Mahasweta Devi’s work began where official histories fell silent. Her fiction and reportage veered out of drawing rooms towards forests, quarries, railway embankments and police outposts, places where India’s development story frays and exposes its human costs. Her writing insisted on giving voice to the dispossessed, shaped by history, humiliation and the burning embers of resistance. Paring Bengali down to its most elemental, it made room for the cadences of tribal speech and oral memory,........

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