Mahasweta Devi

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Mahasweta Devi, 2000

Mahasweta Devi ( Bengali মহাশ্বেতা দেবী Mahāśbetā Debī ; born January 14, 1926 in Dhaka ; † July 28, 2016 in Kolkata ) was an Indian writer . Her works, which often deal with socially disadvantaged groups in India, have been translated into numerous languages ​​and have been awarded several prizes. She was considered the most important contemporary author who wrote in the Bengali language.

Life

Mahasweta Devi was born in Dhaka ( presidency of Bengal , now Bangladesh ) in 1926 as the first of nine children . Her father was the writer and poet Manish Ghatak (1902–1979), her mother, Dharitri Devi (1908–1984), was also a writer and co-operator of a school for the poor . Both belonged to an intellectual avant-garde that campaigned against the British colonial rulers. Her uncle Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) was a well-known film director.

Devi's father worked as an income tax officer, which resulted in frequent changes of residence and she got to know different districts of Bengal. After attending a mission school in Medinipur , she switched to an alternative school in Shantiniketan founded by Rabindranath Thakur in 1936 . The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature taught Devi's class temporarily in Bengali and was friends with her father. In the 1940s Devi lived in Kolkata , where she attended Asutosh College and helped out with starvation relief as a member of the Girl Students' Association of the Communist Party of India . According to her own statements, she shaped this experience.

In 1944 Devi returned to Shantiniketan, where she completed her studies two years later with a Bachelor of Arts. Also in 1946 she got her first marriage to Bijon Bhattacharya , an influential Bengali playwright and co-founder of the Indian People's Theater Association (IPTA). After East Bengal split from India in 1947, they moved to West Bengal , where Devi also completed her schooling. Their son Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948-2014), who was also a well-known writer, came from the relationship . Because of Bhattacharya's membership in the Communist Party , sanctions followed against the couple. They made a living doing odd jobs after Devi lost her job at the Post and Telecommunications Department in 1950 as an alleged communist.

In 1963 (according to other information 1961) Devi divorced her husband and a little later obtained a Master of Arts in English from the University of Calcutta . After graduating, she worked as a journalist and teacher. Her first book Jhansir Rani , a historical novel about the resistance against colonial power in the 19th century, was published in 1956. In 1964 she accepted a teaching position at Bijaygar Jyotish Roy College , which she held for over 20 years. From 1982 she took leave of absence from her position as an English lecturer in order to travel around the villages for a long time and collect material for her stories. From 1982 to 1984 she worked for the newspaper Yugantar ( Eng . "New Epoch").

Devi was politically active throughout her life and campaigned for disadvantaged minorities in India. It is associated with numerous organizations, including Pashchim Banga Kheriya Shabar Kalyan Samiti ( Eng . "West Bengal Kheriya Shabert Welfare Organization") and the Denotified and nomadic Tribes Right Action Group (DNT-RAG). The former carries out standard development projects among the Kheriya Shabards, an ethnic group based in the Purulia district of West Bengal , whose products are sold in Kolkata. DNT-RAG was founded in 1998 and campaigns for the rights of the so-called “Denotified Tribes”.

Mahasweta Devi last lived in Kolkata.

plant

Devi mainly wrote short stories and novels , but also essays , dramas and children's books . Her extensive work includes over a hundred publications and is almost exclusively written in Bengali. The issues are often of a political nature. At the beginning of her career she dealt intensively with Indian colonial history, later the focus switched to the indigenous population of India, for example the Adivasi , who are outside the caste system and are socially disadvantaged. Devi's prose is often about simple and uneducated people and is famous for its drastic and ruthless descriptions. She placed her characters in a certain historical and socio-economic context, whereby their fates can be read as representative of the fate of the members of their respective group. Furthermore, she revived old myths with a new context or created new myths by following the " oral traditions ". She often used satirical means to describe higher social classes .

Her works have a reputation for being very carefully researched, although she used the oral traditions of the indigenous population for historical novels. Titled as a “literary documentarist”, her story is not a pure fictional description, but is based on “facts”, which is why she is also referred to as a “political ethnologist”, “participating observer”, while her work is received as “passionate ethnological work”.

Since the 1950s she has also worked as an investigative journalist. She was also the editor of a magazine. For Devi, literature and political engagement were inextricably linked. She regularly took a moralizing standpoint in her literature, for which she was partially criticized by reviewers. Their literary texts are considered difficult to translate as they contain many local dialects of Bengali, the subtleties of which have to be matched in other languages.

Since the late 1990s, the focus has been on her social and political work. As a writer, she has since devoted herself mainly to the publication of autobiographical essays about her childhood memories in Dhaka and her youth in Shantiniketan.

reception

Since Devi wrote exclusively in the Bengali language, the international public first became aware of her relatively late. In 1995, the American literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published English translations of three of her short stories, which for the first time attracted a wider response outside of her home country. Much of her work was subsequently translated into English. A German translation of one of her novels was published for the first time in 2000. In Germany it has so far only been published by smaller publishers in translations of the Heidelberg South Asia Group and is less well known than in the English-speaking world. In 2006, however, she gave a high-profile speech at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair , where India was the guest country.

Devi's work is often viewed from a post-colonial point of view and read as a literary continuation of her activism and journalistic work. Many interpreters focus on the relationship between modern state and economic structures and disadvantaged population groups who have no voice of their own in this environment and are therefore perceived as devoid of history. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who made Devi known in the Anglo-Saxon region, sees her work as a critical examination of decolonization, in which other groups are further oppressed and disadvantaged by the emancipation of economically strong groups from the former colonial powers. From their point of view, the relationship between civilization and culture is a central conflict in Devi's work. Gender relations also played a decisive role for them. Devi was sometimes criticized for letting political problems flow too heavily into her literature; Her work was accused of being too close to post-colonial literary theories at the expense of the traditional poetic prose style of Bengali literature. On the other hand, this break with traditions and the drastic nature of their language were also perceived as an attack on existing power structures.

Mahasweta Devi has received numerous awards, including the Jnanpith Award (1996), the Ramon Magsaysay Award (1997) and the Padma Vibhushan (2006). She donated the prize money for social purposes. Four of her stories have been filmed in India so far: Sangharsh (1968) by Harnam Singh Rawail , Rudaali (1993) by Kalpana Lajmi , Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa (1998) by Govind Nihalani and Maati Maay (2006) by Chitra Palekar .

Bibliography (selection)

In German translation

  • Pterodactylus (2000, Bengali original 1989) ( Terodyaktil, puransahay o pirtha )
  • Daulati (2002, Bengali original 1985).
  • Mother of 1084 (2003, Bengali original 1975).
  • Uprising in Munda Land (2005).
  • Übers. Hans-Martin Kunz: The girl why-why, a story. Illustr. Kanyika Kini. Draupadi, Heidelberg 2006 ISBN 978-3-937603-04-9 ; again 2012, ISBN 978-3-937603-74-2 ( The Why-Why Girl )
  • Translator Barbara DasGupta: The Brahmin girl and the boatman's son. Draupadi, Heidelberg 2013

In English translation

  • The Occupation of the Forest (1977)
  • Womb of Fire (1978)
  • Choti Munda and His Arrow (1980)
  • Imaginary Maps (1995)
  • Breast Stories . Transl., Einl. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Seagull Books , Calcutta 1997
  • Rudali - From Fiction to Performance (1997)
  • Our Non-Veg Cow (1998)
  • The Book of the Hunter (2002)
  • Outcast (2002)

literature

  • Hans-Martin Kunz: Mahasweta Devi. Indian writer and human rights activist . Draupadi, Heidelberg 2006 ISBN 978-3-937603-02-5 (Additional master's thesis, University of Heidelberg 2006: Mahasweta Devi and the problem of ethnographic representation )

Web links

Databases
Commons : Mahasweta Devi  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Content

supporting documents

  1. ^ Kolkata: Eminent writer Mahasweta Devi passes away at 91
  2. ↑ a b Amit Chaudhuri (Ed.): The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. New York, Vintage 2004, p. 122
  3. ↑ a b Biogram in Kindlers Literatur Lexikon , Metzler, Stuttgart 2009 ISBN 978-3-476-04019-0
  4. ↑ cf. Hans-Martin Kunz: Mahasweta Devi. Indian writer and human rights activist . Draupadi, Heidelberg 2006 ISBN 3-937603-02-6 here p. 16f.
  5. ↑ a b c Monika Carbe: Linking Facts and Fiction ( Memento of August 4, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), seen on October 16, 2009
  6. ↑ a b Detailed biography on the presentation of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards, engl. ( Memento of March 26, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), viewed November 16, 2019
  7. ↑ Kunz, p. 21
  8. ↑ Kunz, p. 23f.
  9. ↑ a b cf. Kunz, p. 19
  10. ↑ cf. Kunz, p. 23
  11. ↑ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Afterword. In this. and Mahasweta Devi Ed .: Imaginary Maps . Routledge, New York 1995, pp. 197ff.
  12. ↑ detailed table of contents
personal data
SURNAME Devi, Mahasweta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Devi, Mahashweta; দেবী, মহাশ্বেতা (Bengali); Debī, Mahāśbetā (scientific transliteration)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Dhaka
DATE OF DEATH July 28, 2016
Place of death Kolkata