Kamtapur, Tulunadu, Harit Pradesh: New States In Offing?

By Avinash Behl / INN Bureau

The UPA’s decision to move ahead with the creation of the new state of Telangana has only managed to take the lid off the cauldron of demands regarding statehood from every nook and corner of the country including from those areas that were relatively calm because of the existence of Autonomous Councils.

Demand for a separate Bodoland in Assam, which was lying dormant for a while after the creation of Bodo Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD), now again threatens to intensify. The region already had a bloodied past when terrorist organisations like the National Democratic Front of Bodoland and Bodo Liberation Tigers were at their peak in the 90s.

'Left Parties' Of India - Are They 'Politically' Left Behind?

By Mahesh Mahtolia | Delhi

In today's scenario, this question is not out place. How relevant is the Left today? Looking outside of India, The Erstwhile Communists are flourishing only in China and Cuba, to count the few last bastions of Leftism. To say it is a dying concept would not be untrue. 

The Left was dealt its death blow with the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, which led to its defeat in the Cold War. That was more than 20 years ago. Since then, Communism carries on in just a few small pockets other than China.

NEGLECTING INDIAN FORESTS - 2 : WEALTH OF FORESTS WITHHELD

Forest departments across the country owe millions of rupees to communities. For 20 years communities toiled under the Joint Forest Management programme in the hope of getting shares in revenue from timber and bamboo sales. 

As forests mature for harvesting, forest departments apply mathematical tricks to bring down monetary share to almost nothing; a few states do away with giving cash to communities. Disillusioned, people are now abandoning the programme. One school of experts questions carrying on with the programme of joint management when Acts giving communities legal rights to manage forests on their own have come into existence. 

INN Correspondents travel to West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh respectively—five states with substantial forests under the programme—to find out how joint management of forests has fared.

Naxalism: The Political: Militant Election Nexus

By M H Ahssan

Even as India’s civil society has campaigned against the plans of the government launching a coordinated operation against Left Wing Extremists commonly known as Naxals across Central India, the elections in Jharkhand have brought to the fore the well oiled nexus between the political parties and the guerrillas. While the Naxals have imposed a ban on participation in the Elections with posters pasted across the state, political leaders are busy campaigning across many Naxal districts. This paradox has surprised many, as if a cease fire has been declared for the Elections.

The transformation is all the more perplexing given the increase in violence during October given the extension of Maoist terrorism from tribal areas of Central India to politically sensitive areas of West Bengal thereby focusing attention of the government as well as civil society on the challenge.

A few notable incidents such as release on bail of 14 tribal women by a West Bengal Court on 22 October as demanded by the Maoists against abducted police officer Atindra Nath Dutta in West Midnapore and kidnapping the driver of the New Delhi-Bhubaneswar Rajdhani Express and his assistant on 27 October which led to stoppage of train between Jhargram and Sarna stations of South Eastern Railway bringing the prestigious train connecting the State capital to New Delhi to a halt highlighted criticality of the situation.

In other major incidents, on 06 October, Maoists beheaded Jharkhand police inspector Francis Induwar in a brutal and gory incident which invited wide spread resentment. On 08 October the Naxals launched a major attack killing 18 policemen when they ambushed a police patrol in dense forests in Gadhchiroli district in Maharashtra which was going to the polls on the 13th.

On the other hand Central and State governments were all set to launch full-fledged anti-Maoist operations at three locations which are junctions of Naxal-affected states. The areas identified are the tri-junctions of Andhra Pradesh-Maharashtra- Chhattisgarh; Orissa-Jharkhand-Chhattisgarh and West Bengal- Jharkhand-Orissa. 40,000 paramilitary personnel will assist respective state police forces during the operations. 7,000 specially trained troops in jungle warfare are also being employed. There are eleven sectors identified which will be addressed in simultaneous operations.

The Maoists warned of possibility of Operation Green Hunt for the past many months are shifting into deep jungle strongholds in anticipation of the onslaught. Others are known to melt into urban pockets of neighboring states as Madhya Pradesh. Thus the main leaders are likely to give security forces a slip. However it is also evident that the Central government is having second thoughts and the operation may not be launched at all if an interview to Tehelka by the Union Home Minister Mr P Chidambaram is any indication.

Transportation networks have been one of the most frequently targeted by Maoists over the past many years and now they are even daring to strike at high profile trains such as the Rajdhani Express which is considered a super fast train serving a large number of people traveling to Delhi. The vulnerability of the railway routes passing through some of the deeply forested areas in Jharkhand and West Bengal is therefore highly challenging and security needs to be considered on high priority for endangering the lives of the people traveling on train which is the primary mode for many in India does not augur well for the states ability to protect its citizens.

What is also evident is that the police particularly railway protection forces are not trained enough to take on the challenge. As the expected operation Green Hunt is launched, the situation could be grimmer, as the Maoists seem to be well prepared for the strikes. Moreover Jharkhand, one of the key Naxal affected states would be going for elections in November- December thereby enhancing the challenge to an extent with the Maoists announcing a ban against voting. Thus the battle between the Naxals and the security forces is likely to be sustained over a period with the Home Minister Mr P Chidambaram having given an estimate of at two to three years before the situation in these areas can be brought under control, though it appears that given the present overall deterioration it may taken much longer.

So how is it that despite the threat of violence political parties and leaders are campaigning in Jharkhand? Are they daring the Naxals, is it a false sense of bravado or fool proof security provided by the state government? While the truth behind this phenomenon will never be exposed, reasonable surmise could also be a working arrangement with the Naxalite leadership to see the election through. This arrangement is not new to the Indian political militancy scene and is routinely adopted in the North East with some militants openly supporting favored candidates. Is such a phenomenon repeating in Jharkhand, let us wait and see?

Exclusive: IN SEARCH OF SILICON VALLEY

By M H Ahssan

The state IT sector seems to hold promise of a better future provided the Govt pulls its acts together and private players survive the downturn

The year 2008 has not been a particularly good year for West Bengal. In addition to losing the Nano car project there have been postponements of several publicised ventures, shelving of hospital and education projects, and uncertainty in the fate of the huge Jindal Steel project. Power cuts have again surfaced, roads have started deteriorating, pollution levels continue unabated and bandhs/traffic dislocations have become common.

Amidst this rather gloomy backdrop the IT/ITeS sector in West Bengal seems to hold promise of a better future, provided the Government pulls its acts together and private players survive the downturn to move forward. The state had planned to climb up the national IT pecking order to the third rank from the current eighth position. The IT minister had announced a broad range of incentives and visualized progress through huge growth in exports, expansion of existing ventures, setting up of new projects, starting IT-hubs in satellite towns along with incubation centres and finishing schools, as well as vigorous participation in e-governance projects. Unfortunately, the sub-prime crisis hit the global economy and the moot question today is how much of that IT vision will become reality and how many of the IT/ITEs players will survive and grow in the state.

The players in this sector number around 500 and closely follow Pareto’s law – less than 20 per cent are large units that account for more than 80 per cent of total business and employment. Bengal has a collection of very prominent large players that includes IBM, TCS, Cognizant, Wipro, Cap Gemini, PwC etc. Discussions with them reveal that the economic downturn has indeed affected them seriously, although most have prepared elaborate plans for countering the problem and overcoming it. Currently 70 per cent of business comes from the US, and the dearth of new projects as well as cancellation of existing projects from the US has hit this segment badly.

Cost-cutting is taking various shapes such as cutting down on executive benefits, restructuring of salary by reducing fixed component and increasing the variable part (linked to performance),and as a last resort reduction of overall headcount in the organization. Since the most important market verticals – banking, finance and insurance – have been affected, there is a concerted effort to explore and develop other verticals. Geographic diversity is also being pursued by looking at markets other than the US, while senior managers have put on their thinking caps to innovate and add new value to their offers to customers.

It is the smaller units that are facing big-time crisis. Many of these units were set up during the good old days of high IT growth and were essentially opportunistic in nature, with little to offer other than low costs. As their customers try to survive, many of these vendors who are not seen as critical, are getting dropped. Consequently, it is a period of trial by fire for these units, and those who can innovate and develop something uniquely valuable to customers will manage to survive. It is also a period of reckoning for the real stars of the future. Around 10 per cent of the SME units are companies that have been built on strong technological foundation, who typically own a few patents, possess specialized offerings and operate in highly exclusive market domains. It is a period of growth for these organizations and they are taking the initiative to scale up operations by building complementary capabilities — either through executive recruitments or partnerships with large multi-locational organizations.

The overall picture that emerges from the IT/ITeS sector is that existing large players will consolidate operations and cut down internal inefficiencies, with business volumes stagnating in the short term. The long term view for these global players fortunately remains positive, and as their renewal strategies hold fruit, they are expected to continue in their growth path. Many of the smaller units are, however, headed for trouble and will either face an uncertain future or partner with organizations that can give them survival strength. From this chaotic background we will also see a few bright stars that will become national players rather than local, and emerge as great companies of the future.

As far as new IT ventures are concerned, the biggest impediment appears to be the negative perception that has gained ground after the original euphoria, and there is a case for drastic improvement of the IT ecosystem in the state. An analysis of the success of Silicon Valley, Boston Belt, Cambridge Valley or our own Bangalore shows that growth happened there because young people found those areas to be physically inviting and intellectually liberal, which was complemented and supported by the advanced infrastructure of education and financial sector. Ask young executives based outside the state where they would consider relocation – and while Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore would be regularly mentioned, Kolkata would be extremely rare. In spite of various official claims to the contrary, Kolkata has very high level of pollution, transport is cheap but chaotic, unscheduled power cuts are common and the city is anything but pleasant to the eyes.

On the ‘ease of doing business index’ West Bengal is ranked quite low, way below the southern and western states. Availability of engineering graduates in West Bengal is 1/3 to 1/6 of that in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka or Maharashtra, while the state continues to be the front runner in industrial disputes. A big selling point of the state ‘ low cost of living’ is certainly great for retired people, but hardly an incentive for ambitious and growth-oriented people.

Lowering costs
The path to Silicon Valley from Sector 5 therefore lies in building a strong and creative partnership between private players and the Government. It is safe to predict that the overall IT/ITES sector in India will remain in a leadership position and grow, and there will be increasing competition from front running states to take a greater share of the pie. At the unit level most unfit players will be eliminated, while the fitter ones will prosper by achieving higher operational efficiencies, focussing on new verticals and new geographical areas, penetrating the domestic market, and participating in e-governance schemes. But marketing the state in the face of strong competitors will remain the biggest challenge for attracting new ventures and more investments into the state.

The IT/ITES industry is predominantly populated and led by youth, the engine of growth being the passion, creativity and innovativeness of trained young minds. Convincing aged industry leaders in chambers of commerce by statistics and presentations will have marginal effect in the long run—instead the attempt should be to create and sell the state to the youth as a ‘cool’ place, physically beautiful and intellectually stimulating. In the IT/ITES industry it is the young who lead the way; the old have no option but to follow.

Exclusive Report: Haven On Earth - Sikkim

By M H Ahssan

Sikkim is sheer magic. This is not just the most beautiful place in the world but cleanest and safest too. If once the charms of the state were limited to mists, mountains and colourful butterflies, they are now complimented by tangible development and progress. With its unique culture and natural landscape. Sikkim is a picture of perfection and pristine purity.

Nestled in the Himalayas and endowed with exceptional natural resources, Sikkim is a hotspot of biodiversity and development. Though small in size, yet Sikkim has been identified world over as an important repository of germplasms of unknown dimensions. Perhaps, there is no part of the world, which offers a spectaular scene with every turn of the road as Sikkim. Though land-locked, Sikkim is one of the most beautiful and strategically important state of the Indian Union.

Bounded by foreign nations on three sides, it shares its boundary with sister state West Bengal. Surrounded on three sides by precipitous mountain walls, Sikkim appears as a small rectangular Gem. Sikkim is like a stupendous stairway leading from the western border of the Tibetan plateau down to the plains of West Bengal, with a fall of about 5.215 metres in 240kms. Sikkim, in the west is bound by the north-south spur of the Great Himalayan Range which includes the world's third highest peak, Khangchendzonga and down to its south is Singalila ridge. In the north it is bound by Dongkia range and also partly includes the Tibetan Plateau. In the east it is bound by the Chola range. The average steepness is about 45 degree. Sikkim is the main catchment area for the beautiful river Teesta, which has its main source from Chho Lhamo lake in the north and is further strengthened by many streams and rivers of which Tholung. Lachung. Great Rangeet and Rangpo are important drainers. It also has about 180 perennial lakes, among which Khachoedpalri, Gurudongmar, Chho Lhamo and Men Moi Tso are some of the most scenic.

Dominating both legend and landscape of Sikkim is the mighty Khangchendzonga. Known to the outside world as Kanchenjunga, it is the third highest peak in the world. But to the Sikkemese it is much more than a mountain: Khangchendzonga is the Guardian deity, a country God whose benign watchfulness ensures peace and prosperity for the land. The five peaks of Khangchendzonga are the five Treasures of the Eternal Snow, a belief beautifully interpreted by the great Lama Lhatsun Chenpo: "The peak most conspicuously gilded by the rising sun is the treasury of gold, the peak that remains in cold grey shade is the storehouse for silver and other peaks are vaults for gems, grains and the holy books."

Each of the five peaks is believed to be crowned by an animalthe highest by a tiger and others by a lion, elephant, horse and the mythical bird Garuda. Along with the Guardian deity, the Nepal Peak, Tent Peak, Pyramid, Jonsang, Lhonak, Pahunri etc. and glaciers like Zemu, Changsang, Teesta, Changme are also important. The most important passes are jelep-la, Nathu-la, Cho-la and Thanka-la in the east; Donkiua, Kongralamu and Naku in the north and Kanglanangma and Chia Bhanjyang in the west.

- Area: 7096 sq km
- Capital Town: Gangtok
- Number of Districts: 4
- District Headquarters: North-Mangan, South-Namchi, East-Gangtok, West-Gyalshing.
- Population : 5, 40, 857 (Census-2001)
- Language Spoken: Nepali, English, Hindi, Bhutia (Sikkimese), Bhutia (Tibetan), Lepcha, Limboo.
- Literacy Rates: 69.68% (Census-2001)
- Best Season to Visit: March to June and September to December
- Maximum Summer Temperature: 300c
- Minimum Winter Temperature: 00c

Nearest Railway Station: The closest Railhead is at New Jalpaiguri in West Bengal, 148 km and Siliguri which are connected to Calcutta, New Delhi Guwahati and other major Indian cities.

Nearest Airport: The closest Indian Airport is at a distance of 124kms from Gangtok at Bagdogra in Siliguri in West Bengal, where scheduled flights operates from kolkata (Calcutta), Delhi and Guwahati and connecting flights onwards. Travel time from the irport to Gangtok is 4 hours. From Kathmandu you can fly to Bhadrapur in the east Nepal (1 hour), then drive to Kakarbhitta (Nepal-India border, 35 kms), to Siliguri (37 kms) and to Gangtok (110kms. 4 hrs). Or fly to Biratnagar also in the east.

Helicopter Service: The Bagdogra airport is connected to Gangtok by a helicopter service which takes approx. 30 minutes to reach Gangtok. Sikkim Tourism Development Corporation (+91-3592-222634) operates this service daily at 11:00 AM from Gangtok to Bagdogra and at 2:00 PM from Bagdogra to Gangtok at a price of Rs. 2000/- per person. It is a five seater chopper and mountain flights and other such tours to North Sikkim are conducted.

Road: Gangtok is well connected by a road to Siliguri, 114 kms. 4 hours, which functions as the major transit point for the North and Eastern sections of the Indian Sub continent. Gangtok is further well connected by road with Darjeeling (4Hrs), Kalimpong and with Bhutan, Phuntsholing (6Hrs).

- State Animal: Red Panda (Ailurus fulgens)
- State Bird: Blood Pheasant (Ithaginis cruentus)
- State Flower: Noble Orchid (Dendrobium nobile)
- State Tree: Rhododendron (Rhododendron niveum)
- Cash Crop: Cardamom (Amomum Sublatum), tea, ginger, potatoes, oranges, medicinal plants, flowers and flower bulbs.

In the year 1592, when men in power were still God fearing and honored their word, a sacred covenant between the Lepchas - the indigenous people of Sikkim, and the Tibetan Bhutias was solemnized. This historical event took place near Gangtok, the present capital of Sikkim.

A bull was sacrificed to the Gods and an oath was sworn over its blood that the Lepchas and Bhutias would never fight and live as blood brothers in peace and harmony. Who ever broke the sacred oath would be cursed along with his descendents. From then on, on the 15th of every ninth month of the Tibetan calendar, the people of this region would make an offering of food and drink to their God to celebrate this sacred covenant. However the Tibetan rulers of the Sikkim could not keep their word for long and broke the sacred oath, inviting the wrath of the curse on themselves. The Namgyal dynasty that ruled over Sikkim from 1642-1975, came to an end on 16th May 1975 and Sikkim became the 22nd State of India. However during my recent trip to the eastern Himalays I realized that while the rulers of this region broke the sacred oath of peace the people of this region continue to follow the sacred covenant.

Kalimpong was my first experience of the eastern Himalayas. We arrived by road from Bagdogra at night, occasionally stopping on the way for tea at some roadside dhaba. It was a different world – the silence, the hills and the trees breathing refreshingly moist cold air, the narrow winding roads fading into a foggy corners, the simple rural folk, the place seemed so romantically remote and away from the everyday absurdities of city life.

The next day, a local Bhutia driver took us around Kalimpong, telling us a little bit about all the major land marks. He was a gentle and friendly man and would greet every third person on the road as we drove around the town. When I commented on his popularity among the locals, his response was simple – “since we do not know how long we are going to live, we might as well live with friendship and love while we are still alive !”

Kalimpong, as well as the rest of the region of eastern Himalayas, is home to people of different tribes and faiths. There are Nepali Hindus, Lepchas and Bhutias who are mostly Buddhist and a small Christian and a Tibetan Muslim population. The Lepchas, meaning ‘ravine folk’ are believed to be the original inhabitants of Sikkim. They are the people who lived with and worshiped nature – they venerated the spirits of rivers and mountains before adopting Buddhism or Christianity. Their closeness to nature is reflected in their language, which though not well developed, is rich in vocabulary related to the plants and animals of this region. The Bhutias are of Tibetan origin who migrated from Tibetan to Sikkim, Himalayan West Bengal and Bhutan after the 15th century. They follow Nyingmapa and Kagyupa school of Tibetan Buddhism. Majority of Nepalis here are Hindus, except the Sherpas and Tamangs, who are Buddhist.

Few outsiders are aware of the fact Tibet had, and perhaps still has, pockets of Muslims entrenched within its borders. Tibetan Muslims trace their origin to immigrants from China, Kashmir, Ladakh and Nepal. Islamic influence in Tibet also came from Persia and Turkestan.
After 1959, during the Chinese aggression, quite a few Tibetan Muslims managed to escape out of Tibet into the border towns of Gangtok, Kalimpong and Darjeeling. A large number of them moved to Kashmir. However, according to one report, about 50 Tibetan Muslim families still reside in the Kalimpong-Darjeeling region. Tibetan Muslims in Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Nepal have a joint Tibetan Muslim Welfare Association based in Kalimpong. I met some of them outside the Jame Masjid in Kalimpong. When I asked one of them if there was any friction among the different communities, he seemed to be taken by surprise, ‘What is there to fight about?’ he wondered. ‘We are simple folks, and our only concern is to earn a living and save for our children’s future’ he added. That moment all the petty politics of hate and communalization over the Jamia Nagar encounter and Malegaon blast come to my mind and I felt a bit ashamed of myself. The rest of India broke its sacred covenant of brotherhood long time ago and God knows how many of our future generations will face the wrath of the curse.

It was in Kalimpong where a Buddhist taxi driver and a pious namaazi taught me the refreshingly simple philosophy of peaceful co-existence. It was in Kalimpong, too, that I got my first glimpse of eastern Himalayas and Kanchendzonga, the highest mountain peak of India. The serene landscape of hills rolling into the far horizon with the mighty Kanchendzonga rising far above the clouds reminded me of what Pir Inanyat Khan, the great musician and sufi, once wrote - the spiritual centre of a region lies at its highest point.

OpEd: At sea in the economy

By M H Ahssan

Unless it suffers a dramatic change of heart it is difficult to see how the United Progressive Alliance will prevent a political backlash from the sliding economy.

The Congress party’s decision to team up with the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal for the coming general elections cannot fail to give the party a much-needed shot in the arm. The two parties together stand more than an even chance of wresting West Bengal away from the Left Front. In the 2006 state assembly elections the Congress-Trinamool alliance polled only 8.8% less than the Left Front. A shift in the vote of 5% will therefore suffice for it to win a majority of the seats. Since then, as recent panchayat elections have shown, the Trinamool Congress has grown rapidly in strength. This alliance could, therefore, decide who rules India three months from now.

But India would be the poorer if the Congress treats this merely as an alliance of convenience and does not absorb some of the political philosophy that underlies the Trinamool’s growing ascendancy. For, the Trinamool can help to revive something that the aged, and now manifestly elitist, Congress has demonstrably lost. This is a heart that beats for the poor.

This allegation may sound strange: hasn’t the Congress quadrupled the outlays on health education and rural development in the past five years? Hasn’t it started the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme? And hasn’t it launched targeted ‘missions’ to ensure that the money actually reaches the intended beneficiaries? The answer is that it has done all these things but has remained firmly elitist, nonetheless.

A close look at the programmes shows why all of them, without exception, are top-down, therefore paternalistic. They create no legally enforceable rights for the beneficiaries, place no reciprocal obligations upon them, and therefore do nothing to empower them. They remain what all such programmes have always been — handouts to the poor. Their purpose has remained quintessentially conservative — to preserve the ascendancy of the urban-industrial elite by keeping the poor in their place. Since all the power and rights have remained squarely in the hands of the fund-givers, it is no surprise that nine-tenths of it has continued to stick to their hands on the way down to the intended beneficiaries.

The Trinamool too started as a ‘standard’ , ‘paternalistic’ political party. But under the spur of recent developments in West Bengal it has developed into a different animal. Today, it is the only party that is fighting not just for benefits for the poor but for their rights; not just to secure just a few more scraps from the table but the right to sit at it. It has shown this in Singur and Nandigram, where it has doggedly maintained that land and cultivation rights cannot be taken away from owners without securing their explicit consent, and that mercilessly flailing police lathis falling on the backs of alleged troublemakers and Maoists, is not the way to secure it.

The Trinamool’s success in stopping the Tatas’ ‘nano’ car project was greeted with horror by organised industry and dismay by the government of West Bengal, which had gone out onto a limb to meet Tatas’ requirements. But in the long run far more good than harm is likely to come out of it, for the party has shown that despite India’s transformation into a market-dominated, free enterprise, economy that makes no pretense of socialism it is still possible for the poor to find champions within its democracy. From this it is but a small step to concluding that they can fight democratically to defend existing rights or to acquire new ones, and that they therefore have no need to resort to violence. This is precisely the faith that the poor have been losing during the past decade. The loss is reflected in the growing violence and rapid spread of Maoism in central India and the chronic insurrection in the Northeast.

The onset of global recession has made what was still a threat in the future into an immediate one. Literally all and more of the growth of employment since the 1991 economic reforms has taken place in the unorganised sector. During the past decade this has grown at a healthy pace of more than 5% a year. But these new workers enjoy absolutely no protection against adversity. Having lost their moorings in the overpopulated, comparatively stagnant countryside they have flocked into the towns in search of work. The acceleration of growth since 1993 and the very high rates of the past five years, and the concentration of this growth in the towns shielded them from adversity, but that golden period has ended with terrifying suddenness.

The UPA government has been in denial for the best part of three months. It first claimed that India would get off very lightly from the global recession. But that fond belief was exploded a few days ago when the estimate of growth between October and December was slashed to 5.3%. Judging from what is happening elsewhere January to March could be even worse. The worst hit are the export industries, but as a recent searing expose in the Indian Express of the panic that is seizing the formerly thriving slum of Dharavi in Mumbai shows, the damage is spreading rapidly to domestic industry as well.

India’s policymakers have shielded themselves from blame because, unlike China, they do not collect data for the unorganised sector more than once every five years. But policymakers do not need detailed statistics to know what is happening to the economy, and the people know it. The UPA government has frittered away the best part of five months doing just a little too little, just a little too late. As a result the spread of recession and the fear that stops people from spending has always kept one step ahead of their reflationary policies. Even today, the Reserve Bank continues to drag its feet over lowering the cash reserve ratio and repo rates dramatically because it is more concerned with preventing a fall in the exchange rate than in saving jobs and growth. Unless it suffers a dramatic change of heart it is difficult to see how the UPA will prevent a political backlash from the sliding economy.

OpEd: At sea in the economy

By M H Ahssan

Unless it suffers a dramatic change of heart it is difficult to see how the United Progressive Alliance will prevent a political backlash from the sliding economy.

The Congress party’s decision to team up with the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal for the coming general elections cannot fail to give the party a much-needed shot in the arm. The two parties together stand more than an even chance of wresting West Bengal away from the Left Front. In the 2006 state assembly elections the Congress-Trinamool alliance polled only 8.8% less than the Left Front. A shift in the vote of 5% will therefore suffice for it to win a majority of the seats. Since then, as recent panchayat elections have shown, the Trinamool Congress has grown rapidly in strength. This alliance could, therefore, decide who rules India three months from now.

But India would be the poorer if the Congress treats this merely as an alliance of convenience and does not absorb some of the political philosophy that underlies the Trinamool’s growing ascendancy. For, the Trinamool can help to revive something that the aged, and now manifestly elitist, Congress has demonstrably lost. This is a heart that beats for the poor.

This allegation may sound strange: hasn’t the Congress quadrupled the outlays on health education and rural development in the past five years? Hasn’t it started the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme? And hasn’t it launched targeted ‘missions’ to ensure that the money actually reaches the intended beneficiaries? The answer is that it has done all these things but has remained firmly elitist, nonetheless.

A close look at the programmes shows why all of them, without exception, are top-down, therefore paternalistic. They create no legally enforceable rights for the beneficiaries, place no reciprocal obligations upon them, and therefore do nothing to empower them. They remain what all such programmes have always been — handouts to the poor. Their purpose has remained quintessentially conservative — to preserve the ascendancy of the urban-industrial elite by keeping the poor in their place. Since all the power and rights have remained squarely in the hands of the fund-givers, it is no surprise that nine-tenths of it has continued to stick to their hands on the way down to the intended beneficiaries.

The Trinamool too started as a ‘standard’ , ‘paternalistic’ political party. But under the spur of recent developments in West Bengal it has developed into a different animal. Today, it is the only party that is fighting not just for benefits for the poor but for their rights; not just to secure just a few more scraps from the table but the right to sit at it. It has shown this in Singur and Nandigram, where it has doggedly maintained that land and cultivation rights cannot be taken away from owners without securing their explicit consent, and that mercilessly flailing police lathis falling on the backs of alleged troublemakers and Maoists, is not the way to secure it.

The Trinamool’s success in stopping the Tatas’ ‘nano’ car project was greeted with horror by organised industry and dismay by the government of West Bengal, which had gone out onto a limb to meet Tatas’ requirements. But in the long run far more good than harm is likely to come out of it, for the party has shown that despite India’s transformation into a market-dominated, free enterprise, economy that makes no pretense of socialism it is still possible for the poor to find champions within its democracy. From this it is but a small step to concluding that they can fight democratically to defend existing rights or to acquire new ones, and that they therefore have no need to resort to violence. This is precisely the faith that the poor have been losing during the past decade. The loss is reflected in the growing violence and rapid spread of Maoism in central India and the chronic insurrection in the Northeast.

The onset of global recession has made what was still a threat in the future into an immediate one. Literally all and more of the growth of employment since the 1991 economic reforms has taken place in the unorganised sector. During the past decade this has grown at a healthy pace of more than 5% a year. But these new workers enjoy absolutely no protection against adversity. Having lost their moorings in the overpopulated, comparatively stagnant countryside they have flocked into the towns in search of work. The acceleration of growth since 1993 and the very high rates of the past five years, and the concentration of this growth in the towns shielded them from adversity, but that golden period has ended with terrifying suddenness.

The UPA government has been in denial for the best part of three months. It first claimed that India would get off very lightly from the global recession. But that fond belief was exploded a few days ago when the estimate of growth between October and December was slashed to 5.3%. Judging from what is happening elsewhere January to March could be even worse. The worst hit are the export industries, but as a recent searing expose in the Indian Express of the panic that is seizing the formerly thriving slum of Dharavi in Mumbai shows, the damage is spreading rapidly to domestic industry as well.

India’s policymakers have shielded themselves from blame because, unlike China, they do not collect data for the unorganised sector more than once every five years. But policymakers do not need detailed statistics to know what is happening to the economy, and the people know it. The UPA government has frittered away the best part of five months doing just a little too little, just a little too late. As a result the spread of recession and the fear that stops people from spending has always kept one step ahead of their reflationary policies. Even today, the Reserve Bank continues to drag its feet over lowering the cash reserve ratio and repo rates dramatically because it is more concerned with preventing a fall in the exchange rate than in saving jobs and growth. Unless it suffers a dramatic change of heart it is difficult to see how the UPA will prevent a political backlash from the sliding economy.

Animal Trafficking Is Helping Terrorism Grow Despite Demonetisation

Illegal camel trade and terrorism are seldom mentioned in the same breath. A car rally was held in the national capital on February 2 by NGOs Dhyan Foundation and People For Animals (PFA) to protest atrocities on animals and the illegal trade of animals smuggled into Bangladesh via Bihar and West Bengal.

“United Humans Against Atrocities on Animals” was the theme of the rally, which started at Kasturba Gandhi Marg and made its first stop at the office of the resident commissioner for West Bengal at Baba Kharak Singh Marg - moving on to Bihar Bhawan in Chanakyapuri.

'Of the Voter, By the Voter, For the Voter': Indian Elections

By Aalia Nazneen | INNLIVE

SPECIAL REPORT After the date 16th May 2014 is arbitrated as the judgment day, the ballots from Five Hundred Forty Three (543) parliamentary constituencies will come together to decide the contender for the Prime Ministerial seat in Lok Sabha parliament.

To clamp down on illegal or wayward action, Election Council of India has ensured that the voting is carried out in nine long phases starting from 7th April 2014 to 12th May 2014. With such a schedule, this proves to be the longest election in Indian history till date.

This year Election Commission of India (ECI) has launched a few IT centered initiatives to appeal to voters of all groups alike to cast their ballot and exercise their franchise. Last year’s Ananda Babu has been altered to Ananya this year, which is an audio-visual campaign run by the Election Commission of India.

CJ REPORT: 'MR.NATWARLAL, THE CONMAN BUSTED'

By CJ Richa Rai in Kolkata

Attractive holiday packages, huge sums of money and incentives like luxury cars and jets. The offers to join and work with this online venture were too tempting to resist. Hundreds of thousands fell for it too, only to get duped of their hard- earned money.

The online pyramidal venture, TVI Express ( Travel Ventures International), allegedly robbed more than one lakh subscribes in India alone of their savings. It is estimated that more than 70 lakh people across the globe are members of the firm, sources said.

Its main promoter, Tarun Trikha, has been arrested recently by the crime investigation department ( CID) of the West Bengal Police.

Central agencies such as Directorate of Enforcement, Serious Fraud Investigation Office, and Financial Intelligence Unit have also been alerted after the arrest.

Trikha, who had been on the run after several complaints were registered in Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore against him in February 2011, was apprehended from the Capital’s IGI Airport on April 4 following an alert by the Intelligence Bureau.

Muslims In India: What Are Political Parties Fussing Over?

Snatches of information from the religion census, that was compiled in 2011, have started to surface in the mainstream media.

Though the complete findings are yet to be revealed, a report states that the Muslim population in India has grown by 24 percent between 2001 and 2011. Though Muslims now form 14.2 percent of the country's population (as opposed to 13.4 in the last decade) , the rate at which the population has been growing has shown a definite slowing down compared to the decade before that, says the report.

Shocking: Top West Bengal Government Hospital Director Transferred After Tried To Do A 'Dog's Dialysis' Treatment!

By Swara Bose in Kolkata

In a shocking incident in West Bengal state-run government hospital a VIP-dog dialysis performed along with human patients in a row. The dog didn’t undergo complete dialysis and INNLIVE break the news, but the hospital’s director has been transferred. That’s the story of Pradeep Mitra, who was the director of state-run SSKM Hospital. 

Close on heels of the bizarre incident in which Mitra had given the go-ahead for a dog to have dialysis - which didn’t happen in the end because the hospital is meant for humans - the West Bengal government transferred him to a nondescript hospital. 

OpEd: At sea in the economy

By M H Ahssan

Unless it suffers a dramatic change of heart it is difficult to see how the United Progressive Alliance will prevent a political backlash from the sliding economy.

The Congress party’s decision to team up with the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal for the coming general elections cannot fail to give the party a much-needed shot in the arm. The two parties together stand more than an even chance of wresting West Bengal away from the Left Front. In the 2006 state assembly elections the Congress-Trinamool alliance polled only 8.8% less than the Left Front. A shift in the vote of 5% will therefore suffice for it to win a majority of the seats. Since then, as recent panchayat elections have shown, the Trinamool Congress has grown rapidly in strength. This alliance could, therefore, decide who rules India three months from now.

But India would be the poorer if the Congress treats this merely as an alliance of convenience and does not absorb some of the political philosophy that underlies the Trinamool’s growing ascendancy. For, the Trinamool can help to revive something that the aged, and now manifestly elitist, Congress has demonstrably lost. This is a heart that beats for the poor.

This allegation may sound strange: hasn’t the Congress quadrupled the outlays on health education and rural development in the past five years? Hasn’t it started the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme? And hasn’t it launched targeted ‘missions’ to ensure that the money actually reaches the intended beneficiaries? The answer is that it has done all these things but has remained firmly elitist, nonetheless.

A close look at the programmes shows why all of them, without exception, are top-down, therefore paternalistic. They create no legally enforceable rights for the beneficiaries, place no reciprocal obligations upon them, and therefore do nothing to empower them. They remain what all such programmes have always been — handouts to the poor. Their purpose has remained quintessentially conservative — to preserve the ascendancy of the urban-industrial elite by keeping the poor in their place. Since all the power and rights have remained squarely in the hands of the fund-givers, it is no surprise that nine-tenths of it has continued to stick to their hands on the way down to the intended beneficiaries.

The Trinamool too started as a ‘standard’ , ‘paternalistic’ political party. But under the spur of recent developments in West Bengal it has developed into a different animal. Today, it is the only party that is fighting not just for benefits for the poor but for their rights; not just to secure just a few more scraps from the table but the right to sit at it. It has shown this in Singur and Nandigram, where it has doggedly maintained that land and cultivation rights cannot be taken away from owners without securing their explicit consent, and that mercilessly flailing police lathis falling on the backs of alleged troublemakers and Maoists, is not the way to secure it.

The Trinamool’s success in stopping the Tatas’ ‘nano’ car project was greeted with horror by organised industry and dismay by the government of West Bengal, which had gone out onto a limb to meet Tatas’ requirements. But in the long run far more good than harm is likely to come out of it, for the party has shown that despite India’s transformation into a market-dominated, free enterprise, economy that makes no pretense of socialism it is still possible for the poor to find champions within its democracy. From this it is but a small step to concluding that they can fight democratically to defend existing rights or to acquire new ones, and that they therefore have no need to resort to violence. This is precisely the faith that the poor have been losing during the past decade. The loss is reflected in the growing violence and rapid spread of Maoism in central India and the chronic insurrection in the Northeast.

The onset of global recession has made what was still a threat in the future into an immediate one. Literally all and more of the growth of employment since the 1991 economic reforms has taken place in the unorganised sector. During the past decade this has grown at a healthy pace of more than 5% a year. But these new workers enjoy absolutely no protection against adversity. Having lost their moorings in the overpopulated, comparatively stagnant countryside they have flocked into the towns in search of work. The acceleration of growth since 1993 and the very high rates of the past five years, and the concentration of this growth in the towns shielded them from adversity, but that golden period has ended with terrifying suddenness.

The UPA government has been in denial for the best part of three months. It first claimed that India would get off very lightly from the global recession. But that fond belief was exploded a few days ago when the estimate of growth between October and December was slashed to 5.3%. Judging from what is happening elsewhere January to March could be even worse. The worst hit are the export industries, but as a recent searing expose in the Indian Express of the panic that is seizing the formerly thriving slum of Dharavi in Mumbai shows, the damage is spreading rapidly to domestic industry as well.

India’s policymakers have shielded themselves from blame because, unlike China, they do not collect data for the unorganised sector more than once every five years. But policymakers do not need detailed statistics to know what is happening to the economy, and the people know it. The UPA government has frittered away the best part of five months doing just a little too little, just a little too late. As a result the spread of recession and the fear that stops people from spending has always kept one step ahead of their reflationary policies. Even today, the Reserve Bank continues to drag its feet over lowering the cash reserve ratio and repo rates dramatically because it is more concerned with preventing a fall in the exchange rate than in saving jobs and growth. Unless it suffers a dramatic change of heart it is difficult to see how the UPA will prevent a political backlash from the sliding economy.

Opinion: Is Hindu Vote Bank Developing In Eastern India?

By Dr.Shelly Ahmed (Star Guest Writer)

We know that the BJP is not contesting on the Hindutva plank this time. But if there is any region where there is a subtle possibility of a Hindu vote bank materialising even without the party adopting a formal Hindutva stance, it is in eastern India – in the states of West Bengal, Assam and Bihar. 

Even as Muslims stop thinking like a vote bank in many states as development becomes the core issue for them, demographic changes are leading to the opposite concerns among some Hindus in eastern India.

Exclusive: TOXIC THREAT LURKS INYOUR BOWL OF RICE

By Savita Verma

New study says some rice varieties have excess arsenic, Some paddy plants absorb ten times the toxin in the soil

Arsenic poisoning may not just be caused by drinking water in areas affected by the problem. Research now shows that eating certain rice varieties may also lead to arsenic poisoning.

Indian scientists under a project of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research ( CSIR) have found that some rice varieties accumulate much more arsenic from the soil.

Scientists from the National Botanical Research Institute ( NBRI), Lucknow, screened about 90 varieties from the Bardhaman district and Purbasthali in Birbhum district of West Bengal.

“ We found that most of these varieties had high arsenic — about ten- fold higher than the permissible limit,” Dr Rakesh Tuli from the NBRI said while speaking at the Indian Science Congress session here. Only 10 per cent of these varieties had low arsenic. The names of rice varieties used in the study have not been revealed.

The NBRI team found that some of the plants had accumulated ten- fold more arsenic than was present in the soil. The levels of arsenic in the soil were about 10- 12 microgram of arsenic per kilogram of soil.

Arsenic was found in both grain and bran. Despite being grown in the same areas, some of these rice varieties accumulated up to 1,250 micrograms of arsenic per kilogram of grain while others accumulated only 150 micrograms of arsenic per kilogram of grain.

Arsenic poisoning has been reported widely in West Bengal. In addition, some areas in Orissa, Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh have also reported the problem.

So far, arsenic- contaminated water from tube wells was thought to be the main cause of arsenic poisoning in humans. The safe limit of arsenic in water is 0.05 micrograms per litre of water.

Long- term exposure to arsenic via drinking- water causes cancer of the skin, lungs, urinary bladder, and kidney, and can also result in skin changes such as pigmentation changes and thickening. Immediate symptoms on an acute poisoning include vomiting, abdominal pain, and bloody ‘ rice water’ diarrhoea. “ There are techniques available to remove arsenic from water, but once it gets into the food chain through grain and cereals, it is impossible to remove it,” said Thuppil Venkatesh, arsenic poisoning expert based in Bangalore.

The NBRI study was carried out using rice varieties provided by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research ( ICAR) near Kolkata.

“ We will inform the state government about this. We need more studies to see the quantum of consumption of these varieties in these areas,” said Dr Samir K. Brahmachari, director- general of CSIR. Scientists indicated that stopping consumption of these varieties may help in controlling arsenic poisoning.

However, scientists pointed out that these are preliminary findings and more studies need to be carried out to ascertain the full extent of arsenic contamination of rice varieties.

The present experiment was carried out in the two areas which have considerably high levels of arsenic in soil. “ There are areas which have even higher levels of arsenic in soil and arsenic- contaminated water may have been used for irrigation as well,” Tuli said.

So more studies will have to be carried out to know how much arsenic is accumulated when these same varieties are grown in low arsenic soils. The aim is to ultimately find out which varieties are good for growing in arsenic rich soils, scientists explained. So far this concept has not been used in selecting rice varieties for largescale cultivation.

The team is now screening more varieties in West Bengal.

The NBRI also plans to carry out studies with agricultural research institutes in Orissa and UP to analyse the levels of arsenic accumulation in rice varieties grown there.

Scientists said that there was no information on how many of these varieties were being consumed and to what extent. But certainly, some of these are being consumed widely in local areas. There is also a possibility that these varieties may also be in market places in the country including in Delhi. So far, India does not even have standards on arsenic levels in food.

“ The problem has been found in the US and China. Market samples lifted over the last two years in the US and China had high levels of arsenic,” Tuli said.

The problem is being witnessed largely since the past two- to- five years. A third of the baby rice tested by the US Food Standards Agency was found to contain high levels of arsenic.

However, this was attributed to planting of rice in soil rich in arsenic and use of arsenic- contaminated water.

A World Health Organisation report in 2005 had assessed that some seven million people living in West Bengal had problems related to arsenic poisoning. The report attributed about 10,000 deaths to arsenic poisoning.

Studies have shown that high concentration of arsenic in soil and irrigation water often leads to high levels of arsenic in crops.

At present, twelve countries in Asia have reported high arsenic levels in their groundwater resources, according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation.

A study by the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in arsenic- affected areas in Bangladesh had shown that rice plants accumulate arsenic from soil and water, but the accumulation of arsenic varies for the different parts of plants. The quantity of accumulated arsenic decreases gradually from the root to the shoot.

While arsenic accumulation was seen in different parts of the rice plant, no arsenic accumulation was found in the rice grain in some cases. In some cases, arsenic was found in rice husk but not in rice grain and vice versa. Such variations could depend on many factors such as rice variety, composition of irrigation water, soil quality and the fertiliser used. Bangladesh researchers say that arsenic from contaminated irrigation water accumulates in the root, stem and leaf of the rice plant that may cause risks for cattle and human health. Similar results have been reported by Chinese scientists as well.

Writing as Social Service: The Literary Compass of Mahashweta Devi

By M H Ahssan
My India still lives behind a curtain of darkness, a curtain that separates the mainstream society from poor and the deprived. But then why my India alone? as the century comes to an end, it is important that we all make an attempt to tear the curtain of darkness, see the reality that lies beyond and see our own true faces in the process.’ (Mahasweta Devi, Ramon Magsaysay award acceptance speech, 1997) Mahashweta Devi is an extraordinary woman who has written, worked and fought for the marginalized tirelessly for the past six decades. She is a strange mix of an activist and a writer who has carried both duties fiercely all her life. Away from the spot light, she keeps working for the welfare and betterment of those whom the media and the mainstream conveniently keep forgetting. Her writing is disturbing because it shows the reader her or his own true face.

She is certainly as a noted critic puts it ‘one of the most important writers writing in India today.’ Much more can be said of Mahasweta Devi. She stands with few equals among today’s Asian writers in the dedication and directness with which she has turned writing into a form of service to the people.

Mahasweta Devi was born in a privileged, middle-class Bengali family on January 14, 1926. Force of custom had it that she was born in Dhaka where her maternal grand-father was a practising lawyer. It was tradition in the family for daughters to give birth in their parents’ house. While Devi briefly attended Eden Montessori school in Dhaka, it was in West Bengal that she grew up in the midst of a large and intellectually stimulating family.

It was a family with a long tradition of civic spirit and high literacy. Devi’s grandparents were involved in various movements aimed at the promotion of western education and social reform, initiated and inspired by Rammohan Roy (1772-1833), who has been called an important mentor of modern India, and such leaders of nineteenth-century Bengali Renaissance as Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar. These were man who played important roles in shaping early Indian nationalism as well as modern Bengali literature, perhaps the richest and most dynamic of the literary traditions in India.

The eldest of nine children, Devi was raised in the rich milieu of Bengali high culture. Her father Manish Chandra Ghatak (1902-1979), was a renowned poet and prose writer. In the 1920s, he was part of a group of young writers who broke new grounds by writing a new type of realist stories that dealt with the slum life and the seamier underside of Indian society. Devi’s mother, Dharitri Devi (1908-1984), was a writer who loved Pearl Buck’s novels about old China and translated some her works. She met the famous American author when the latter visited Bombay in 1934 and was gifted with a copy of one of Buck’s books. Dharitri was also a social worker who, like her own mother, devoted a great part of her time to promoting literacy among underprivileged children. Assorted Aunts and uncles won prominence as artists, journalist, actors and filmmakers, among them the pioneering, British- trained cinematographer Sudhish Ghatak, actor and film-director Ritwik Ghatak, journalist Sachin Chowdhary and sculptor Sankho Chowdhary.

Together with her sisters and brothers, Devi was raised to love books and develop an interest in music, theatre and films. Her parents instilled in their children a curiosity for new things and other places and enjoyed taking them to the cinemas in Calcutta (called Kolkata since 2001) to watch the British and American movies. Devi was brought up in an atmosphere ‘where everyone read and read and read.’ ‘There was no bar on my reading,’ Devi recalls. Thus, while still quite young, she became acquainted with western authors such as Charles Dickens, Balzac and Anton Chekhov, as well as such Bengali classics as the sixteenth-century Chandi Mangal by Mukundram Chakravarty (more popularly known as Kavikankan), narrative poems that stirred her interest in fiction and history.

While she enjoyed the benefits of a middle-class upbringing, Devi was also exposed to the values of egalitarian concern for those less fortunate. The women in her family were deeply involved in volunteer work to spread literacy among the poor, and Devi recalls that on visits to her parents’ ancestral village in eastern Bengal, her grandparents always admonished them, the children, against wearing expensive clothes, insisting that they wear what the poorest in the village wore.

Devi’s family moved around a lot, because her father’s job as a government income tax officer meant periodic reassignments to new districts. Hence, Devi picked up her education at various places. She finished her elementary education at Medinipur missionary girls’ school in West Bengal in 1935, attended middle school in Shantiniketan (1936-38) and finished high school at Beltala Girls School in Kolkata(1939-42).

Shantiniketan left a deep impression on the young Devi. The school in Shantiniketan was an experiment in education started in 1901 by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the leading light in Bengali literature and winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Asian to receive the honour. Devi’s father was an admirer and friend of Tagore. Her uncles too, either attended Shantiniketan or moved in the same circles as Tagore. It is not surprising that, at the age of ten, Devi would find herself partaking of the heady atmosphere of Indian cultural nationalism.

Shantiniketan (which in 1921, came to be called Vishwa-Bharti- its founder’s vision of a ‘world-university’ embodied Tagore’s ideas of education, open-air classes, freedom from traditional restrictions, students of all countries coming together to participate in a life of creative harmony. Here Devi came in contact with students from all over India and came to think of herself not just as a Bengali but part of a larger country. She listened to well-known Bengali writers, watched Tagore’s dance dramas performed, cultivated her love for literature and the arts, enjoyed outdoor games, and learned the value of independent study. She was fortunate as well to have sat “at the feet” of Tagore himself in his final years. Tagore spent a lot of time in Shantiniketan and, once, briefly took over as teacher in Devi’s class in Bengali. Tagore left quite an impression. Devi’s first published piece of writing was an essay on Tagore’s My Boyhood Days for a Bengali children’s magazine, written when she was thirteen. Shantiniketan, however, was an idyll rudely interrupted by the momentous crisis India went through in the years that followed.

Her years after High school thrust Devi into a new and troubled stage in her life. She attended Ashutosh College of Calcutta University (1943-44) and then returned to Shantiniketan to earn bachelor’s degree (with high honours) in 1946. Tagore had passed away and Devi’s memories of her second stay in Shantiniketan are not as vivid as her first. Now older and restless, she felt that Shantiniketan had lost something of its old, pastoral charm.

This was a time of great social upheaval in India. The world was in the grip of the Second World War. The Nationalist “Quit India” campaign of 1942, after the Indian National Congress voted to expel the British from India, led to the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and the thousands of Indian nationalists. The suppression of the nationalists triggered widespread violence.

Among those arrested was Devi’s uncle, Sankho Chaudhary. It was the time of the Great Bengal famine (1942-44) caused by the cutting off of the Burma rice supply and administrative bungling during the war. In 1946, the Great Calcutta riots broke out as communal rioting among Hindus and Muslims took place in Calcutta and elsewhere in the Punjab and Bengal, unleashed by the intensifying conflict between the Hindu-dominated parties and the Muslim League.

On August 15, 1947, the British Indian Empire ceased to exist and India achieved its Independence. The triumph of freedom, however, was diluted by the tragedy of partition as two nations were born, India and Pakistan. Eastern Bengal became part of Pakistan. Splitting many families (including Devi’s) between, the two new countries, the partition was marked by violent, large-scale communal disturbances, a toll of many thousands of causalities and the migration of several million persons. The cities, recalled Devi, were “bathed with blood” passions were so inflamed that, on January 30, 1948, Gandhi was assassinated by a young Hindu extremist.

It was a tumultuous and violent time. As a young college student during the famine, Devi joined her classmates in relief work: distributing food, picking through the dead bodies in the streets to find those still alive, feeding them and bringing them to the relief centres. She remembers one particular instance when they found a baby still alive beside her dead mother only to discover, as they carried the infant to the centre, that she, too, had died. The sight of suffering and death deeply affected Devi . In her teens, she felt that, inside her, something was changing. It was during this time of uncertainty and violence, Devi said that she came out of her relatively protected middle-class life.

After her college graduation in 1946, she married Bijon Bhattacharya, a playwright, who acted in her uncle, Ritwik Ghatak’s films and was one of the founding members of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). He was also a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Though her family advised her against the marriage, Devi could not be dissuaded. Even as a young woman, she was already quite headstrong and independent-minded.
Founded in 1928, the CPI was ascendant at the time Devi was in the University. The party had legal status and was active in organizing, propaganda and electoral work. It was an important influence on Devi and her generation , though she herself never joined the party. At the time married Bijon, however, the party was in deep crisis. During the war, the CPI had alienated the Indian nationalist leadership by supporting the British war effort against the badly defeated in the 1946 elections. When India became independent in 1947, the party adopted a policy of insurrection; carrying out a series of violent agitations.

Devi and her husband briefly stayed with Bijon’s family and then lived on their own in a one-room apartment on the outskirts of Calcutta. In 1948, they had a child (Nabarun, who would become a poet, actor and novelist). It was a difficult time for the family. Communists and their sympathizers were harassed and Bijon could not find a job. To help support the family, Devi sold dye powders and even became involved in a friend’s failed venture to supply thousands of research monkeys to laboratories in the United States. She also worked as a teacher in Puddopukur Girls’ school (1948-49), did private tutoring and then gained employment as an upper division clerk in the regional office of the Deputy Accountant General of Post and Telegraph (1949-50). Accused of being a communist, she was retrenched from her government job after someone planted books of Marx, Engel and Lenin in her office drawer.

It was at this time that she began to turn her energies to writing. To augment her income, particularly after she lost her government job, she wrote for Sachitra Bharat, a Bengali weekly, under the pen name Sumitra Devi, producing light fiction (“romantic stories, ghost stories, family stories”). In 1956, however came her first major work. This was Jhansir Rani (The Queen of Jhansi), a fictionalized biography of the women ruler of the princely state in north India who fought against the British in 1857 in the first war of independence by the Indian people. Devi has first learned of this of a woman warrior who was able to inspire and unite the common people to wage a war of resistance against the British. She resolved that this was the story she had to write.

In preparing to write the novel, in 1954, she demonstrated uncommon seriousness and tenacity. She scraped together enough money from relatives and friends to travel to the area in the then united province (now Uttar Pradesh) to collect the archival data and oral history. She travelled on foot through remote villages and desert plateaus, collecting scraps of legends and folk ballads, getting firsthand knowledge of the places where Rani of Jhansi fought the British. She had always been interested in history and the research she did for Jhansir Rani was to characterize her working style as a writer.

Jhansir Rani earned for her reputation as a writer. It was quickly followed by other works - Nati (1957), Madhrey Madhur (1958), Yamuna ke teer (1958), Etotuku Asha(1959) and Premtara (1959) – romances and novels that formed a virtual kaleidoscope of Indian lives. While many of her writings during this period, she said, impelled by the need to earn money for the family, they also demonstrated an appetite for chronicling social realities that would mark her body of fiction.

In 1962, her marriage came to an end and when she divorced Bijon, leaving her fourteen year old son with his father. She lived on her ownin the remote southern outskirts of Calcutta and went through a terrible spell of depression during which she attempted suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. The attempt failed, she woke up, she said, and the first image she had was that of her son. Surviving death, she recalls feeling “a tremendous surge for living.”

In 1963, she finished her master’s degree in literature at Calcutta University and, from 1964-84, served as a lecturer in English at Bijoygarh Jyotish Roy College, a small private college that served poor students in a refugee area. During this time, she married an aspiring writer but this marriage did not work out either and came to an end in 1975.

Devi had begun to focus on what she wanted to do with her life. Like a dam of creativity that had burst open, she wrote furiously, publishing novels, stories and articles. She wrote plays, textbooks and children’s fiction; adapted folklore for young readers; translated works in other languages; and even did biographies of her own father, Manish Ghatak, and the famous Chinese writer Lu Xun.

It was at this time that there was a marked intensification of social purpose in her writings. Devi says, “I was born in a family with strong literary traditions and was fortunate enough to attend Shantiniketan with its founder, Rabindranath Tagore, was alive. Writing came early, though not with any special purpose. What people call social activism came much later. ”

A turning point came in 1965 when Devi visited Palamau, a remote and impoverished district in Bihar that she calls “a mirror of tribal India.” Moving from place to place on foot, she witnessed the savage impact on indigenous society of absentee landlordism, a despoiled environment, debt bondage and state neglect. In India other tribal districts, she subsequently observed the same dismal conditions. There was no education, no health care, no roads, no income. Exploitation and neglect had reduced people to a subhuman existence. Devi had for long been dimly aware of the presence of tribal people, but it was the Palamu experience that brought her face to face with the misery of a people largely excluded from official, mainstream history.

This exposure focused Devi’s work. This can be seen in the novels Kavi Bandyoghoti Gayiner Jivan O Mrityu (The Life And Death of poet Bandyoghoti Gayin, 1966) which depicted the struggle of a low-caste boy in fifteenth-century Bengal and Andharmanik (Jewel in Darkness, 1966), which dealt with the upheaval in Bengal’s social life caused by the Bargi (Maratha cavalry) raids during the mid-eighteenth century.

A deepening social awareness and literary maturity converged in her watershed novel of 1974, Hajar Chaurashir Ma (Mother Of 1084), which is one of Devi’s most widely read works. Written in 1973-74, it charts the emotional struggles of a mother as she tries to understand her son’s involvement in the Naxalite movement, a rebellion that began in 1967 in the village of Naxalbari, northern West Bengal, and soon spread to urban areas in the region until the mid-1970s. The journey of discovery carries her to an understanding of her son’s death as well as her own alienation, as a woman and wife, from the complacent and hypocritical bourgeois society her son had rebelled against.

The plot is condensed into the scenic space of a single day through the device of the mother recalling, a year after, the events that followed the morning when she was summoned to identify her son lying dead in the police morgue. Through this device of dramatic condensation, Devi achieves an admirable concentration of effect. Hajar Churashir Ma, the critic Samik Bandyopadhyay says, reveals “a passion that has rarely emerged so unashamedly in the Bengali novel.” On another plane, it can also be said that the novel is significant in personal terms. It enacts Devi’s own passage from urban middle-class domesticity to the larger sphere of what would be her focal subject and concern, the age-long exploitation of the tribals and the landless peasantry in rural eastern India.        

In the succeeding years, she would return to the Naxalite Movement in works such as Agnigarbha (The Fire Within, 1978), four long stories about the Naxalite tribal unrest, and the novel Bish-Ekuh (1986). In a career of sustained creativity, she would produce a stream of narratives, fusing indigenous oral histories with contemporary events to uncover the bitter and often bloody relationship between tribal communities and India’s dominant classes and systems.

Her work has gravitated around certain topics and themes. History has always fascinated her. She says, ‘I think being conscious about history is a primary condition of being a writer.’ Devi has used fiction not only to resurrect forgotten episodes of India’s tribal and feudal past but to highlight acts of local resistance to aggression and oppression. Her historical fiction includes Aranyer Adhikar (Right to the forest, 1977). A meticulously researched novel on the life and struggles of Birsa Munda and the famous Munda Rebellion against the British in the late nineteenth century; Chotti Munda 0 Tar Teer (chotti and his arrow, 1979), which records the history of one of the tribes of eastern India in the first seven decades of the twentieth century; Subhaga Basanta (1980), two novels set in Bengal on slavery in eleventh century and the Sati system in the eighteenth century; and Sidhu kanhur Daakey (1981), a novel on two heroes of the Santhal tribal rebellion in 1855-1856.

Her interest in history is not backward- looking but strongly contemporary. She renders scenes of the past ‘in their physicality, as if they were nothing less than contemporary’ and creates characters evolving through their interactions with a historical process. While she turned to the past for materials, her vision is not exotic but historical. It is always trained on realities of the present. In an interview in 1983, she said, ‘It is my conviction that a story writer should be motivated by a sense of history that would help her readers to understand their own times. I have never had the capacity or the urge to create art for art’s sake.’
Devi has critically reflected on her own class position in works exploring the dilemma of the bourgeois intellectual’s social loyalties. These works include Gharey Phera (1983), which treats the degeneration of a once politically committed writer and Srinkhalito (1985), a novel about a writer torn between an easy life and one of social engagement. The drama of divergent class realities is powerfully communicated in the characters of the Naxalite tribal hero and the communist journalist in the novelette Bashai Tudu (part of the 1978 Agnigarbha collection). A martyred tribal hero, Bashai Tudu, assumes the power of myth as he periodically appears to succour the landless farm laborers when they are driven to crisis. He gets killed and then appears again at another point of crisis. As a counterpoint to the myth, Devi creates the character of the middle-class journalist who must wrestle with his shame, helplessness and guilt, as he is called upon, time and again, to identify Bashai Tudu’s martyred body.

Devi returned on the profound subordination of women in Indian society in such works as Bioscoper Baksho (1964), which is about the condition of women in tradition-bound, middle-class society; Swaha (1977), on bride burning; Daulati (1984), three interlinked stories on the Palamau bonded labor movement; Iter Parey It (1987), stories of an illiterate tribal woman who strives to start a school in her village. Leading scholars see her powerful tales of exploitation and struggle as extremely rich sites of feminist discourse. However, Devi (who dislikes labels) declines to be called a feminist. She acknowledges that a woman tends to be more vulnerable to exploitation because of her body, but asserts; “I write not as a woman…..I look at the class, not at the gender problem.”
Indeed, a pronounced class consciousness informs Devi’s writings. While she professes little interest in ideological abstractions and theorizing, Devi is clearly influenced by the Marxist ideas ascendant in India during her formative years. Almost from the beginning of the twentieth century, Bengal has been a centre of leftist intellectualism. Though Devi kept her distance from party politics, she appropriated from the left something of its ideological fervour as well as the tools for understanding the social and economic problems of her country. Speaking of the highly politicized 1940s, she says, ‘In retrospect, I think that my understanding of the people and their struggles came from those days.’

What joins all these topics and themes in Devi’s fiction is a passionate opposition to realities of social exploitation. Her fiction is driven not only by a strong sense of identification with the oppressed and the excluded but by a faith in their capacity for self-emancipation. The cause of tribals has become Devi’s life mission. She has chosen the cause in part because the lot of the tribals has been, for her, the most emblematic of social oppression in modern India.

Devi has used her writings to render the plight of this population invisible to India’s mainstream society. She has explored in her fiction the history of Santhals, Hos, Oraons, Kurunis, Mundas and other tribal communities. Since 1976, she has been actively involved in the struggles of tribal and underprivileged communities in the border areas of the three adjacent provinces of Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal, especially in the districts of Mayurbhanj, Medinipur, Purulia, and Singhbhum. As Samik Bandhopadhyay said of this stage in Devi’s career, ‘The subjects of her stories have become the subject of her life.’
In her introduction to Agnigarbha (1978), Devi explained her mission thus:

‘I find my people still groaning under hunger, landlessness, indebtedness and bonded labor. An anger, luminous, burning and passionate, directed against a system that has failed to liberate my people from these horrible constraints is the only source of inspiration in all my writing. All the parties to the Left as well as to the Right have failed to keep their commitment to the common people. I do not hope to see in my lifetime any reason to change this conviction of mine. Hence I go on writing to the best of my abilities about the people, so that I can face myself without any sense of guilt and shame. For a writer faces judgement in her lifetime and remains answerable.’

Restless, feeling that writing fiction was not enough; she pursued other avenues of engagement. In 1980, she founded Palamau (Bihar) Zila Bandhua Samiti, India’s first bonded-labour organization, with the help of local journalist, Rameshwaram. The organization raised public awareness of the bonded-labour system and drew together thousands of bonded labours in common action to call for an end to bonded labour and demand a program of land-to-the-tillers.

The year after her father died in 1979, Devi started editing the Bengali quarterly Bortika, an obscure literary periodical her father had edited. She turned it into a forum where tribals, small peasants, agricultural labourers, factory workers and rickshaw pullers wrote about their life and problems.Impatient with abstract, theoretical and academic research, Devi turned Bortika into a publication that gave precedence to the view-from-below and the documentation of social and economic conditions through surveys and reports done by the local people themselves.

In 1982, she took a two year leave of absence from the Calcutta college where she had been teaching English literature since 1964 and joined Jugantar, a Bengali newspaper, as a roving reporter. This gave her greater opportunity to travel and learn of conditions in the countryside. Increasingly involved in the lives of the people she met; she resigned from her teaching job in 1984 and became a full-time writer and activist. She wrote for a Bengali daily, Dainik Basumati, for about a year and then joined Bartman, another Bengali daily, for which she wrote a weekly column until 1991.

She has done articles and investigative reports for English-language periodicals such as the Economic and political weekly (founded by her uncle Sachin Chowdhary). Business Standard, Sunday, Frontier and New Republic, written in English and Bengali, her journalism mapped her passionate commitments. She ranged through such topics as police atrocities, failures in the implementation of government programmes, exploitation of sharecroppers and miners, unemployment and landlessness, environmental degradation and the need to protect and foster tribal languages and identity.

Her practice of journalism is an integral part of Devi’s lifework. She has embraced journalism as social advocacy instead of as a trade or profession. Her practice of “journalism-from-below” is quite innovative. She has located herself, marked out her vantage point at the peripheries, in the rural districts, instead of writing out of the capital or metropolis. She does not just collect information from “informants,” she identifies with the people she writes about and works side by side with them for the redress of their problems. As her experiment with Bortika shows, she believes ‘that the people I write about should themselves write about their own problems.’ These are writings she says, ‘Based on real life experience, facts and figures. I sometimes help them with questionnaires and guides for conducting surveys in their own areas, which they themselves write. For many of the writers, it is the first time that they can project their own problems to a wider audience, in their way.’

She has pursued journalism side by side with active grassroots organizing and advocacy. In 1983, she founded Paschim Banga Kheria Sabar Kalyan Samiti (Kheria Sabar Welfare Society) with the help of other social activists, such as Gomasta Prasad Soren and Gopiballabh Singh Deo. The welfare society is an autonomous organization of the Kheria and Sabar tribes, among the poorest of the poor in India. Aimed at defending the rights of tribals and promoting their material and cultural well-being, the organization has undertaken such initiatives as handicraft and farming, irrigation and water, forestation, health and savings, and literacy projects. At least ten thousand, out of a population of about sixteen thousand constituting the two tribes, have directly benefited from the various projects of the organization.

Recognizing the value of collective action, Devi pioneered in forging a common voice for tribals by founding, in 1986, Adim Jaati Aikya Parishad (Ancient Tribes Union), a forum of thirty-eight West Bengali tribal groups. Formed to enable tribes to claim their rightful socioeconomic and civil liberties, the forum promoted co-operative action among both big and small tribes and reduced the incidence of intertribal violence.    

In 1990, Devi instituted the Shabara Mela, an annual fair based on traditional Indian country fairs, held after winter harvest in Rajnagar some thirty kilometes from Purulia, West Bengal. It features crafts, exhibits, contests and theatrical performances dealing with social themes such as literacy, anti-alcoholism. The yearly fair has grown into a celebration of values of tribal dignity and autonomy. It has been duplicated in other rural areas.

Devi has been involved with numerous other initiatives in grassroots organizing, even serving as President of the Berhampur Municipal Sweepers Association in her home district of Murshidabad. Among the other organizations she is associated with – she took the initiative in founding a few of them- Paschim Banga Munda Tribal Samaj Sugar Ganthra (Mighty Union Of West Bengal Munda Tribal society); Paschim Banga Bhumij Tribal Samaj Kalyan Samiti (West Bengal Tenanted Tribal Welfare Society- Medinipur and Purulia districts); Paschim Banga Oraon Tribal kalian Samiti (West Bengal Oraon Tribal Welfare Society); Paschim Banga Sahis Scheduled Caste Kalyan Samiti (West Bengal Sahis Scheduled Caste Welfare Society); Paschim Banga Harijan Kalyan Samiti(West Bengal Harijan Welfare Society-North 24 Parganas district); Bharat Ker Adim Jaati Samiti (The Indian Ker Aboroginal tribal Society-North 24 Parganas District); Adibasi Kalyan Samiti (Adibasi Welfare Society-South 24 parganas district); and Paschim Banga Baul Fakir Sangha (West Bengal Baul Fakir Union-Murshidabad district).

She lives with the people she writes about, participates in their struggles, and gives voice to their lives in her writings. She calls them “her own people” and they call her in turn, Didi(elder sister). Her reputation as an advocate is such that she has become a ‘one person resource center’ for people in distress. People, mostly from remote rural areas, come to her house in Calcutta daily with their problems. Some even stay in her tiny apartment. They approach her with their problems: job for the unemployed, violation of government norms for jobs reserved for tribals and other eligible people, inaction or unjust action of the police or the administration, government recognition for running a school, someone needing admission to a hospital immediately, land, irrigation, drinking water, or SOS from a small tribal group fearing violent attacks. The list can go on and on.

She listens and gives advice, makes referrals to her extensive network of contacts or personally intercedes for them by bringing their grievances to the attention of state agencies and officials. Each year, she tirelessly writes several hundred letters of complaint or petition addressed to the government and publishes columns and articles documenting abuses by police, landlords and politicians. She has made the cause of the tribals and the poor her own, and her reputation as an advocate has spread far and wide.

Having been raised with the education and other privileges of a middle-class Indian family, Devi feels a certain complicity in the marginalization of millions of her compatriots. Although her own family followed a Spartan lifestyle and devoted much time to projects of civic amelioration, she believes that her social activism is a matter of expiation and duty. What she is doing, she often says, is partly atonement for India’s exploitation of tribal groups in the last thousand years.

Fiercely independent, Devi is critical of the failure of political parties from both the Left and the Right to change the system. Expressing her impatience with ‘mere party politics,’ she says, ‘Life is not arithmetic, and man is not made for the game of politics. I believe that it should be the object of every kind of politics to fulfil man’s craving to live with all his rights intact…’

Devi perceives herself as a catalyst rather than a leader. She has spent much time listening to people rather than talking to them; she has danced with them in their tribal festivals; she has marched with them in their protest demonstrations; she has tried to mould her voice to theirs in her writings.

Devi takes sides. She is impatient with hypocrisy, complacency and indifference. Deeply stirred by how the tribals and the poor have been pauperized and abused, she set for herself the task of savagely exposing the realities and structures of social and economic exploitation. In refusing to mystify what she sees, she shocks her middle-class readers into confronting a social cancer in Indian society. Devi says, ‘Bengali literature has been far too long a field for retraction from objectivity and an atrophy of conscience….A responsible writer, standing at a turning point in history, has to take a stand in defence of the exploited, otherwise history would never forgive him.’

Her comments gave life to her distinctive qualities as a writer and artist. She studied the history of the peoples she wrote about by examining archival documents; by collecting myths, legends and ballads; and by direct observation in her frequent travelling through the countryside. Her empirical research into oral history as it lives in the cultures and the memories of tribal communities was the first of its kind among Indian writers. It has allowed her to create fiction rooted in history and folk myth as well as in contemporary reality. Combining narrative with segments of oral history and social critique, she moved between past and present as she presents characters formed in the thick, time-shaped materiality of their social existence.

Her innovative use of Language has expanded the conventional borders of Bengali literary expression. She calls upon an eclectic array of classical and modern images and interlaces literary, bureaucratic and ‘street’ Bengali with tribal idioms. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak believes that it was with Aranyer Adhikar (1977) that Mahasweta Devi began ‘putting together a prose that is a collage of literary Bengali, street Bengali, tribal Bengali and the languages of the tribals.’ In crafting this style, Devi has succeeded in melting the often discordant realities of modern Indian life. Transgressing the boundaries of language, she has broken down the barriers of class as well.

She creates the effect of documentary realism by representing reality with precision and economy of detail, using irony and satire and avoiding romantic cliché. She sentimentalizes what would otherwise slide into the realm of melodrama, by grounding her fiction in the particularities of the actual; her stories acquire the authenticity of lived experience at the margins.

She described her instinct as a writer in the preface to the story collection ‘Shrestha Galpa’ (1985): ‘I have found authentic documentation to be the best medium for protest against injustice and exploitation…I have a reverence for materials collected from folklore, for they reveal how the common people have overlooked at an experience in the past and look at it now…To capture the continuities between the past and present held together in the folk imagination, I bring legends, mythical figures and mythical happenings into a contemporary setting, and make an ironic use of these...’

Her use of folk symbolism and political irony in wholly contexts is illustrated in the stories adapted as plays and translated into English in five plays; Mother of 1084, Aajir, Bayen, Urvashi and Johny Water (1997). In one of these stories, a traditional water diviner’s instinctive understanding of the processes and movements of nature is turned into a medium for the rise of a new consciousness that empowers a community to contest a dominant, class-defined system.

In another, the cancer of the throat that afflicts a local ventriloquist becomes a metaphor for the suppression of democratic rights during the period of Emergency in India. In still another story, the tragedy of a mother who is branded as a witch and separated from her son until the later acknowledges the dead woman as his mother inscribes the larger story of the cruelties of superstition and of a male-dominated system that has erected barriers between mothers and sons. In another collection of stories, published in English as Breast Stories (1997), Devi constructs a human as well as national parable in the story of a woman who becomes a professional wet nurse to support her family and dies of painful breast cancer, betrayed alike by the breasts that for years became her chief identity and the dozens of “sons” she suckled.

The uncompromising realism of her fiction has led the critics to see her work as a critique of the Bengali renaissance Devi departs from the high diction and musicality of renaissance writing by immersing herself in the non-snskritik idiom of the tribal world and by assuming the terse, direct style of modern journalism, she also goes beyond the humane, universalizing lyricism of Tagore and the renaissance writer in her violent, mythopoeia-ridden depiction of class conflict in Indian society. Shantiniketan schooled her love for humanity. It was, however, in the ideologically conflicted and violent world of the 1940s that she forged the anger at humanity’s violation as well as the weapons to defend it.

Devi’s work has not gone unrecognized. She has won various literary honours, among them the highest state-sponsored literary award in India from the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of letters) which she received for ‘Aranyer Adhikar’ in 1979. In 1986, She was honoured with Padamshree (awarded to distinguish citizens by the Government of India) for her activist work among tribal communities. In 1996, for lifetime literary achievement, she was given the Jnanpith Award in ceremonies in New Delhi attended by Nelson Mandela. In handling her award, Mandela honoured her work by saying that Devi “holds a mirror to the conditions of the world as we enter the new millennium.” (she donated Jnanpith prize money for the uplift of tribal groups through the tribal welfare society she established and heads.) In the same year, the Rabindra Bharti University of Calcutta conferred on her an honorary Doctorate in Literature.

Her achievement as a writer and activist has carried her beyond India. She travelled to Paris in 1985 as part of a cultural exchange program between India and France and went to Frankfurt in 1986 as part of delegation of Indian Writers to that city’s famous book fair. In 1988, she visited Pittsburgh University in Pennsylvania on the invitation of the Marxist Study circle and then returned to the United States in 1990 as a visiting Fulbright Lecturer. In 1992, nominated by India’s First Lady, Devi attended the Geneva Summit Conference on ‘Economic Development Of Women in Agricultural Sector in The Third World.’ In the same year, she visited France again on the invitation of the French Cultural Affairs Ministry. 

Some of her works have been translated into English, Italian, Japanese and French. Although her work may not conform to the cosmopolitan ‘Indian Fiction’ currently fashionable among western readers, she is slowly gaining an international readership, in part because of the admiring attention given to her work as sites of Postcolonial and Feminist discourse by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists. A literary writer in India does not have a large and ready readership. The literacy rate in Bengal is only 38 percent as of the 1970s, and a serious novel in Bengali sells about five thousand copies in three years. Devi’s best-known books, however, have run to over twenty editions. Her writings have also circulated beyond the confines of print. Her works can be found in Gujarati and two tribal languages, Ho and Santhali.

‘In the last few years in my travels among the people, I’ve come across several traditional folk forms, like the Aikap. With its rich treatment of social themes in an idiom of repartees-earthy, full-of-blood and highly sophisticated forms that carry on easily from speech to singing. I have seen several such performances that project images of persecution. In the 1940s the communist party had instructed its cadres to locate, learn and revitalize all these forms and made them a vehicle for both the people there, and the people here who would like to communicate with them. In my novel ‘Bandobasti’ last year I went back to a reconstruction of the history of that encounters folk forms that the communist peasants’ movement has initiated. I feel a crying need for a revival of that process.’

Devi has widened her audience by writing in many forms and media in both Bengali and English. Her fiction has been adapted as theatrical performances in various Indian languages and Devi herself has adapted some of her works for the stage. ‘Rudali’, an adaptation of her short story about a poor, low-caste village women, has been staged a hundred times to packed houses in both Bengali and Hindi since it was performed in 1992. Devi’s other stories have been dramatized and performed in towns and villages in Bengal. The stories are appreciated by audiences closer to the experiences in which her works are rooted. In her visit to the villages, Devi has also made it a point to discuss and narrate her stories to the people about whom she writes. Her stories have entered into the oral tradition of the places where her books and plays circulate. The social researcher Maitreya Ghatak, for instance, relates how she met a young tribal boy while she was visiting a village in Medinipur district of West Bengal. The boy was carrying a copy of an abridged version of Devi’s ‘Birsa Munda’, written specifically for young readers. It was a book read by everyone in the community, the boy said.

One of the most prolific writers in Bengali, Mahasweta Devi has published over a hundred titles of fiction in addition to a large body of journalistic and other writings. Her works of fiction include ‘Byadh Khanda’ (1994), ‘Prosthan Parba’ (1995) and ‘Krishna Dwadoshi’ (1995). She had also finished her autobiography. Devi is in her late eighties, yet her dedication to her mission and her art has not dimmed.

A Bengali novelist has remarked about Devi; ‘She is perhaps the only living author (in India) whose literary activities cannot be separated from her day to day living.’ Both in and outside India, there are few writers who offer as clear an example of writing as an act of social conscience and a function of individual will. Her life is a lesson in the idea that, indeed, one person can make a difference. The spirit of Mahasweta Devi symbolizes her compassionate crusade through art and activism so that tribals may find a just and honorable place in India’s mainstream, national life.