Paper Details

Name: Saroj Kumar Ray
Country: India

Year: 2024
Volume: Volume-11, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 27-31

ABSTRACT
This study examines the representation of subaltern voices and counter-narratives in thewritings of Mahasweta Devi and Bama. Although the study belongs primarily to literary and cultural analysis, it reads their works through the political economy of caste, gender, land, labour, and social exclusion. Mahasweta Devi‟s fiction foregrounds Adivasi, tribal, bondedlabour, and dispossessed communities whose exploitation is linked to state power, feudal control, police violence, and capitalist extraction. Bama‟s writings articulate Dalit Christian women‟s experience of caste humiliation, religious contradiction, gendered labour, and collective resistance in Tamil society. The study argues that both writers transform literature into a counter-archive of the oppressed. Their texts do not merely represent marginality; they produce alternative knowledge from below. Through characters such as Dopdi Mejhen, Douloti, Sanichari, and Bama‟s Dalit women narrators, the margins become active sites of speech, critique, and social imagination. The study concludes that Mahasweta Devi and Bama redefine Indian literature by placing subaltern life at the centre of historical, ethical, and
economic inquiry.

Keywords: Subaltern, counter-narrative, Mahasweta Devi, Bama, caste, gender, Adivasi,
Dalit literature, political economy.