Activism stands for making efforts to promote, obstruct, or direct social, political, economic, or environmental change. Different forms of activism are political activism, economic activism or aesthetic activism. In the post-colonial literature, writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, James Baldwin, Ken Saro-Wiwa have used their political activism for bringing revolutionary changes in the society. Mahasweta Devi, one of most distinguished Bengali writers of this century has continued the tradition of these writers through her art which has been hailed as her aesthetics of activism. Devi’s main focus remains on radical feminist realism. The present paper makes a textual analysis of Devi’s seminal work Rudali and explores how her aesthetics have played a determining role in personifying the idea of women empowerment in India. Keywords: Activism, Aesthetics, Post Colonial, …show more content…
An internationally applauded film was also made based on this novel. Thus, she becomes one of the boldest female writers who initiated a battle against the forces of oppression and suppression and used her pen to uphold the cause of millions of tribal Indian people especially women against social injustice, discrimination and poverty. Her writing reflects the spitefulness, filth and gloom in the lives of the tribal people and accuses Indian society for the shame it heaps on its most oppressed citizens. Her works often hold what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a prominent post colonial literary theorist states in In Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993) a "problematic representations of decolonization" (77). Her aesthetic activism effortlessly endorses what Radha Chakravarty writes “Mahasweta’s current reputation as a writer rests largely on her own self-projection as champion of the tribal cause and decrier of class prejudice” (Chakravarty, Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers