Bengal’s bhadralok shut out Dalit literature for decades. The monopoly is now cracking

At the third edition of the Dalit Literature utsav, writers showcased novels, poetry, and around 70 journals. The upper-caste Bengali book lovers have had very limited exposure to that.

Speaking truth to power as only she can, Kalyani Thakur Charal, a 60-year-old Bengali Dalit author with a shock of chalk-white hair. Her blistering poetry has consistently challenged the ‘casteless-Bengal’ myth. She has a global audience.

Charal is one of many Dalit poets, novelists, biographers, and essayists – including Manohar Mouli Biswas, Manoranjan Byapari, Kapil Krishna Thakur, Ashish Hira, Nakul Mallik, Jatin Bala, among others—who have battled for space in Bengal’s crowded literary firmament. For ages, that arena has been dominated by the upper caste bhadralok, unwilling to give Dalit counterparts an inch.

Earlier, when huge numbers of the Dalit community streamed from East Pakistan to West Bengal during the Partition, the riots in the 1950s, and then the 1971 war, they were in no position to fight for space. They were a dismembered community and their Dalit identity was secondary to their identity as refugees, desperately seeking a life and a living.

However, times have changed and in the last 30 years, Bengal’s Dalits have chiselled out a niche for their literature and they are firmly holding on to it.   

Therefore, on 26 February, Bengali Dalit writers strode into the Rabindra Sadan-Nandan-Bangla Academy complex—Kolkata’s cultural Mecca. For three days, they celebrated a literary festival of their own, showcasing novels, poetry, and around 70 journals of essays that have recorded the birth and rise of modern Dalit literature in Bengal for many years. It is a literature the upper-caste Bengali book lovers have had very limited exposure to.

The Dalit Literary Utsav wasn’t a houseful event, attendance could have been much better at the panel discussions and poetry readings. This tepid interest is at odds with the fact that West Bengal has the second-highest Scheduled Caste population in the country after Uttar Pradesh. Over 10 per cent of India’s Dalits live here. Within the state, Dalits make up over 23 per cent of the population. Yet, modern Dalit literature here is barely 30 years old, younger than Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu.

And the festival of Dalit literature this February was only the third such festival ever held.

The third edition of the Dalit literature festival happened because the state had stepped in. On BR Ambedkar’s birth anniversary in 2020, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee announced setting up the Paschim Banga Dalit Sahitya Academy for the cultural growth of the Dalit people and allotted a Rs 5 crore fund for it.

Had the government not intervened, there would have been no utsav. “And we would not have been striding across this most hallowed cultural space in Kolkata as we are doing today,” said Dalit rickshaw puller-turned-writer Manoranjan Byapari. He now heads the Dalit Sahitya Academy and is a Trinamool Congress MLA who inaugurated the 26 February utsav. In 2018, Byapari became the first Bengali Dalit writer to win The Hindu Prize in the non-fiction category with Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit. 

“Earlier, we could come here for literary events but like mice, scuttling around timidly, not disclosing our identity.” Author of a dozen or so popular books, Byapari, with his trademark dramatic flourish, added, “Today, because of the Sahitya Academy, because of state support, we are coming here like tigers.”

State support for Dalit Sahitya Academy (DSA) caused turbulence. It came just before the face-off between the Trinamool Congress and the BJP in the 2021 elections. The CAA or Citizenship Amendment Act was a crucial issue, which caused fissures among the Dalits.

And then a social media storm erupted over prominent author Swapnamoy Chakraborty’s post asking why do we need a Dalit Sahitya Academy. “Then why not have a Brahmin Sahitya Academy?” he wrote on Facebook. Typical Brahminical response, the Dalit literati chorused. Winner of the 2024 Sahitya Akademi award for his novel, Joler Upor Pani, Chakraborty has not lived down that controversy yet. 

“On the day the chief minister announced the setting up of the Dalit Sahitya Academy, she also announced a stipend for purohits or Brahmin priests,” he told me. “I wanted to mock that, the politics, and never the Dalits, but it was taken amiss.”

The origin story

Before the Dalit Sahitya Academy, there were other Dalit writers’ associations. The best-known among them was the Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sanstha founded in 1994. “It was formed after the death by suicide of Chuni Kotal, a girl belonging to the Lodha tribe, in 1992,” said Manohar Mouli Biswas, one of the founders of the Sanstha. Chuni Kotal was the first girl from the Lodha tribe to go to university in the West Medinipur district and pursue a master’s in anthropology. She took her life after being humiliated by upper-caste professors on account of her identity. Author Mahasweta Devi and the Dalit community had, in protest, taken to the streets.

The 82-year-old Biswas is the celebrated author of a seminal autobiography, Surviving In My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal. In his foreward for the English translation of the book, historian Sekhar Bandyopadhyay writes, “’This Literature explodes that popular bhadralok myth that caste does not matter in Bengal” and reveals how “caste discrimination worked, or still works in this linguistic region”.

One of the first things that the Sanstha did was open a tiny book stall just off Kolkata’s iconic book district, College Street, right next to the Presidency College. That was in 1994. Authors would gather every evening for tea and talk literature. Early on, the Sanstha launched a journal called Chaturtha Duiya, which became the publisher of many Dalit works. That’s where anyone looking for Dalit literature could go and get a rich haul.

But in 2022, the ‘landlord’ of the Chaturtha Duniya at Stall 22 Bhabani Dutta Lane locked up the place demanding overdue rent. And that was that. The photo of the stall today is a sad commentary.  Its shut-down left the Sanstha without an address and the state-run Sahitya Academy became central to Dalit literary life. 

What is the Academy’s agenda, its mandate, its objective? Ashish Hira, vice president, poet, and author of several non-fiction works and poetry  is upbeat. “Chaturtha Duniya, with which I was associated, is now a flickering candle but now Dalit literature has been given a place (by the state government). People are enthused. They are thinking ‘I can do something’. I have in me the gunpowder. But it needs a match for the explosion of creativity. Now that is happening. We are creating a movement.”

The Academy has been holding district-level literary meetings and claims that the attendance of aspiring Dalit writers is showing an upward trend.

But what is possibly revolutionising the fortunes of the Bengali Dalit literary movement is translations. “Finding Dalit writings in Bangla today is a challenge,” said Asit Biswas, a senior professor of English at the PR Thakur government college in southern Bengal. He has translated at least eight works of Dalit literature and his repertoire includes modern literature as well as 19th-century works into English – some of them religious texts that define the Namasudra community.

Not just Dalit academics like Biswas, non-Dalits are also stepping up to the plate. Professor of English literature Sipra Mukherjee in the West Bengal State University has translated works by both Manoranjan Byapari and Kalyani Thakur. Prof Mrinmoy Pramanik, of Calcutta University’s comparative literature department, has included translation studies in the course and won a Sahitya Akademi award for translation in 2023. Jaydeb Sarangi, principal of a Kolkata college and numerous other academics are taking up translations of Dalit works. The number of translators is growing and the market for Bengali Dalit works in English is booming.

Prof Kalyan Das, an English literature teacher at Presidency University who did a PhD in Dalit literature, has not gone down the translation path. However, he said, “English literature departments across universities and colleges are including Bengali Dalit literature in translation in their syllabus. Many people in this state are not aware of its Dalit literature tradition but there is a huge audience in the rest of the country and even abroad.”

According to Mrinmoy Pramanik, Dalit literature finds little or no place in the syllabus of the most crowded undergrad course at Calcutta University: Bengali Literature honours. “It is unfortunate that the Bengali Literature honours course does not include any or a negligible amount of Dalit literature. The government needs to change that if it really wants Dalit literature to thrive. The Academy could urge the government in this direction.”

The burning embers

It is difficult to define where Bengali Dalit Literature stands today. Has it come of age? Has it matured or still stuck in its infancy? The simplest answer is that it is changing.

In Surviving in My World, Biswas wrote, “This was a community that remained neglected away from the watch of the nation’s administration. The people born in nature, lived in their own way and even died in their own way. The name of this history of life and death is prisnika – growing up like the water hyacinth and dying like it, uncared for.”

That has changed. Bengali Dalit literature is no longer the rootless prisnika. It has grown roots nourished by the Bengali Dalit community’s anger at the discrimination they still suffer. Perhaps it’s less aggressive than what they see in other parts of the country but it’s still cutting as deep.

Ashish Hira said his favourite lines against this bias are from his own writings: “Everyday, Eklavyas are born into our homes/Only because they are Dalits, their pointed arrow stops at the tainted guru’s feet.”

The embers are still burning and enriching Dalit literature. It needs to be placed on the pedestal it deserves.

Courtesy: The Print

Note: This news is originally published on https://theprint.in and is used purely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes, especially human rights.