The Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi is major a prize-winning Indian novelist and an activist comrade of Spivak in campaigning for the rights of tribal peoples. She was born in 1926 in Dhaka, of a literary family. She won the Jnanpith Award (India's highest literary award) and the Magsaysay Award (considered to be Asia's version of the Nobel Prize) in 1996. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work amongst dispossessed tribal communities. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. Among her publications are Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida's De la grammmatologie), Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, Old Women (translations with critical material of the fiction of Mahasweta Devi), In Other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic, Outside in the Teaching Machine, and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Other Asias, comprising three long essays that combine poststructuralist theories with the political history of the present, will be published by Blackwell in 2002. This will be followed in 2003 by Of Derrida and in 2004 by Conversations. Chotti Munda and his Arrow forms the corner-stone of her translations for the Selected Works of Mahasweta Devi.