Food, Abstinence, and Resistance in Mahasweta Devi’s “Mahadu: Ekti Roopkatha”

Food Studies help the present academia to explore how food functions a great deal in literature and how food opens a new gateway to interpret a literary text. In a literary text, food’s function can be multidimensional. In Mahasweta Devi’s writing, food plays an important role as it is addressed very frequently. In most of her writing, Devi places her characters at the margins, who are most of the time deprived of food. In her writing, the marginal characters are in an extreme crisis of food. This crisis is not natural. The elite/superior class creates this food crisis to sustain the marginal class’s dependence on the elite. The class position of Mahasweta Devi’s characters can be located through the foods they are given access to or denied. The present paper seeks to analyze Mahasweta Devi’s “Mahadu: Ekti Roopkatha” (2004) from the perspective of Food Criticism.