On a humid Calcutta afternoon in the early 1980s, a rickshaw-puller named Manoranjan Byapari asked his passenger—a bespectacled woman in a cotton sari—the meaning of the word jijivisha, the enduring will to live. She answered, then pressed him to write for the working-class magazine she edited. Before stepping down, she scribbled an address on a slip of paper and signed it: Mahasweta Devi. The encounter, recalled decades later by Byapari, now a celebrated Dalit writer and politician, was not an act of charity but of recognition. Devi, who would have turned 100 this year, spent six decades insisting that the people she wrote about—Adivasis, denotified tribes, landless labourers—possessed the right to dream their own paths, or mukti, and to narrate their own fates. Her own writing, she said, was a form of ‘surrender’ to language, a possession by the spirit of literature that left no room for the ego of the author.

That insistence on the power of naming ripples far beyond Bengali letters. In France, a maîtresse de conférences—a university lecturer—recently described her own slow conversion to the word autrice. For years she resisted, preferring auteur or the slightly feminised auteure, convinced that the masculine form was the neutral. The shift came not from ideology but from a growing awareness that her reflexes were simply habits of socialisation, not arguments. ‘Why would autrice be ugly and actrice not?’ she asked, pointing to the unconscious grip of majority usage. Her testimony, published in the Swiss daily Le Temps, echoes a broader Francophone reckoning with a language that has long treated the masculine as universal.

Viewed from American academia, the stakes of such linguistic choices appear even higher. The president of the American Anthropological Association, Carolyn Rouse, declared in a recent interview that the idea of two biological sexes is ‘factually incorrect’ and likened the binary view to astrology. When a journalist noted that over 40 percent of forensic anthropologists in a 2022 survey held that sex is binary, Rouse dismissed the finding, suggesting many practitioners lacked advanced schooling. The exchange, dissected in The Atlantic, revealed a striking incuriosity: Rouse said she did not understand what people mean when they assert sex is binary, yet she was certain their position was settled error. For scholars who see the category as a necessary analytic tool, the episode crystallised a disciplinary rift over whether some questions can even be debated.

Away from the seminar room, the same tension between lived experience and expert framing surfaced in a more intimate register. A 50-year-old woman wrote to a Washington Post advice columnist, worried that after her divorce she was spending too much time on sex with multiple partners. The columnist, Shane O’Neill, replied that there is no such thing as too much sex, but urged her to watch for obsessive thoughts and to get tested for infections every three months. The exchange, republished by a Russian-language outlet, treated the question not as a moral failing but as a practical negotiation of desire and self-care—a small, private act of naming what one wants without shame.

In Purulia, West Bengal, a two-room mud house called Mahasweta Bhawan still holds her bed, her books, her photographs. Prasanta Rakshit, who lived there for four decades, continues her work: helping Kheria Sabar families with land records, legal cases, a girls’ hostel. When the community first asked for her help, they said, ‘We just wanted her pen.’ The pen, for Mahasweta Devi, was never separate from the body that held it or the forests she walked through, taking running notes of life as it unfolded. Her grandson recalls her saying she was appreciated for the wrong reasons; the books she considered her best—Aronyer Adhikar, Kobi Bondhoghoti Gnaier Jibon o Mrityu—are stark reminders of tribal undervaluation. In the end, the question she posed to a friend returns, unanswerable: ‘What happens to belief when it is betrayed?’