In Mahasweta Devi’s centenary year, a question: Why did she not win a major Bengali literary prize?

Two thirds of the way into the 32:15 minute documentary on Mahasweta Devi commissioned by the Sahitya Akademi, the Bengali writer, typographic illustrator and editor Ajoy Gupta makes a perceptive remark about the Bengali literary establishment. “Besides the Sahitya Akademi and Jnanpith awards, Mahasweta Devi has won multitudes of awards from across India. The curious thing is that in the state where she lived and the language she wrote in, she did not win any major prizes… One might say that neither the literary establishment, nor the state celebrated her work.”

Gupta is the editor of Mahasweta Devi’s complete works, published by Dey’s Publishing, one of the three largest publishers in West Bengal, along with Ananda Publishers and Patra Bharati. He estimates that Mahasweta wrote more than 100 novels, 350 short stories, and at least half that amount of non-fiction writing in the form of essays, reportage and her unfinished memoirs. No one has studied Mahasweta, and her written work, with as much care and diligence as Gupta.

But Mahasweta did not win the Ananda Puraskar, the Rabindra Puraskar or the Bankim Puraskar. What does that say about the Bengali literary establishment?

The landscape of Bengali literary prizes

The Ananda Puraskar is given out by the Ananda Bazaar group, and the Rabindra Puraskar and Bankim Puraskar are handed out by the government of West Bengal. The Rabindra Puraskar is considered the highest literary honour given out by the state government, and considers work across categories – fiction, non-fiction, essays, poetry, travel writing and academic works. The Bankim Puraskar, also prestigious, is given for a work of prose fiction.

The Rabindra Puraskar was instituted in 1950, and prominent winners include Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (whose Pather Panchali was adapted on screen by Satyajit Ray), Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, and Ashapurna Devi – widely considered to be the greats of 20th century Bengali writing.

The Bankim Puraskar began in 1975, and winners include Sunil Gangopadhyay, Sankar – favourites of Bengali writing – and Mahasweta’s son Nabarun Bhattacharya for his novel Harbart in 1997, considered radically anti-establishment and a cult favourite of the non-parliamentary Left.

The Ananda Puraskar, a prestigious private prize, is typically awarded for one notable literary work spanning all forms, ranging from fiction and non-fiction to memoirs amd essays. It was instituted in 1958, two years after Mahasweta’s first book, Jhansir Rani – a biography of Lakshmibai – was published. Winners include notable writers such as Sunil Gangopadhyay, Buddhadeva Bose, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay – Mahasweta’s contemporaries in terms of publishing age – and the journalist Gour Kishore Ghosh, who won the Ramon Magsaysay prize before her.

‘The anti-style writer’

Mahasweta’s first book was published in 1956, she died in 2016, and new work continues to be published posthumously from her papers. In that sense, she has been a published writer for 70 years running. She won the Sahitya Akademi in 1979 (for Aranyer Adhikar), and the Jnanpith award, considered to be India’s highest lifetime achievement prize in literature, in 1997.

Mahasweta is, without a doubt, among the greatest Bengali writers of the 20th century, alongside Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Ashapurna Devi and Sunil Gangopadhyay, among others. Literary quality is, by definition, subjective. But there are at least two objective measures by which Mahasweta makes the cut of belonging to the finest in the century.

One, the Jnanpith prize in 1996 – a lifetime achievement award in literature in India – of which she is one of six Bengali winners so far. Second, her unreasonably prolific output across forms, as listed by Gupta. Barring poetry, there is no literary form that Mahasweta did not produce work in confidently. A substantive amount of this was published in her lifetime.

The third argument is subjective –my personal assessment. I rate Mahasweta among the three most important stylists in the Bengali language, not only in the 20th century but in the history of its literature, after Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore. Dutt, for elevating Bengali to a language of grace from a quotidian language, beginning with his epic poem Meghnad Bodh Kavya (Verses on the Slaying of Meghnad). And Tagore, because of his gift for evoking nature with rhythm and sound and phonetics, going well beyond admiring nature, and writing about it. He is among the greatest nature writers of the 20th century, and almost no one can capture the beats and sounds of nature and life in words like he does. The Nobel Prize and the wide acclaim he received is not why he was great, they underline the fact that he was recognised as a giant.

In my book, Mahasweta joins them because she broke out of the Bhadralok register of elegance to write in voices from the slum, the street, the farm, the field, the factory – bringing to the page their idioms, phrases and speech patterns. She brought alive non-Bhadro characters, who sound authentic, coarse and, frequently, very funny. The writer Sumana Roy calls this “anti-style”, and considers this the very reason for her being snubbed by literary prizes.

“In spite of her coming from great cultural capital, a family of writers and artists, including a film director, Mahasweta Devi’s writing was ignored by the Calcutta literary establishment,” said Roy, “because of the choice of subjects, the settings, and the language she chose to write in. Her anti-style would have made her writing seem like a critique of the established and admired literary styles of the time, particularly male Bengali writers.”

The establishment, not so much the literary establishment

Ganesh Devy, one of the greatest living scholars of language in the world, and a close associate of Mahasweta’s who set up an organisation to fight for the rights of denotified criminal tribes with her, said that she had shared the sense of being disowned by the literary elite with him, without mentioning awards specifically. “During her lifetime, whenever I visited Bengal and met various literary persons, I noticed that they did not speak of her with much respect. There was a shade of character assassination,” said Devy. “In any case, the pain in the loss of home and love was also the source of her literary imagination. However, towards the last years of her life, there were occasions when I attended some literary events/meetings with her, and I saw that she was being treated with very high esteem.

“Prizes represent not the literary establishment, but the establishment,” said Samik Bandyopadhyay, theatre and literary critic, English translator of Mother of 1084, and a collaborator of Mahasweta’s on Oxford University Press’s Bengali school reader project. “What is interesting is that the Trinamool Congress, whom she endorsed at one time, did not honour her with one of these prizes either.”

They did, however, make her president of the Bangla Academy, a post she quit in 2012, saying her choices had been undermined.

Of course, prizes are never not political. Not only in the sense of being influenced by factors other than the quality of writing, but also in the obvious sense of their recipients having to be aligned to state power. Mahasweta at her best has a unmistakeable political undercurrent. There is a perception, particularly among Bengali readers, that Mahasweta is an important political writer but does not have much literary value, likely arising from her activism in the last 35-and-odd years of her life.

But Mahasweta began differently, a Bhadralok writer with an upper middle-class perspective as most of those considered her contemporaries. What many, including me, tend to forget is how long she has been writing: when she published Hajaar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) in 1973-74, her landmark novel and one of the most memorable works on the Naxalite movement, she had already been a published writer for 18 years, writing one book after another continuously since 1956. What happened with Mother of 1084 was that she established herself as a major writer, as well as a writer who aligned herself with the Naxalite movement.

Her next novel, Aranyer Adhikar (Their Right to the Forest) makes the argument that the British colonial regime also faced troublesome resistance from tribal leaders, such as Birsa Munda in 1900, in the early 20th century, even though they did not conceive an Indian nation that these tribals were part of. The school history that most of us Indian citizens read has had, unless recently changed, focused on privileged figures from mainstream society, both in terms of caste and class. An argument for Birsa Munda’s causing significant distress to the colonial administration, and raising the consciousness for rights among his followers, has a strong political charge.

Thereafter, her work focused consistently on the Adivasi, whom she considered the most impoverished, overlooked section of Indian society, making a scathing critique of Indian state policy that makes generous provisions for the tribal population but in reality does everything to maintain the feudal order of exploitation that crushes them. “My state has disappointed me very much in the matter of denotified criminal tribes,” she wrote in the editorial of the July-December issue of the magazine Bortika, which she published herself. “There is no state that promotes itself [as progressive] as much as this state does.”

It was a sentiment she would express again and again in her writing on the state. It is natural to imagine that would not sit well with them. Interestingly, Bortika received advertisements from the Left Front government. In fact, in a list of 57 regular advertisers in the magazine that Mahasweta put out, at least 26 were Bengal government departments.

A change of heart

Towards the end of their long 34-year-long-reign in the state, from 1977 to 2011, the Left Front, Gupta said, was keen to make amends. “Sometime in 2007-2008, at a book function, the president of the Bangla Academy at that time, a noted poet himself, asked me to persuade Mahasweta to accept any one of the three state awards.” said Gupta. “I told them, how can I ask her to accept an award that her son has received several years earlier, given that she began her career as a writer well before him? Later, when I told Mahasweta-di about this, she said, you said the right thing, Ajoy.”

There is another conversation that Mahasweta had recounted to him personally some years earlier. A top CPI(M) leader had reportedly made a personal phone call to Mahasweta, asking her to consider accepting an award from the government. Mahasweta had pointed out that the secretary of the Bangla Academy then had criticised her novel Aranyer Adhikar on the ground that the valorisation of tribal resistance undermined the labour movement’s contribution to the anti-British struggle.

A lot of these conversations are attributed to Gupta, but remember that Gupta is the one who made the observation that Mahasweta had not won any major Bengali prize. Given his long working relationship with Mahasweta, it is likely that he was privy to conversations around this, or indeed, that it arose from something she may have confided in. Or even that he noticed a curious absence of awards, and tracked the matter over the years.

In the case of the coveted Ananda Puraskar, the trigger may have also been personal, according to Gupta. But there were some incidents before and after. At the start of her writing career, when she wrote purely to earn money, Mahasweta would write with the pseudonym of Sumitra Devi. A couple of these stories were published in the Ananda Bazar publications, and was paid Rs 25 per story. One time, Mahasweta told Gupta, a money order for Rs 20 was sent. She refused to accept it, and the editor Ashok Sarkar was reportedly miffed that a new writer had declined the payment.

At the same time, her first book The Queen of Jhansi (1956) was serialised in the Ananda Bazar group’s prestigious magazine Desh. “That gave her first work a serious push,” said Bandyopadhyay, “though of course it was also an achievement – the first work to use oral histories seriously. I have also seen her stories in Desh later on. But prizes are another thing, never about literary merit alone.”

Did Mahasweta care about not winning big in Bengali? At the National Awards ceremony in 2021, the sound recordist Resul Pookutty told me that he had won an Oscar, three National Awards (until then) but no Kerala state award. It mattered enough that he mentioned it, even if it did not mean much to him. In a sense, this article was birthed from his anecdote. How much do we care about recognition from our own?

From what I have read of her autobiographical writing, Mahasweta doesn’t mention it. Perhaps this was because she knew, by the last couple of decades in her life, that the Bengali prize arbiters had lined up to give her a big one. All they wanted was her to accept. Knowing Mahasweta, her saltiness and her penchant for defiant, insolent characters, she enjoyed playing the establishment. Let them run after me, she may have decided. Let them get a taste of what they do to every citizen, running around in circles to get a signature.

Sohini Chattopadhyay is a National Award-winning film critic, and the author of The Day I Became a Runner. She is working on a biography of Mahasweta Devi.

Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this article erroneously said Jhansir Rani is a work of fiction. The error has been rectified.