India

Shantiniketan is three hours by train north of Calcutta. Nearby are the villages of the 'tribes', as they say, the animists who worship nature as their god. It’s also here that the great poet Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize winner, founded his international free university, a 'place for freedom and joy amidst the great brotherhood of trees', and once welcomed the young Mahasweta, who would become an activist writer, a great lady of Bengal.

Shanti lives in a lovely village all in earthen tones, where traditional bas-relief decorations mingle with tags of the sickle and hammer! The region of Calcutta is primarily communist and elections are coming up. In his twilight years, the philosopher poet Tagore said: 'I have had my invitation to this world’s festival and I played there for as long as I could.' Shanti was summoned to another type of event, a retrospective on the ordinary misery of the women here below, where there is no other music than that of daily chores."

Extract from Zoé Zoé, Femmes du mondes, 2007, Éditions Gallimard