Five Plays

In the seventies, Mahasweta Devi dramatized one of her major novels, Mother of 1084, and four of her finest stories, convinced that as plays they would be more accessible to the largely illiterate audience she wanted to reach. In the five plays in this anthology, the mother of a Naxalite martyr ‘discovers’ her son (and in the process her self) a year after his death; a slave enslaved by an ancient bond discovers too late that the bond has turned to dust years ago; a ventriloquist intensely in love with his ‘speaking doll’ loses his voice to throat cancer; a son, too late, acknowledges his mother who has been outcast and branded a witch by the community; and the traditional water-diviner rises to a different role, immediately becoming a threat to the administration. These plays are rooted in history and folk myth as well as in contemporary reality. The socio-economic milieus range from the urban bourgeoisie to the urban underworld, from rural untouchable settlements to tribal communities—offering a view of India rarely seen in literature. Mahasweta Devi is one of India’s foremost writers. Her powerful fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del’Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005) amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work among dispossessed tribal communities. Samik Bandyopadhyay, who has translated and introduced these plays, is an eminent critic and scholar who has translated several of Mahasweta Devi’s works, and has been closely connected with her career for several decades.