- Lived:
- born Dacca (Dhaka), raised across Bengal; the writing life happened in Calcutta (Kolkata), the real life in the Adivasi villages of Purulia, Medinipur and Palamau; died in Kolkata at 90
- Field:
- Bengali fiction — more than a hundred books — fused with four decades of activism among India's tribal and "denotified" communities
- The Big Idea:
- Literature is fieldwork. She walked into the villages history had refused to record, lived there, let the people write in her own journal, turned what she learned into novels — and spent the prize money the novels won on the people in them.
- In their words:
- "the right to dream" — the demand she kept making in her last years, that this be counted the first fundamental right of every Indian
- If you remember one thing:
- The greatest Bengali prose writer of her generation decided that her real readers were people who could not read — and arranged her entire life, her books, her journal and her bank account, around that decision.