Mahasweta Devi hospitalised

Magsaysay Award winning writer-activist Mahasweta Devi was Saturday admitted to hospital with chest pain and respiratory problems.

The 85-year-old Jnanpith awardee was first taken to the state-run SSKM hospital and later admitted to a private nursing home where she is under the treatment of critical care specialist Subrata Maitra.

"She is stable," said a doctor at Belle Vue Clinic. Apart from her literary credentials, she is also known for her work among the Lodha and Shabar tribals in West Bengal.

Full report here Deccan Herald

Hinduism and modernity

The contemporary Indian novel might be said to have two strains. The first is the Indian novel in English, and its best-known representatives are household names: Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga. The second is the Indian novel in languages other than English, and who the great names are in this space depends very much on the language and geographical location of the reader. The English-speaking reader, relying solely on translations and looking down again from a pan-Indian perspective, might say that currently these are the Bengali novelists Sankar and Mahasweta Devi, the Tamil writer Salma, the Hindi writer Alka Saraogi, the Oriya writer Chandrasekhar Rath, and the Rajasthani folklorist Vijay Dan Detha.

One remarkable aspect of the Indian novel is that both these strains trace their origins in the work of one man, Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894). The first Indian to take a BA under the new English-medium educational system set up by the British, Chatterji thereby came under the influence of the novel, then a prose form unknown in India. Chatterji’s first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife (1865), written while he was a young deputy magistrate in the newly established Indian civil service, was composed in English.

Full report here Mint

In India, sympathy could be a thought-crime

Legendary writer Mahasweta Devi has challenged Union home minister P Chidambaram to arrest her and put her in jail for 10 years, in response to the Centre’s newfound enthusiasm for using the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, to arrest Maoist ‘sympathisers’. One must sympathise with the home minister for being humiliated by a gutsy 84-year-old woman.

Yet sympathy is a thought-crime thanks to the UAPA, which says: ‘Any person who commits the offence of supporting a terrorist organisation with inter alia intention to further the activities of such terrorist organisations would be liable to be punished with imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years or with fine or with both.’

The key point seems to be ‘intention to further the activities’ of the Maoists. So the question that must be asked is, has anyone furthered the activities of the Maoist more than the state with its exploitative economic policies and its counter-insurgency tactics? What is more useful to the Maoists, a writ petition filed by activists for the Adivasis, or a security apparatus that terrorises the population on mere suspicion and suppresses dissent and civil society?

Full report here New Indian Express

Mahasweta stalls Suman, party frowns

For a change, Mamata Banerjee may not find Mahasweta Devi’s advice to Kabir Suman requesting him not to resign as MP too palatable.

The Trinamul Congress chief had made it clear to her aides at a meeting in Delhi yesterday that she would rather have the Jadavpur MP out of the party than let him cause further embarrassment.

Mahasweta sent a note to Suman last night urging him not to resign after the MP sent text messages to Mamata and party chief whip Sudip Bandopadhyay expressing his desire to quit both Parliament and party.

Today, the writer said: “Differences between Suman and Trinamul have strengthened the CPM’s hands. I will advise both Mamata and Suman to sit with me and thrash out their differences through dialogue for the greater cause of driving the CPM out of Bengal in 2011.”

Full report here Telegraph

'I don't know what the Maoists want but I can mediate'

Much of Mahasweta Devi 's writings are inspired by the tribals of Bengal and Bihar. Her work offers valuable documentation of these marginalized communities. The 84-year-old writer, who has won many awards, including the Magsaysay and the Jnanpith, is well-known for her strong opposition to the government's anti-Maoist operations. She tells Jayanta Gupta that she doesn't know the Maoists, but that as a writer with a social conscience, she is willing to mediate on the people's behalf. 

What went wrong in rural Bengal in order for outfits like the Maoists to gain a foothold? 
After what happened in the 70s, we welcomed the Left Front government in 1977. We expected them to deliver but they have not even done the bare minimum for the people. Even after so many years, a major part of rural Bengal does not have access to electricity or good roads. It only got worse and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was the last straw. Projects like the ICDS and Right to Food were complete failures.

Add to this the state-sponsored violence. There can be nothing more cruel that what took place in Nandigram. The victims told me how men who used to call them didi (elder sister), boudi (elder sister-in-law) and masi (aunt) took liberties at the behest of a certain political party. The police refused to register FIRs, leave alone arrest the criminals.

In West Midnapore, it was not only the tribals who were victims of torture. Everybody who is below the poverty line (BPL) has suffered — including Muslims and backward classes. The government handed over land in Salboni to the Jindal Group and received crores. How much of this was utilized for local development? There is a big scam in West Bengal regarding the distribution of ration cards. BPL families receive “above poverty line” cards while affluent ones hold BPL ones. After all this, does the government expect people to support them?

Full interview here Times of India 

Big Home Video’s “Script to Screen” makes for an interesting package

Literary adaptations on big screen have always been a tricky business. Across countries and languages there are numerous examples of how sometimes brilliant literary work has been reduced to mediocre movies (example from closer home: Mahashweta Devi’s Hazar Chaurasi Ki Maa, filmed by Govind Nihalani), and how sometimes great literature has been made into even greater cinema (example from closer home: Bhisham Sahani’s Tamas, filmed again by Govind Nihalani). While bad literature can almost never be converted into good cinema, there are many good novels that have been made into forgettable films. But despite all that and more, literature continues to be an important source of cinema (the only exception perhaps is our own Bollywood which only rarely taps into India’s rich literary heritage but all the time lament about the lack of good stories, especially at (very often) times when it has to get ‘inspired’ by a foreign (read ‘mostly Hollywood’) film.

It is in this context that the recent series of DVDs brought out by Big Home Videos, under the title “Script to Screen”, makes for an interesting package. The package has 22 titles, and it’s an interesting mix of films, some of them probably the best ever made across genres. The stories of these films are so well known that they do not require re-rendering of even plot outlines here, and most of them have even cinematically excelled to warrant specific details. Of the lot, my picks are definitely A Beautiful Mind, Forrest Gump, Love Story, No Country for Old Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Out of Africa and The Day of the Jackal. Each one of them comes with a classic story, but what makes them special is that their directors have put their own distinctive touches into them, giving them a distinct identity of their own.

Full feature here Dear Cinema

LBR achieves a milestone

The Limca Book of Records has completed 20 years of docunmenting records. At a gala celebration in the capital, Vijaya Gose, editor announced names of 20 Indians of the year, up from the usual five.

The book was launched by eight of the 20 Indians of the year, which included Amitabh Bachchan, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief G Madhavan Nair, senior photographer Raghu Rai and senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai, among others. Others in the list, who were not present on the occasion were actor Naseeruddin Shah, singer Lata Mangeshkar, writer Mahashweta Devi, shooter Abhinav Bindra, cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, badminton player Saina Nehwal and footballer Baichung Bhutia besides others.

The Hindi and Malayalam versions of the book were also unveiled on the occasion.

The first LBR was launched in 1990.

Mahasweta Devi, VS Naipaul in Man Booker shortlist

Mahasweta Devi and VS Naipaul are among the 14 writers from 12 countries who are in the running for this year’s Man Booker International Prize.

Also on the list is doube Booker winner Peter Carey from Australia. Others in the list include Manuel Vargas from Peru, UK's James Kelman and three Americans including Evan S Connell. Also on the list are Croatian Dubravka Ugresic and Russian Ludmila. Arnost Lustig from the Czech Republic and Italian Antonio Tabucchi complete the list.

The £60,000 award, instituted in 2004, is different from the annual and better-known Man Booker Prize. This one recognises a writer’s life-time achievement rather than judging him or her on the basis of the latest work.

It is given every two years to a writer who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in English.

The previous two winners of the award are the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare and the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. Kadare won the inaugural one in 2005. This year’s contenders were chosen by a panel of judges that included Amit Chaudhuri.

The winner will be announced in May.

Agra to host SAARC lit fest

The city of the Taj will host about 60 writers, poets and scholars from all the eight south Asian countries at the SAARC Festival of Literature, to be held in the city from March 13-16.

Besides literature, considerable attention is expected to be on terrorism, ethnic angst and popular culture. "The focus this year is on terrorism. The foundation is organising the festival at a time when expectations from the creative fraternity and peace activists have soared in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and sensitivities of the creative fraternity across the SAARC region, particularly in Pakistan and India, are shaken and bruised," festival founder Ajeet Caur said.

Caur set up the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature in 1997, which received the government seal in 1999.

13 writers from Pakistan and 8 from Afghanistan are to attend the festival. Afghanistan and Myanmar are participating at this annual festival for the first time.

Expected participants include Jayant Mahapatra, who will inaugurate the festival, Mahashweta Devi, Kapila Vatsyayan, Gulzar, Abid Hussain, M J Akbar, Mushirul Hasan, Seema Mustafa and Indira Goswami.