On her 92nd birth anniversary, Google paid tribute to author and activist Mahasweta Devi, who passed away, aged 90, in 2016.
An author of over 100 novels and over 20 collections of short stories, Mahasweta Devi is considered a cult icon by both her followers and her critics.
Here are some things you should know about her
- Mahasweta Devi was born in 1926 in Decca, British India (now Dhaka, Bangladesh) to Manish Ghatak, a well-known poet and Dharitri Devi, a writer and a social worker.
- Mahasweta Devi's first schooling was in Dhaka, Eden Montessori School (1930) but after the partition of India she moved to West Bengal in India where she studied in Midnapur Mission School (1935). After that she admitted in Santiniketan from 1936 to 1938.
Google's tribute to Mahasweta Devi - Screenshot
- In 1964, she began teaching at Jadavpur, Kolkata-32 (an affiliated college of the University of Calcutta system). She also worked as a journalist and as a creative writer. She studied the Lodhas and Shabars, the tribal communities of West Bengal, women and dalits.
- She said that real history is made by ordinary people. “The reason and inspiration for my writing are those people who are exploited and used, and yet do not accept defeat. For me, the endless source of ingredients for writing is in these amazingly noble, suffering human beings. Why should I look for my raw material elsewhere, once I have started knowing them? Sometimes it seems to me that my writing is really their doing.”
- She spearheaded the movement against the industrial policy of the earlier Communist Party of India (Marxist) government of West Bengal. Specifically, she stridently criticized confiscation of large tracts of fertile agricultural land from farmers by the government and ceding the land to industrial houses at throwaway prices.
- She supported the candidature of Mamata Banarjee in the 2011 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election that resulted in the end of the 34-year long rule of CPI(M). The WB CM even tweeted a post on Sunday
- She was married twice in her life – once in 1947 and once in 1962. Both marriages reportedly did not work out.
- On 23 July 2016, she suffered a major heart attack and was admitted to Belle Vue Clinic in Kolkata. Devi died of multiple organ failure on 28 July 2016, aged 90
