With the publication of his first collection of poems, Tabak Deya Paan in 1975, Bangla literary scene witnessed the emergence of a powerful new voice.

While novelists such as Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Sanjeeb Chandra Chattopadhyay adopted an ambiguous position on caste discourse in their writing, Mahasweta Devi's fiction explicitly delineates the Dalits and adivasis as political, social, and psychological beings embroiled in multiple levels of oppression.