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Talking Writing: Four Conversations with Mahasweta Devi

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A very personal documentary attempting to explore the special relationship that Mahasweta Devi enjoys with the lives that people her writing and the people that fuel her activism. In a series of four conversations with her publisher and friend Naveen Kishore she revisits her life in a travelogue that weaves in and out of her story—a young woman writer trying to make her mark in a male dominated publishing world, coming to age both as a wife and a mother, a relationship with her once-estranged son—and the story of a nation in the throes of a freedom struggle, the realization that freedom is a privilege for the haves while the have-nots merely change masters in their struggle against slavery, the choice to actively oppose all that reeks of injustice, to record through her journalism and her fiction the less-than-human life of the tribals she has spent all her life fighting for, to remember the shoulder-to-shoulder camaraderie of the Left . . . and how this amazingly vital tapestry creates the terrain of her writing.

55 mins. Colour. English subtitles
direction and cinematography: Pushan Kripalani
VHS: Rs 650. £ 25. $ 35. NTSC: $ 50