Decolonization through Language and Culture in the Writing of Mahasweta Devi

Abstract

This paper examines how Mahasweta Devi’s oeuvre performs decolonization through acts of language and culture: dismantling imperial epistemologies, reanimating subaltern knowledge systems, and refunctioning myth and official archives. Through a qualitative close reading of selected works—Draupadi ("Dopdi"), Breast-Giver ("Stanadayini"), Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha, Aranyer Adhikar (Right to the Forest), and Mother of 1084, the analysis maps three intersecting strategies. First, Devi mobilizes multilingual registers (Bengali, Hindi, English, and Adivasi lexicons) to unseat colonial and upper-caste-nationalist authority over meaning. Second, she centres indigenous cosmologies, labour, and land relations to contest colonial-capitalist extraction and its postcolonial afterlives. Third, she retools mythic and documentary forms—Mahabharata figures, police dossiers, medical records exposing how the empire and the modern state weaponize narrative control. The paper argues that Devi’s writing is about the subaltern; it is written with subaltern language practices that enact decolonization at the level of form, style, and ethics. The conclusion reflects on implications for translation politics and decolonial pedagogy.