[Re-sent] June Play: Deep Dive On Devi

Pics & a Deep Dive on Devi

June 26, 2024

This month’s feature

 Mother of 1084 (1973)

by Mahasweta Devi

We were delighted that Netflix star Ranjita Chakravarty directed this reading! She & the cast, with our partner company Bay Area Drama, did a marvelous job bringing this thorny, haunting, and relevant story to life. Photos: Stacy Lee @stacylee.media

You can hear an in-depth discussion of the plot, as well as some insight into why our curators fell in love with this powerful tale, on this month’s episode of our podcast, This Is A Classic!

An in-depth bio of Mahasweta Devi:

Nelson Mandela gives Mahasweta Devi the Jnanpith Award in 1997 for the novel version of Mother of 1084.

“All my life, I’ve done whatever I felt like doing.”

Born in 1926, Mahasweta Devi seemed destined for a writing career from the start. Her mother was a novelist and her father was a social activist. From a young age, Devi was mired in service and literary arts.

At the age of 21 (in 1947), Devi married the playwright Bijon Bhattacharya. The two had a son and lived in Kolkata. The couple lived in poverty in the early years of their marriage, and Devi had to work several jobs to supplement her husband’s income.

She wrote her first novel when she was 30. The book, The Queen of Jhansi, was a fictionalized account of the queen who dressed as a man to fight against the British in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. For her research, Devi traveled across Northern India, interviewing villagers and listening to stories about this queen passed down through generations.

Devi wrote The Mother of 1084 first as a novel, then dramatized it in 1972-73 (though the novel itself wasn’t published until 1974). However, her dramatization never reached the stage, with theaters opting to perform, instead, a more sanitized version that tempers the violence the rebels encountered from the state in the play.

In the 100+ novels and short stories she wrote in her lifetime, many were focused on the lives of tribal communities, rebels and revolutionaries, sex workers and nomads, and the lower classes. She travelled frequently, often embedding herself in the communities she was writing about. Devi simultaneously organized with these communities to protest the injustices they faced. In 1997, she was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for her writing and activism on behalf of India’s tribal communities, and the Jnanpith Award for the novel Hajar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084).

She was known for her unflinchingly honest tongue, dark humor, and idealism about the world. In an essay on the wire, G. N. Devy (a writer and activist and friend of Devi’s) wrote: “It was impossible to predict when, in the middle of the most polite conversation with persons she had not previously met, she would curtly dismiss civility and tell the person that he was a fraud.”

She died at the age of 90 in 2016.

Next month, we’re back in NYC!

Mark your calendars: Thursday, July 18

Join us for a reading of Day of the Swallows at INTAR!

Expand the Canon is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYSCA-A.R.T./New York Creative Opportunity Fund (A Statewide Theatre Regrant Program), and the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).

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