A Dalit writer’s journey: Of multiple identities and struggles

First, there is the issue of identity. The title of the book is Interrogating My Chandal Life, while its sub-title is ‘An Autobiography of a Dalit’. An exploration of identity (or identities) starts with the title of the book itself. Chandal is a low caste in the Hindu caste hierarchy. Byapari belongs to the Namashudra caste. The book is an autobiography written mostly in the first person and Byapari writes this about his father and their community: “My father always proclaimed his caste identity with pride. We are ‘Namashuddurs of the Kashyap gotra’, he would say. Though people of the upper castes called us ‘untouchable’ and spoke of us contemptuously as Chandals or Chanrals, neither my father nor anybody of the community, would acknowledge themselves as Chandals. They claimed that we were highborns and that the blood of the Brahmin flowed in our veins. This, however, is not a claim confined to the Namashudras.”

The Namashudra identity is the one Byapari was born with. That is his first identity, an identity his father was proud of. However, the society they lived in bestowed another caste identity on his family: Chandal. Nobody who is called Chandal, including Byapari’s father, was comfortable with being called a Chandal. However, Byapari chose to use his identity as a Chandal to write this book. In Bengali, the book is called Itibritte Chandal Jibon, which roughly translates into The history of [my] Chandal life. In the English translation, the book is called Interrogating My Chandal Life—which derives the Chandal name from the original Bengali book—while its sub-title is An Autobiography of a Dalit. In the original Bengali title, the “Dalit” identity has not been touched upon. Although the first sentence of Chapter 1 in the English translation begins in this way, “I was born into an impoverished Dalit family”, I am not sure if this is the first line in the Bengali original as I have not read the Bengali original. In the Bengali original, at least in the title, “Chandal” alone sufficed. In the English translation, however, the author’s Dalit identity has been highlighted, thus bestowing upon the author and the book another identity—that of a more politically heavy identity, the Dalit identity. In Bengali, perhaps, calling a person Chandal was enough. In English, for a readership that, perhaps, does not understand the society Chandals come from, perhaps an addition of the term “Dalit” becomes necessary as a way of explaining things.

From the original Bengali to the English translation, Byapari’s autobiography—or memoir—gathered one identity after the other. Quite like how Byapari himself gathered several identities through his lifetime.

Byapari was born a Namashudra, the society made him Chandal, and his circumstances turned him into a refugee.

Byapari was born in “a place called Turuk-khali near the village of Pirichpur which used to be a part of the Barisal district in the now vanished East Pakistan.” His parents, “both simple rural people, [had] only a vague idea of [his] birth year which [he places] at 1950-51, a few years after that traumatic event that shook the Indian subcontinent: the Partition of India.” That is, Byapari was born in the country that is now known as Bangladesh. Communal riots and “[f]ear of violence [drove] thousands from East Pakistan towards an unknown geographical entity called ‘India’. Those who were educated, socially established, economically stable, upper caste fled first.”

Byapari’s family fled too, ending up in the camp built for refugees at Shiromanipur in Bankura district of West Bengal state in India. With this escape from East Pakistan, came the label of refugee.

With the label of refugee, came the label of Bangal. Bangal are Bengalis from the East Bengal part of Bengal, as opposed to Ghoti who are Bengalis from the West Bengal part of Bengal. “To the people of West Bengal, the words ‘refugee’ and ‘Bangal’ are synonymous. And the word ‘Bangal’, a name for people from East Bengal, was also, for all practical purposes, a word of abuse too. Like the adjectives ‘reactionary’, bourgeois, ‘loan shark’, ‘jotedar’, ‘street mongrel’.”

After this, surviving in India made Byapari take up several more identities, a fact Byapari sums up in one sentence in the Preface to this book: “You’ve seen me a hundred times in a hundred ways”, before elaborating on the various identities he took up.

“[T]ake a look at that green field outside your window. You will see a bare-bodied goatherd running behind his cows and goats with a stick. You’ve seen this boy many times…That is me. That is my childhood. … Now come outside your house for a while. Look at that tea stall that stands at the corner of the road where your lane meets the main road. That boy who you see, uncombed hair, wearing a dirty, smelly, torn vest, with open sore on his hands and feet; he has been beaten a while ago by the owner of the stall for breaking a glass and has been crying—that there is my boyhood. … And then my youth. Ferrying goods at the railway station, climbing up the bamboo scaffolding to the roofs of the second or third floor with a load of bricks on my head, driving the rickshaw, walking nights as a guard, the khalasi on a long-distance truck, the sweeper on the railway platform, the dom at the funeral pyres. That is how I have spent my youth. At one stage or the other of this varied life, you must have seen me somewhere, on the roads or the bazaar.”

Milestones in the modern history of India

The second feature of Byapari’s book that struck me was the way he put the happenings in his life alongside major happenings in various parts of India.

“[We] came to the Doltala camp in 1960. Within two years of this was the Indo-China War and two years after that the splintering of the Communist Party,” Byapari remembers about his arrival at the refugee camp in Ghola-Doltala area of South 24 Pargana district from Bankura district.

“That day of recompense arrived much later. As far as I can remember this was in 1963, sometime after I had left the [Brahmin] doctor’s house. The sacred lock of hair belonging to the Hazrat Sahib went missing from a masjid in Kashmir,” Byapari writes about the communal riot that took place in Ghutiari Sharif area of South 24 Parganas district.

“This was the time when a tiny black cloud was gradually spreading across the horizon of Assam’s history. Bongal khedao: Chase out the Bengali. Very soon this would become a destructive cyclone and take its toll across Digboi, Dibrugarh, Tinsukia, Jorhat and Guahati for almost a decade,” Byapari writes about the time during his adolescence that he spent at a small station in Assam.

Narrative style

Byapari’s autobiography reads like a conversation. The book is written mostly in the first person and it is as if the author is talking to the reader. I had the privilege of sharing the stage with Byapari during a session at this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival. The man just captivates his audience. His words are honest and come from his own experience. The session was of 60 minutes and we did not know when we finished. Reading this book is like listening to Byapari speaking live.

Though Byapari has written the book in the first person, there are parts where he has shifted to the third person. In Chapter 4, “My Lone Travels across East and North India”, Byapari adopts an alter ego: Jeeban. He writes about Jeeban meeting a boy named Raja at the Howrah railway station. Raja is street smart. He helps Jeeban get onto a train. Together, they travel to Farakka, cross the river Ganga there on a launch, and travel to New Jalpaiguri. In this chapter, there is a mention of Jeeban being sexually abused by a “havildar” in Lucknow. Was it the unpleasant memories of his adolescence that made Byapari write these parts in the third person and not in the first person?

Differences, discrimination, poverty, hunger

Byapari’s book is a reminder to the differences that exist in our society, be it on the basis of caste, religion, or wealth. Most of the things that Byapari writes about in the book find their roots in this phenomenon of difference or otherness.

While writing about the “jabardakhal” colonies – “colonies where the refugees [from East Bengal] took forcible occupation of the land that came up in West Bengal” – in Marichjhapi (in the Sundarbans) where refugees of the lower castes were massacred, Byapari writes: “The question that arises naturally in these circumstances is this: why did the ruling people have such different reactions to two groups of people? I believe what lies behind this is the centuries old hatred born of the varna system. If these people on the island [of Marichjhapi in the Sundarbans] had been Brahmins, Kayasthas, Baidyas and not the Namos, the Pods, the Jeles, the rulers would have never been able to [ignore any massacre or atrocity].”

The Brahmin doctor, in whose house Byapari worked, had, like Byapari, migrated to West Bengal from East Bengal, but “[he] had come to this land as a result of Partition…not as a refugee. He had not stayed at refugee camps or taken over land forcibly but had built his own house on land purchased with his own money.” That Brahmin doctor, like Byapari, was a Bangal; but because of their relative circumstances, Byapari had come to “learn of yet another division among humanity, besides the many [he] already knew, between the Bangals who had crossed over to this side: those who stayed as refugees in colonies and those who did not.”

In a poignant conversation (the entire book is poignant, by the way) with Raja, Jeeban says: “My vice is rice…That is my only vice. Nothing else.” Jeeban says this because he has – or, rather, the author, Byapari, has – lived hungry for most of his life. The themes of hunger and a feeling of want run through this book and they are disturbing.

Byapari compares the poverty of the refugees with the poverty of the other disadvantaged groups: “About eight or ten miles away from [Bishnupur town in Bankura district] was another camp and about four miles past it was a Muslim village. The inhabitants of this village, living in tiny huts, were so poor that they would come to beg food from [the refugees] when [the refugees] would be given the dole [by the government]. To the north of this village past the crematorium was a Santhal village but their situation too was as bad. They would eat everything including frogs and snakes. Most of them would take an advance and go to some distant place to work on contract.”

Perspectives on why things happened

I live in Ghatsila, a place some 130 kilometres from Bankura. 130 kilometres is not a big distance, but I came to know more about Bankura from Byapari’s book than I had known previously. Byapari’s book also throws light on the rise of the Communist Party in West Bengal through the support of the “refugees” from East Bengal. The Communist Party would go on to rule in West Bengal for more than three decades.

Manoranjan Byapari’s book, Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit, is not an easy book to review. There are so many things from this book – like, Byapari’s stint as a Naxalite, his life in Dandakaranya, and his meeting with Mahasweta Devi which inspired him to become a writer – which I could not mention. And that is because everything Byapari mentions in this book is so important. This book is not only about a person. This book is about an important part of the world with several important events from history taking place in the background.

The translator, Sipra Mukherjee, deserves applause for translating this book into English for one can tell from this translation that the original is definitely quite something. Yet, this book is just a part of the original Bengali book. Itibritte Chandal Jibon is a far bigger tome, and, hopefully, Interrogating My Chandal Life will have a second volume