Interrogating My Chandal Life
Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd (Verlag)
978-93-81345-13-9 (ISBN)
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Winner of The Hindu Prize 2018 (Non-fiction)
Shortlisted for the 3rd JIO MAMI Word to Screen Award 2018
If you insist that you do not know me, let me explain myself … you will feel, why, yes, I do know this person. I’ve seen this man.
With these words, Manoranjan Byapari points to the inescapable roles all of us play in an unequal society. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit is the translation of his remarkable memoir Itibritte Chandal Jivan. It talks about his traumatic life as a child in the refugee camps of West Bengal and Dandakaranya, facing persistent want—an experience that would dominate his life. The book charts his futile flight from home to escape hunger, in search of work as a teenager around the country, only to face further exploitation. In Kolkata in the 1970s, as a young man, he got caught up in the Naxalite movement and took part in gang warfare. His world changed dramatically when he was taught the alphabet in prison at the age of 24—it drew him into a new, enticing world of books. After prison, he worked as a rickshaw-wallah and one day the writer Mahasweta Devi happened to be his passenger. It was she who led him to his first publication.
Today, as Sipra Mukherjee points out, ‘issues of poverty, hunger and violence have exploded the cautiously sewn boundaries of the more affluent world’, rendering archaic the comfortable distances between them. Despite ‘Chandal’ explicitly referring to a Dalit caste, this narrative weaves in and out of the margins.
Manoranjan Byapari never went to school or university. He first wrote for little magazines where his success and popularity found him many publishers. His writing career took place as he worked as a cook for 21 years at the Helen Keller School for the Deaf and the Blind. He is a Trinamul Congress MLA for Balagarh since the 2021 West Bengal Vidhan Sabha elections. He has received many awards such as the Suprabha Majumdar Smarak Puraskar by the Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi in 2014, the television channel 24 Ghonta’s Ananya Samman in 2013 and in 2019 the Hindu Literary Fest’s nonfiction award. He is well known across India as he speaks in Hindi that he learnt in Chhatisgarh when he was with the Mukti Morcha of the late Shankar Guha Neogi. Sipra Mukherjee is Professor, Department of English, West Bengal State University. Her research interests are religion, caste and power. Her interest in literatures of the margins began with research into early missionary journals of Northeast India. She has since worked on small religious sects and is presently trying to archive the local cultures of North 24-Parganas at her university. She has published with Brill, Oxford University Press, McGillQueen’s University Press, SAGE, Sahitya Akademi, Ravi Dayal, Routledge and Permanent Black.
Preface
Acknowledgements
A Note by the Translator
East Bengal, Partition and West Bengal
Dandakaranya Rehabilitation Project, Food Riots and Calcutta
I Run Away from Home
My Lone Travels across East and North India
On the Road for Five Years
Return to Kolkata
My Entry into the Naxal Movement
To Dandakaranya and Back to a Changed Calcutta
Life on and around the Railway Station
A Bomb Explodes in Barddhaman
Into Jail and into the World of Letters
A Rickshaw-wallah’s Meeting with Mahasweta Devi
A Girl from the Past
Marichjhap
To Dandakaranya, Dalli and Bastar
Chhatisgarh, Mukti Morcha and Shankar Guha Neogi
After Shankar Guha Neogi
Epilogue
Notes
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 03.05.2018 |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | New Delhi |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 139 x 215 mm |
| Gewicht | 430 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Geschichtstheorie / Historik |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie | |
| ISBN-10 | 93-81345-13-9 / 9381345139 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-93-81345-13-9 / 9789381345139 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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