Regardless of the consequences, which would lead to some amazing stories where the reader often forgot the writer. The writer as a clandestine presence? Maybe.
Mahasweta Devi’s ability to combine the fact of her daily life with her fiction. And her activism that instinctively made her decipher realities and then translate them into a literature of resistance. Not just as an extension of her own ‘fighter’ self but also as a human being with an evolving concerned vision.
Writing as an act of intuition. A desperate storytelling that does not always position itself in the objective. It is personal. And political. It is left to the reader to find motivation or strategy or allusion or method in her texts.
“Writing became my real world for me, in which I lived and survived,” she said.
We read to each other. Poems, texts that qualified as jottings. She insisted I write. Every single day. And made me send her texts — long, short, anything I did that day — for 30 days to start me off.
Mahasweta Devi.
| Photo Credit:
Naveen Kishore
Our conversations were meanderings in an otherwise vast and unfolding ‘interruptus’. Life. And in her case, all the ‘throwing herself into the fray’ on behalf of the tribal community, for instance. Fighting battles with the police on their behalf. And yet we talked.
We joked about death in the same breath as we joked about wanting to hover over our own wake.
Mahasweta Devi.
| Photo Credit:
Naveen Kishore
She hated ‘good people’. Had no time for them. Often said to me: “You must promise me that you will not change into a good person.”
“What happens to belief when it is betrayed?” I suddenly said aloud to her.
“About belief — I have never found any reason to feel negative or pessimistic. The old values are alright for me and I see no reason to depart from them. You see the way I stay. You’ve seen me before too, you see it now. And I’m not doing a lot, I’m not doing anything great. This is the least I can do. I don’t even feel the urge to be otherwise. People talk about my being a Naxalite sympathiser. Yes, I sympathise with them for sacrificing their lives. For a belief. Even when they knew that writing a slogan on the wall would court a bullet from the police, they did it. They were young jewels. The Party just used these people and threw them away. And forgot all about them. They are looking forward to my death so that they can slip in and give me a State funeral. I won’t give them that chance.”
A sense of self that instinctively didn’t ‘lean’ on anyone. Not out of pride. Just a matter-of-fact way of being woman-human. And remember, she learned survival very early in a man’s world.
I once asked her: “Don’t you feel lost sometimes? Because I get the feeling that you are haunted by so many ghosts and characters and people — I suppose all of us are. But with you it is slightly different, because they are almost like entire scenarios of books that you have done.”
Mahasweta Devi.
| Photo Credit:
Naveen Kishore
“They’ve become part of my system,” she said. “I’ve been able to get a glimpse of a vast human society — tribal and non-tribal, all of them. Also, because I wrote for newspapers — investigative sort of writing. I often say that my world is divided between two things — the needful and the needless. I am interested only in the former. I don’t have much use for the needless.”
Soon, the nature of the conversations would change. Even grind to a halt. To be replaced by shorter visits. No recorded interviews. Or cameras for black-and-white photographs. She would still smile. And recognise. And do what we call aador to my arm as if to say you are loved. But already the fog in her mind was becoming a welcoming place. An early entrapment. A slow dementia that would only grow worse.
Mahasweta Devi.
| Photo Credit:
Naveen Kishore
Mahasweta Devi.
| Photo Credit:
Naveen Kishore
Yet, a few years ago, delivering the keynote address at the Jaipur Literature Festival, she said:
“At eighty-eight or is it -seven I move forward often stepping back into the shadows. Sometimes I am bold enough to step back into the sunlight. As a young person, as a mother, I would often move forward to when I was old. Amuse my son. Pretend that I couldn’t hear, or see. Flail my hands about like in a blind man’s game, or make mockery of memory. Forget important things. Things that had taken place but a moment ago! These games were for fun. Now they are no longer funny. My life has moved forward and is repeating itself. I am repeating myself. Recollecting for you what has been. What is. What could have been. May have been.
Now it’s Memory’s turn to mock me.”
***
Author Mahasweta Devi in conversation with Naveen Kishore (left) at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2013.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images
A poem for ‘Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa’
the mandolin splays the night
the street waits for the girl to walk all over it
the girl takes her chalk and slits the street’s
unwilling throat
ek-hat – du-hat ek-hat – du-hat
she hops from one numbered square to another
us n them
us n them, she mutters
turns on number ten and hops back on bloody feet
the man finishes clothing the naked mannequin with care
whips out a pistol and shoots it in the eye once twice three times
day after day she wakes up to her breathlessness.
Mahasweta Devi.
| Photo Credit:
Naveen Kishore
The writer is a photographer, theatre lighting designer, poet, and the publisher of Seagull Books.
Published – July 17, 2026 06:00 am IST
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