A collection of twelve representative short stories, the anthology curates as many intricately layered perspectives on Dalit life and living in Punjab. Foregrounding the existential-intersectional milieu of ‘dalit vehras’ and beyond, these narratives, individually and collectively, trace the evolution of Punjabi Dalit creative praxis over a span of half a century. The collection, in laying bare the peculiarities of Punjabi caste-class dynamics and the resultant Dalit consciousness—its identity formation and aesthetic configuration—helps one distinguish its regional yet inclusive specificity from the predominantly autobiographical, binary gaze and activist hype of Marathi Dalit literature.
The Punjabi Dalit are constitutionally different from the Marathi Dalit; while the caste discrimination persists, the Punjabi Dalit do not suffer acute levels of deprivation. Additionally, Sikhism, the Marxist movement, and many other reform movements in the region have tended to postpone and distract the anger of a Punjabi Dalit. While the Marathi Dalit literary praxis is marked by an overtly anti-Brahmanical, subversive ethos, in Punjabi Dalit stories, at least those included in this anthology, this subversive hiatus is replaced by feudalist-modern love-hate dynamics. These experiential interstices engender everyday operational overlaps, pitting the land-owning Jatts and their land-tilling Dalit counterparts within a complex relational grid. These enmeshed historical, religious, and social peculiarities of Punjab make its caste-dialectics and poetics more layered and intertwined. Gangrene, perhaps the first anthology of Punjabi Dalit short stories in English translation, bears timely testimony to this significant fact. It helps problematize the ‘generalised’ binary truism of Indian Dalit literary aesthetics and foregrounds its distinct experiential and ideological personality across regions and religions.
This macro-level contrast doesn’t work so simplistically at the micro level. While organically rooted in and deriving their ethical-activist rationale from the Marathi resistant renaissance of the 1970s, Punjabi stories, nevertheless, usher in a much-needed paradigm shift–both perspectival and structural–within this overarching literary discourse. This shift and expansion in Punjabi Dalit narratives is wrought through a nuanced contextualization, customization, and historicization of ‘Ambedkar-Phule-Dalit-Panthers’ inspired, but regionally realized, discursive fictional forays. It is this literary, sociological, and ideological conjunction, and its nuanced sampling through Punjabi Dalit Stories, that makes this translation endeavour creatively and critically significant.
The anthology, in fact, works as a three-in-one literary package. It packs within its covers an adroit mix of critique and creativity that is painstakingly bonded together with the glue of ‘affective’ translation. The ‘Punjabi-Dalitness’ that Gangrene samples is prefaced and supplemented by a comprehensive peep into the spatio-temporal and cultural dynamics of Punjab and Punjabiat that imbues these stories with their distinct Dalit hues and horizons. This introduction, in fact, is the USP of this anthology. It not only grounds the stories within their socio-economic and historical-ideological contexts but also turns this book into a kind of literary primer for English-speaking enthusiasts–both initiates and scholars–interested in the overtures and curvatures of Dalit literary consciousness in Punjab. The translator duo needs to be complimented for this maiden but inclusive initiative. Their academic and language location uniquely qualifies and equips them for this ‘translational labour of love’.
The order and choice of the stories included in Gangrene not only encapsulate the historical-existential curvature of Dalit-centric aspirations and imagination, but also underline the demographic and representational profile of Punjabi Dalit writers/writing. Dalitness here cuts across religions, regions, dialects, caste and class bonds and bounds, ruptures and overlaps. As a result, the Dalit literary corpus of Punjab emerges as an intricate cross-section of agrarian ethos and urbane sensibilities, feudal closures and modernist aspirations, tribal claims and diasporic assertions. This anthology avowedly concentrates on the ‘third and fourth phase’ of this literary evolution.
The anthology opens with Attarjit’s ‘Bathloo Chamiar’ and ‘Gangrene’. While the author turns the ‘sinkhole’ materiality of Bathloo’s existence into a twin metaphor of Dalitness and doom in the first story, in ‘Gangrene’, the caste biases become symbolic of a social pus that putrefies the very idea and ideals of inter-caste love. ‘Doomsday’ by Sarup Salvi and ‘Cancer’ by Nachhatar form a thematic continuum with ‘Gangrene’ but take the inter-caste matrimonial tension to another level. Unwitting ‘victim’ of unequal caste alliance, the savarna mother in ‘Doomsday’ seeks to set caste equations right through socio-psychological distancing of her daughter born of a shudra father. Unfolding within comparable caste dispensation, ‘Cancer’ voices the impossibility of inter-caste love even in situations where old hierarchies are being erased by new socio-economic and professional equations. Though new, potentially education-induced secular sensibilities are seeping into the body-politic of Punjabi society, the stubborn feudal-caste rumps are still not ready to yield so easily to progressive ways of thinking.
‘Attu Khoji’ by Gurmeet Karyalvi simultaneously inserts and asserts the tribal voice within the Punjabi Dalit literary discourse. With Mohan Lal Phillauria’s ‘Cobbler’s Son’, one re-enters the transitional, inter-generational landscape of Dalit reality. ‘Iron Boned’ by Makhan Maan delineates the ambivalences of interpersonal and socially interdependent contours of an agrarian economy where heroic struggles for one’s rights and passive renunciation of one’s rightful claims coexist and collide with each other on everyday basis within the entrenched caste configurations of rural Punjab. ‘Cactus’ by Harnek Singh Kaler takes up the issue of hypocritical masculine upper-caste desires complicated by the appearance-reality dialectics within which its protagonist seeks to channelize his romantic yearnings for a vivacious girl, and when faced with the untouchable truth of her caste location, feels jilted by its Dalitness.
‘Roots’ by Bhagwant Rasulpuri is a nuanced exploration of Dalit conversion politics. It showcases a conflictual desire that on one hand aims to transcend caste enclosures through Buddhism and, on the other is entrapped in a nostalgic, palimpsestic yearning for re-rooting oneself within the religious Ravidassia ethos. ‘Cry of the Sky’ by Bhura Singh Kaler is a poignant documentation of Dalit silence and marginalization. ‘My Story, Everybody’s Story’ by Prem Gorkhy is the most ideological in its fictional intent. Underlined by a palpably Marxist tone and texture, it goes on to etch the contours of socio-sexual inequities that, within the context of multiple hierarchies, create a spectrum of mutually hostile caste situations. ‘Gaurjan’ by Ajmer Singh Sidhu, the last story in this collection, deals with the problematic of Dalit social mobility and identity within a caste-biased society.
Gangrene thus offers a variegated bouquet of Punjabi Dalit thematic hues. However, the structural-narrative weave of these stories is surprisingly conservative. Mainly foregrounded as realistic tales of emancipatory yet thwarted aspirations within overarching thematics of love and loss, human dignity and disgrace, egalitarian identity ethos and disruptive caste dynamics, they, nevertheless, succeed in tracing the caste discrimination at work in various places–gurudwaras, offices, hospitals, schools and colleges, market-places, urban colonies and in panchayat meetings. And in the process, Gangrene authenticates the fact that it is the short story, not autobiography, that is the preferred mode of Punjabi Dalit expression.
As a representative anthology, Gangrene, however, is marked by a total absence of Punjabi Dalit women writers. Is it a deliberate omission or a hint at the gendered lopsidedness of Punjabi Dalit literary corpus? The anthology, though well-conceived and construed in English translation, at times leaves its readers wondering whether the cultural and colloquial diversity of Punjab/Punjabi/Punjabiat, which is surely as varied as its thematic diversity, has been duly captured in the target language.
These hiccups notwithstanding, Gangrene is a welcome translation initiative that not only helps introduce this important literary tradition to the larger literary fraternity beyond Punjab and Punjabi but also accords commensurate recognition to the writers whose stories appear in this anthology.
Anup Singh Beniwal, Professor of English at USHSS, GGS Indraprastha University, Delhi, is a writer, translator and critic. He is the author of seven books on literary criticism and theory.