1st Edition

Mahasweta Devi in Defence of the Human The Poetics of Translating Resistance

Edited By Anuradha Ghosh, Mahmoud Al-Zayed Copyright 2025
228 Pages
by Routledge India

228 Pages
by Routledge India

This book re-thinks the literary and social worlds of Mahasweta Devi, the prolific and influential writer and social activist, in connection to her praxis. It brings into focus Devi’s preoccupation with the human, nature and life, and unwritten or distorted histories that underline her poetics of translating resistance in terms of a radical alterity. The defining feature of Devi’s writings is... Read more

List of Contributors. Acknowledgements. Introduction: The Poetics of Translating Resistance: Mahasweta Devi in Defence of the Human I. Translating the Wor[l]d of Mahasweta Devi’s Writings 1. Many Other Tongues — Translating Plurality: Mahasweta Devi 2. Engaging with the Representation of the Subaltern in Select Short Stories by Mahasweta Devi   in English Translation 3. Mahasweta Devi’s “Teer” translated as “The Arrow” II.  Subversive Retellings from Mahābhāratam 4. Retelling of the Epics in Mahasweta Devi’s short stories: A Study of  “The Five Women”, and ‘“Kunti and Nishadin” 5. Reading Mahasweta Devi’s “Kunti and the Nishadin” as a Political Transcreation of the Mahabharata III.   Visual Aesthetics and the Politics of Translation and Adaptation 6. The Politics of Visual Aesthetics and Resistance in Contemporary Picture Books by Mahasweta Devi 7. Photographs, Fame, and Fantasies: Performative Self-contradiction and Gangor, Italo Spinelli’s Film Adaptation of Mahasweta Devi’s “Behind the Bodice” 8. Politics of Transcreation: A Study of Select Cinematic Adaptations of Mahasweta Devi IV. Reading in Comparative Frames 9. Writers as Activists: A Comparative Study of Mahasweta Devi and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni 10. Exploring Gendered Subalternity in Bessie Head’s “A Collector of Treasures” and Mahasweta Devi’s After Kurukshetra V. On the Poetics of Translating Resistance 11. Ethical Literary Experiments: Thinking with Devi about Aesthet(h)ics of Liberation 12. The WOR[L]D of Mahasweta Devi and her Poetics of Translating Resistance. Index.

Biography

Mahmoud Al-Zayed is Einstein Fellow and Lecturer, Department of History and Cultural Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Anuradha Ghosh is Professor in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.