ABSTRACT
The vast group that spans, in the metropolis, the migrant subproletariat at one end, and the post-colonial artist, intellectual, academic, political exile, successful professional or capitalist at the other, is articulate in many different ways. It is not surprising that it claims, in one way or another, a paradigmatic importance in the contemporary socius. By contrast, Mahasweta Devi lingers in post-coloniality in the space of difference, in decolonized terrain. Her material
is not written with an international audience in mind. It often contains problem atic representations of decolonization after a negotiated political independence. Sometimes this offends the pieties of the national bourgeoisie. A great deal can be said on this issue. Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas’s words will suffice to make a closure here:
The sheer quantity of Mahasweta’s production, her preoccupation with the gendered subaltern subject, and the range of her experimental prose-moving from the tribal to the Sanskritic register by way of easy obscenity and political analysis, will not permit her to be an isolated voice.
