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MAPs: THREE STORIES by Mahasweta Devi. Translated and introduced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. xxxi + 213 pages. $17.95.
Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps portrays the pains of decolonization from the perspective of the indigenous tribes who inhabit the lowest level of India's strictly demarcated caste society. For Devi, a well-known writer and political activist who writes in Bengali, the struggles of decolonization are fundamentally cultural: central to each of these stories is a tension between the myths and rituals of the indigenous tribes and the pervasive modernity of national bureaucracy and multinational capitalism that penetrates even the most remote regions of the Indian subcontinent. By looking from the bottom up, as it were, Devi's stories make it impossible for the Western reader to conceive of India without acknowledging the fierce regional, religious, class, and gender struggles that have accompanied decolonization and nascent nationhood. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out in her introduction, these stories continually remind the Western reader that "'India' is not an undivided perspective."
The first two stories, "The Hunt" and "Douloti the Bountiful," relate the disempowerment of the tribals through the particular struggles of tribal women....