Slaves of Palamau and Other Writings

A collection of Mahasweta Devi's activist essays, reportage, and editorials on rural development and dispossession.  

What do India’s poorest communities reveal about power, land, and survival? In the late 1970s, writer Mahasweta Devi shifted her focus to the lives of Adivasi (Indigenous peoples of the Indian subcontinent) and Dalit communities in eastern India, especially Bihar and West Bengal. Traveling widely and staying with the communities she wrote about, she drew on these firsthand encounters in her writing. She also edited the Bengali quarterly Bortika, making the journal a space for peasants, laborers, workers, and other marginalized groups to speak for themselves.

The Slaves of Palamau and Other Writings brings together a representative selection from her activist prose of the 1980s and early 1990s, drawn from essays, reportage, and editorials. These pieces examine rural development; dispossession and land alienation; environmental damage; and the conditions of landless laborers, sharecroppers, bonded and contract workers, miners, and Indigenous communities, with the steady attention that also informs her fiction.

Mahasweta Devi (1926–2016) was an Indian writer and activist born in Dhaka and educated at Santiniketan, a school and art center in West Bengal, and the University of Calcutta. She wrote more than one hundred novels and many story collections, and is widely honored for her writing and public advocacy. Maitreya Ghatak is a translator and social researcher with extensive on-the-ground experience, closely associated with Mahasweta Devi’s activism for many years.