Author: Mahasweta Devi
Publisher: Thema
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 210
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8186017054
Description
An omnibus of three outstanding works of contemporary Indian fiction translated from original Bengali with a long interview with the author.
This collection comprises three novels of Mahasweta Devi. These are:(1) The Hunt, (2) Douloti the Beautiful, and (3) Pteroactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha.
In the Hunt, Mary Oraon, tribal daughter of a white planter, who 'put Mary in her mother's womb' before leaving for Australia, comes to activate ritual into contemporary resistance as she kills her mainstream exploiter-cum-potential rapist as part of the Jani Parab, when every thirteenth year it is the turn of the women to perform the spring festival of the hunt.
In Douloti, one of Mahasweta Devi's most probing exposures of bond slavery in India, Douloti has to pay trough life for a loan of three hundred rupees taken by her father, raising over forty thousand rupees for her masters by the time she dies at the age of twenty-seven.
In Plerodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha, a tribal community, draught-stricken and destitute, confronts pterodactyl tat appears to them as the discontented soul of their ancestors, and a concerned journalist bears witness to the encounter - till the prehistoric bird dies.
THE TRANSLATOR:
For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, translating Mahasweta Devi, the activist-novelist, has been part of what she considers a 'habit of mind' - a vision of impossible justice through attention to specificity that may draw a reader to Marx, to Mahasweta, and to Derrida, three major points of interest in Ms Spivak's radical negotiations with literature and politics.
Contents
The Author in Conversation
Translator's Preface
The Hunt
Douloti the Bountiful
Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha
Appendix