Old Women

Mahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost literary figures, a prolific and best-selling author in Bengali of short fiction and novels, and a deeply political social activist who has been working in marginalized communities for decades. "Old Women" tells the touching, poignant tales of two timeworn women. In "Statue", we meet Dulali, a widow since childhood, who is now an old woman preoccupied only with day-to-day survival. When the government decides to erect in her village a statue of Dindayal – a man who had fought in India's struggle for independence from British rule and who also was in love with Dulali long ago – a tragic, forbidden love comes back to haunt her. And in "The Fairy Tale of Mohanpur", a combination of poverty, societal indifference, and government apathy leads Andi to lose her eyesight, even as she persists in her faith in a fairy-tale solution.