Synchronizing the Dalan, Chandal Aesthetics and Namashudrayan in Manoranjan Byapari’s Autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life

Abstract

The study looks into the vexed issues of caste and marginality in the context of the Partition experience in South Asia. The discussion takes clues from Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life (English trans. Shipra Mukherjee, 2018). The paper situates itself between two significant strands - one the Partition and the second, the Dalit consciousness to critically examine the positionality of the Namashudra refugees during/post Partition resettlement in Bengal. The discussion treats Byapari’s text as an auto-ethnographic account that introduces “Chandal aesthetics,” Namashudrayan to foreground the contested issues of subalternity, religiosity, spatiality and socio-political identity in a post-partition South Asia. The Dalit voice, represented through the writings of Byapari, records the micro-narratives of the lower-caste/subalterns/marginalized people who have been denied spaces in nationalist/majoritarian histories and their archives. The paper attempts to locate the largely silent zones of Bengal’s partition histories and their intergenerational shared memories and re-representations that have occluded, evaded and circumvented the questions of caste and, specifically, the Dalit experience.

Keywords:

• Partition Dalit narratives Namashudra

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term “two Bengals” alludes to the historical geographical expanse known as Bengal, which underwent a partition in South Asia, resulting in the formation of East Bengal (now recognized as Bangladesh) and West Bengal (a constituent of India). The partition of British India in 1947 entailed the division of the region into two distinct nations, namely India and Pakistan, predicated upon religious demarcations.

2 The etymology of the word ‘nama’ carries a mythological reference. Sage Kashyap’s son Namas was married to Ruchi’s daughter Sulochana and they had two sons from this wedlock. But due to the carelessness of Namas Muni, his sons were not endowed with sacred thread for attaining the Brahminhood in their 14th years of birth and thus remain shudra.Yet their parental progeny, they were respectable but considered as Namashudras and thus the tribe created.

3 Byapari as a Rickshaw-puller met the renowned writer Mahasweta Devi and asked the meaning of “jijibisha” he came across in a book. Later his collection of short stories published in 2005 titled as Jijibishar Golpo (See Byapari and Mukherjee 2007).

4 Fourth World defines as an alternative literary and cultural discourse, which incorporates Dalits and Tribals of India to emphasize upon the marginalized social and literary identity of such poor and indigenous communities. It subverts the First/Second/Third World’s pedagogical aspects of knowledge. In respect of Dalit Literature, Bengal Dalit literary institution was established in 1992 and its preamble was “Chaturtha Dunia” (trans. Fourth World).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Praggnaparamita Biswas

Praggnaparamita Biswas is an Independent Scholar. She did her Ph.D. at the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. She has completed a project (funded by Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India) on Indology at The Asiatic Society, Kolkata, India. Her articles have been published in edited volumes, Thematizations of the Goddess in South Asian Cinema (UK: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2022) & The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature (UK, Routledge, 2022). Her articles have also been published in Nidan: International Journal for Indian Studies, International Journal for Fear Studies (IJFR), University of Calgary, IUP Journal of English Studies, & Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities.

Anup Shekhar Chakraborty

Anup Shekhar Chakraborty is an Associate Professor of Political Science in North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Meghalaya, India. Previously he was at Netaji Institute for Asian Studies (NIAS), Kolkata, India. He did his Ph.D. at the Department of Political Science, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, WB, India. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow (C.R Parekh Fellowship) in London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK. His forthcoming co-edited book is Death and Dying in Northeast India: Indigeneity and Afterlife, (2023) Routledge.