January 20, 2026 08:53 AM IST First published on: Jan 20, 2026 at 08:53 AM ISTWhat is there was the national problem that year… crop failure-earthquake, everywhere clashes between so-called terrorists and state power and therefore killings, the beheading of a young man and woman in Haryana for the crime of marrying out of caste, the unreasonable demands of Medha Patkar and others around the Narmada dam, hundreds of rape-murder-lock-up torture et cetera nonissues which by natural law approached but failed to reach highlighting in the newspapers — all this remained nonissues. Much more important than this was choli ke pichhe.” Thus begins Mahasweta Devi’s short story ‘Behind the Bodice: Choli ke Pichhe’, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In a sense, Mahasweta, who would have been 100 this year, was always pulling back the bodice of state propaganda and establishment media to diagnose what was happening on the ground. What she does with her writing is to provoke the state to tell it like it is, please spare us the official version.This is what she did for the second half of her 60-year writing career, post the landmark Hajaar Churashir Maa (1974). Written from the perspective of a savarna, wealthy working woman whose college-going son is killed because he is a Naxal, the novel diagnosed Bengal’s rotting Bhadralok society as the cause and betrayal of the Naxal movement. It was a confessional, her distaste for her own class, and once it was done, she was done. Mahasweta, the writer, was reborn.AdvertisementThe book she wrote right after was Aranyer Adhikar (The Right to the Forest), a fictionalised biography of Birsa Munda. She had dived into the Naxal issue from the other end — to understand the impoverished, landless, rural poor for whom the Naxalbari movement was launched, the most wretched of whom was typically the Adivasi. Until the end of her life, she would focus on the Adivasi — in her fiction and non-fiction; on finding out if “minimum wage” and “land redistribution” and the banning of bonded labour meant anything on the ground.Could a woman from one of modern India’s most illustrious families — the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak was her paternal uncle, her maternal uncle Sachin Chaudhuri founded the Economic and Political Weekly, to name only two — know the ground realities of minimum wage, land redistribution, the so-called bonded labour ban and witch killings intimately enough to question the state with such confidence? Did savarna Mahasweta corner the mic, speaking over the Adivasi? This question may not have been asked in the 1970s, 1980s, even the 2000s, but it must be confronted today, given the questions Ambedkarites and Periyarites have raised about who shapes public discourse. I’d say she did the opposite. Mahasweta published the Adivasi, indeed the subaltern, across every axis of marginality in the magazine Bortika, which she inherited from her father. “Are you a migrant labourer (bodli sramik)? A rickshaw puller? An Adivasi primary school teacher? A socially aware village resident who can write in Bengali? A poor farmer? Bortika wants your writing.”Manoranjan Byapari, the Dalit writer from Bengal, published his first piece in Bortika in 1981 after he dropped Mahasweta home in his rickshaw. A 15- or 16-year-old young woman, Chuni Kotal, the first school graduate from the Kheria Sabar tribe, was published in 1982. “I felt dizzy with hunger in school because we didn’t have anything to eat for breakfast,” Kotal writes. “The only meal we had was dinner. So I started dividing dinner into two parts, saving one for the morning.” In 1992, Kotal would kill herself, alleging discrimination from Vidyasagar University, where she said she was denied her master’s degree.AdvertisementSifting through stacks of the magazine in the Mahasweta Devi Sangraha Shala in Kolkata, I am struck by the labour it must have taken to run Bortika for two decades. Although Mahasweta was scathing about the state, particularly the Left Front’s rule, the majority of its advertisements came from the West Bengal state government. Could it be that the state admired Mahasweta as an adversary after all? Like Madhuri Dixit who answers Neena Gupta sweetly but never straight in the film song, perhaps it deemed Mahasweta worthy of listening to?Chattopadhyay, a National Award-winning film critic and writer, is working on a biography of Mahasweta Devi