Mahasweta Devi

Trivia

• Was recently been spearheading the movement against the industrial policy of the government of West Bengal, the state of her domicile.
• Praised Gujarat for strides made in development at the grassroots level and criticised the West Bengal government saying that 30 years of Left rule has achieved "very little" in that state.
• At the Frankfurt Book Fair 2006, when India was the first country to be the Fair's second time guest nation, she made an impassioned inaugural speech wherein she moved the audience to tears with her lines taken from the famous film song by Raj Kapoor.
• . Also during that period, she also worked as a journalist and as a creative writer.
• In 1964, she began teaching at Bijoygarh College (an affiliated college of the University of Calcutta system). During those days, Bijoygarh College was an institution for working class women students.
• Joined the Rabindranath Tagore founded Vishvabharati University in Santiniketan and completed a B.A. (Hons) in English, and then finished an M.A. in English at Calcutta University as well.
• Her first schooling was in Dhaka, but after the partition of India she moved to West Bengal in India.
• Her father Manish Ghatak was a poet, novelist , a social activist and deeply involved with IPTA, and elder brother of noted filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, and her mother Dharitri Devi was also a writer and a social worker.
• Was born in 1926 in Dhaka, to literary parents.
• Her only son Nabarun Bhattacharya is also a renowned author in his own right.