The 1997 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and
Creative Communication Arts BIOGRAPHY for Mahasweta Devi She is
certainly, as a noted critic puts it, "one of the most important
writers writing in India today." It is fulsome praise and yet
more can be said of Mahasweta Devi. She stands with few equals
among todays Asian writers in the dedication and directness with
which she has turned writing into a form of service to the
people. Mahasweta Devi was born to a privileged, middle-class
Bengali family on January 14, 1926. Force of custom had it that
she was born in Dhaka where her maternal grandfather was a
practicing lawyer, since it was tradition in the family for
daughters to give birth in their parents house. (Dhaka was part
of British India before the partition of Bengal in 1947, when it
became part of Pakistan; it is now the capital of Bangladesh.)
While Devi briefly attended Eden Montessori School in Dhaka, it
was in West Bengal that she grew up in the midst of a large and
intellectually stim