ABSTRACT
Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 and Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us record how the distortions in the system and their consequences like the naxalism, which ravaged the state of West Bengal in 1967 or the National Emergency in 1975, marked real challenges to caste, class, and gender empowerment in post-independence India. The 1970s and 1980s were significant epochs in the contemporary socio-political and gendered history of India. The chapter dwells on and seeks viable responses for questions like what has changed post-independence, especially for the disempowered including women. Instead of simply highlighting the authorial disillusionment with the political, it analyses how Mahasweta Devi and Sahgal negotiate the political through the crisis of the personal. These authors engage with possibilities of integrating the interests of subordinate classes/castes and oppressed groups with those of upper caste women. Radha Kumar relates that this was one of the significant questions that confronted the feminist organisation of the 1970s, “How women could be organised and represented?” Here, both Mahasweta Devi and Sahgal propose that feminism culled solely from their own privileged experience could never be politically effective if it does not recognise the deprivations and discriminations operating within society. The critical aspect of self-reformation could only materialise if the oppressed groups express a political consciousness of their own oppression.
