The attitude was typical of her. For she believed it was the activism that mattered and not an activist. She took up which were apparently lost causes. But Mahasweta Devi championed them and turned them into burning issues. Literary imagination was inseperable from activism for this Magsaysay winner. She wrote about violence and exploitation as if she had faced them first hand

Never an armchair author, Mahasweta Devi’s debut novel Jhansi ki Rani (The Queen of Jhansi) was an account of India's first war of independence. A thoroughly researched work about Luxmi Bai and her defiance of the British, it took the then teacher of English to the interiors of Budelkhand to know more about a woman who was more than a man and preferred death than kowtowing to foreign invaders. Her writing comprised fiction and reportage. It stood out from its peers for unhesitatingly stepping into forests, quarries, embankments and police stations.

A pioneer in this sphere, Mahasweta Devi was the first to make a backdrop of her writings of the places where the country’s development story frays. There were no sepia tint or gay frivolity in her works.

The human costs of what passes off for development came out in her works. And they hit the reader on the chin knocking him/her out with shame and indignation at what the System is heaping upon the people. It made some join her cause. Others with stronger worldly ties wished they could do the same.

Though a student of a convent, Santiniketan and Calcutta University, her Bengali was all her own. Having pared down her language to its elemental with cadence of tribal speech, Mahasweta Devi had an inimitable style of writing. Her pen gave voice to the dispossesed, shaped by history and the embers of protest which refused to be stifled. The backdrop of her novels differed but their theme was constant- protest.

The backdrop of Aandhar Manik was bargee raids which ravaged Bengal while a "spring thunder," which failed to turn the '70s into a decade of liberation was written about in Hajar Churasir Ma. In the first novel a key character is a little girl who was cast off for being in the shadow of a bargee horseman, in the second one, the central character is a bereaved mother who has lost her son to state reprisal during Naxalite movement.

Indeed women have the pride of place in Mahasweta Devi's works. In the short story Draupadi or the novel Aranyer Adhikar, suffering acquires a documentary clarity that refuses consolation. Protest was in Mahasweta Devi'd genes. She inherited it from her author parents Manish and Dharitri Ghatak: and of course her uncle Ritwik Ghatak who does not need any introduction, deserve special mention.

Mahasweta Devi has penned delightful pieces for children. Be it Nei Nagarer Shei Raja based on the turbulence post battle of Plassey or Nyadosh whose central character is a cow who ate up text books but spared pen and ink have illumined the childhood of many.

A decade has passed since her passage to the land of sleep. But it has not reduced the appeal of her works. Inequality is on the rise in the world. The questions Mahasweta Devi asked about land, labour, state power and gender have gained greater prominence than when she was writing. Mahasweta Devi was a great story teller but her tales were from harsh reality. It is this feature of her pen which makes it a form of resistance in print. (IPA Service)