Rani Rashmoni
Rani Rashmoni was one of the great women in the history of Bengal. She is known for the services she rendered to the society, contributions she made to the advancement of education in the state. She is also known for her nationalist attitude which often put her in direct confrontation with the British. She was a very religious lady and lived an austere life.
Rani Rashmoni was born on September 1793 in a poor family but was married into a zamindar family of Janbazaar,Calcutta. But soon after her marriage her husband Babu Rajchandra Das passed away. The death of her husband shattered her and changed her outlook. She became more religious and turned to spirituality.She found solace in the service of mankind.
She had great leadership and administrative qualities.She looked after and managed her estates well.
She constructed a number of bathing ghats on the Hooghly river for the devotees.One of them is called Babughat after her husband. But her major contribution is the construction of Dakhineswar Kali Temple.
She also fought for the fisherman of Hooghly whose livelihood suffered because of the speeding boats of the British.She put up blockades in their path until the British heeded to their demands.
She also made generous contributions to the National Library and the Presidency College ( the then Hindu College )
This queen of the masses died on February 1861.

Mahasweta Devi is one of the greatest literary personalities of Bengal.She was born in 1926 in Dhaka, now Bangladesh. Later she moved to India with her parents.Her father Manish Ghatak and mother Dhatri Devi both were writers. She did her schooling in Dhaka,did her graduation from Shantiniketan and did her Masters in English literature at Calcutta University .

She started her professional life in 1967 when she joined the Bijaygarh College as a teacher and then became a lecturer at her alma mater,Calcutta University. She retired from Calcutta University in 1984 to devote full time to writing and social work.

In a literary career spanning over forty years, she has produced twenty collections of short stories and nearly hundred novels in Bengali.Her works have been translated in major Indian languages like Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi and Oriya. Her stories and novels have also been translated into foreign languages like English, Italian, Japanese and French.Some of her most popular works are Hazar chourasir Ma, Aranyer Adhikar, Basai Tudu, Kulaputra, Rudali, etc. Jhansir Rani, published in 1956 was her first book which was based on the life of Laxmi Bai.

She was conferred the Gyanpith Award, the highest literary award in India,in 1995, the Magsaysay Award which is considered the Asian equivalent to the Nobel Prize,in 1996 and the Padmavibhushan Award for her contributions in the field of literature, journalism and mass communication, in 1997.

Mahasweta started writing stories at a very young age and her writings were published in various literary journals.She has been a regular contributor to Bartika, a journal dedicated to the cause of the oppressed and the downtrodden. She is also the editorial advisor of the Budhan, a newsletter of a tribal rights group.

Mahasweta Devi culls the plots of her stories from ordinary life around her. The downtrodden, the untochables and the landless tribals who are oppressed and exploited by the upperclass landlords and moneylenders are the heroes and heroines of her stories. In some of her stories she has also dealt with the misrule of the British government and the freedom movement . She also openly admits that the Naxalite movement of the sixties and seventies in Bengal were a great inspiration for her. Her novel Hazar Chourasir Ma is based on the story of a woman whose son was killed for his Naxalite affiliations. Her another story Aranyer Adhikar which was published in 1977 is based on Birsa Munda, the tribal freedom fighter.She has donated the entire prize money from the Gynpeeth and Magsaysay awards to the organizations working for the upliftment of the tribal communities.This speaks volumes of the sincerity of her revolutionary thoughts and her feelings for the oppressed and the undrpriviledged. She says that a writer should have a conscience and she has a duty towards the society.She is a well-known tribal rights activist and is associated with tribal rights movements in Bengal, Bihar , Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
Apart from stories and novels she has written stories for children and plays as well.In her adolescence, she was associated with the theatre group Gananatya which popularized theatre in the rural Bengal in the thirties and forties.