Mahasweta Devi: Short Stories Lesson Plan

Mahasweta Devi, renowned Indian author and social activist, was born in 1926 in Bangladesh to a novelist father and an activist mother. From an early age she observed her mother educating illiterate girls, and later she received a master’s degree in English from Shantiniketan, an experimental university founded by poet, philosopher, artist, composer, and social activist Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). She went on to tell the stories of India’s most marginalized groups in over 100 short stories and novels, most of them in her native language of Bengali. She was particularly known for her in-depth, firsthand field research of the communities on which she wrote. She spent a great deal of...