ABSTRACT
Bringing together three literary giants named here – Mahasweta Devi alongside Toni Morrison and Amrita Pritam, this essay contends with the symbology of three women writers whose works interrogate cultural and historic practices that commit violence upon women’s bodies, especially women who are othered within nations. Toni Morrison writes of Black and other marginal women in the Americas, Amrita Pritam against the backdrop of nation-making in Punjab that experienced the severing of communities, and Mahasweta Devi about the lives of marginalised groups in a literary oeuvre that spans over a hundred books. The essay specifically examines Mahasweta Devi’s story “Giribala” alongside Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar. Together, this trio of literary feminist visionaries imagine future possibilities tethered in the material, yet enjoining a radical re-ordering of the maternal, moving away from old discursive histories of violence that simultaneously deify womanhood and eviscerate the materiality of female bodies.
