Responses to Violence: A Review of the Women Characters in Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084

Abstract

Born on 14 January, 1926 in Dhaka (then undivided India, now in Bangladesh) to
artist Manish Chandra Ghatak and social activist Dharitri Devi, Mahasweta Devi grew up in
an intellectual environment where she was brought up to take interest in creative writing,
music, theatre and films. Gradually, she chose writing as her career and worked as an activist
for development of the underprivileged.Mother of 1084 is one of her most famous work,
which was translated into an English play by Samik Bandyopadhyay. It was written on the
aftermath of the urban Naxalite movement and its effect on the family members of the
deceased revolutionaries. The immediate source of the story was the killing of eleven young
men with their hands tied behind them in Barasat in November 1970 and the slaughter of
hundreds of Naxalites in Baranagar on 12 August 1971 by the police under the instruction of
the ruling party as well as the party in opposition. The paper aims to show the impact of the
urban revolt on two bereaved mothers, Sujata and Somu’s mother and the survived Naxalite,
Nandini and their act of resistance to the patriarchal society of the post- Naxalite movement