المجلة الدولية لتكوين البحوث متعددة التخصصات

The Sale of the Unsalable  in the Fiction of Mahashweta Devi

Dr. Preeti Maurya

Assistant Professor, Department of English,

A.B.R.P.G.College, Anpara, Sonebhadra, U.P., India

Corresponding Author: drpreeti.abr@gmail.com

 

DOI: 10.52984/ijomrc2303

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Abstract:

Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016) is one of the foremost writers in Bengali. Devi was an ardent fighter and her weapons were fiction and her political writings. Devi’s writings are peculiarly devoid of sentimentality. She does not tug at her readers’ emotions and is rather straightforward with her approach to talking about the lived experiences of the marginalized. Women’s status in society, particularly those of marginalized positions are very preoccupied with the sense of submissiveness and negligence. The word ‘Marginalized’ is used as the substitute for poor/ tribal/ peripheral. Marginalized women, the tribe or the poor women and the outcast or the rebellious women, do not have any ‘proper’ position and identity in society. They have similar stories uncaring pronunciation and different situations. Mahasweta Devi’s stories articulate this unspeakable truth of women’s misery and their power of enduring and resistance. Her fiction offers an array of females’ figurative situations/positions in society as well as their materialistic use of the body for social and economic purposes. In this paper, her short stories such as Breast-Giver, and Rudali explain the paradoxical position and representation of women in society as well as their uneven voices.

 

 Keywords: Tribal Women, Marginalised, Subalterns, Breast-Giver