Quote by Mahasweta Devi: “One is not born a woman; one becomes one.”

Being a woman is not simply a biological fact — it is something imposed on people through social conditioning, expectation, and power. This idea, originally from Simone de Beauvoir, resonated deeply in Devi's feminist activist context: womanhood is constructed by society, not given by nature, which means it can also be challenged.

India in the late 1970s was grappling with the aftermath of the Emergency and growing feminist movements influenced by both local traditions and international feminist theory. Devi regularly invoked this concept from Simone de Beauvoir in her activist speeches and essays on women's rights in India.

Bengali writer and activist, born in Dhaka in 1926, whose fiction exposed the brutal exploitation of tribal and lower-caste communities in India. She received the Jnanpith Award in 1996 and the Ramon Magsaysay Award for her journalism and fiction, including the celebrated story collection Agnigarbha.