Author and translator, Aruna Chakravarti is the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award for her translation of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta. She is also the former Prinicpal of Janki Devi Memorial College, a prestigious women’s college of the University of Delhi. Chakravarti’s latest book, Rising from the Dust, a translation of Dalit short stories from Bengal, makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of Dalit literature. The carefully selected twelve short stories, spanning a century, have been written by Dalit writers Manohar Mouli Biswas, Bimalendu Haldar, Nakul Mallik, Manoranjan Byapari, Anil Ghorai and Kalyani Thakur Charal, and non-Dalit writers Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Mahasweta Devi and Prafulla Kumar Roy. Most of the stories have been translated into English for the first time. The stories reflect the trials and tribulations of the oppressed against the changing historical and cultural contours. A unique quality of the stories in this collection is the foregrounding of Dalit women’s voices who have active agency and challenge the entrenched system of caste and patriarchy. Exploring caste, gender and class intersectionality, the stories in Rising from the Dust reveal the deep fissures of social stratification. Renowned Dalit writer Meena Kandasamy aptly notes in the Foreword to the book, ‘The dialectics of survival and social ostracization are explored with nuanced sensitivity in every story, reflecting the complex contradictions which arise in the tensions between upheaval and oppression.’
In most of the stories in Rising from the Dust, women’s grit and determination to fight systematic social subjugation is awe inspiring. In Manoranjan Byapari’s ‘The Fortress’, Sarama transforms her body into a weapon to preserve her land. The story sheds light on the precarious condition of widows whose property is easily usurped by the powerful men in the village. As Sarama refuses to leave her home and move to the city, she is gang raped by the headman Panchanan’s men. In response, Sarama spends a night with Ratan who is dying of disease and returns home: ‘She is a pot brimming over with poison. She leaves the door open. Locks and latches are redundant now. She doesn’t need protection. Her body has become a fortress.’
Similarly, in Bimalendu Haldar’s ‘Salt’, Chintay refuses to conform to the dictates of the warehouse owner, Nishay Ghosh. Chintay and her husband Madhai stay in Matla, the fishing village at the mouth of the Sunderbans. Madhai and the other men catch fish in Nishay Ghosh’s boats. However, when Madhai and three other men do not return from fishing, Chintay approaches Nishay only to be spurned and threatened. But Chintay is determined to take revenge: ‘Our lives, low-caste people’s lives, are bitter. Filled with salt…Look your hardest into them…you won’t find a tinge of honey.’ Chintay mobilizes the other women and they decide to look for the men themselves. As she leaves, Chintay burns Nishay Ghosh’s warehouse to ashes. Quiet resilience is seen in Nalini in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Nalini’s Story’. Set against the conflictual context of East Pakistan, Nalini moves to India in 1965 with her son. Abandoned by her husband and son, Nalini works hard to make ends meet to bring up her grandson. On her husband’s death, the landlord Gobindo and her son seize the opportunity to make her mortgage her house on the pretext of spending lavishly on the rituals. The support from Mukundo’s Ma gives Nalini the strength of quiet assertion as she refuses wasteful ritualistic expense for a man who had been missing from her life.
Chakravarti’s poignant selection of stories focusses on the different Dalit communities to bring out the social variation in the oppressed communities. Manohar Mouli Biswas’s ‘Shonkhomala’ is on the Doms, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s ‘The Witch’ is also about a woman from the Dom community ostracized as a witch, Prafulla Kumar Roy’s ‘Snake Maiden’ is about the nomadic Bede community, ‘Raikamal’ is about a Vaishnav girl. The eponymous Shonkhomala resists the displacement of the Doms for the establishment of industries, a development agenda benefitting the powerful sections of the society: ‘We are Chandals. We have the strength of our caste. We will give our heart’s blood…but not our land.’
Issues of migration are addressed in Nakul Mallik’s ‘Illegal Immigrant’. The formation of Bangladesh spurred the movement of Madhab’s family from a nation in formation to India and back. Extreme poverty once again pushes the family to migrate to India. Madhab settles down with Shefali but is picked up as an illegal immigrant and sent back to Bangladesh, a pregnant Shefali is left alone to fend for herself. Kalyani Thakur Charal’s ‘Motho’s Daughter’ on the Mattwas or Krishna worshippers underscores the importance of education. In Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s ‘Abhagi’s Heaven’, Abhagi’s desire to be cremated by her son Kangali remains unfulfilled. Being a Dalit from the Duley community, she is to be buried by the banks of the river and not cremated. As he watches his mother’s burial, Kangali’s realization of caste and class discrimination benumbs him: ‘Kangali stared at it with eyes that had turned to stone.’
Caste hierarchies and the tragic overtones of love appear in Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s ‘Raikamal’, Prafulla Kumar Roy’s ‘Snake Maiden’ and Anil Ghorai’s ‘The Insect Festival’. Ghorai’s story on Larani from the Harhi community emphasizes her skill in repairing drums, a task associated with her caste. Issues of migration of young boys like Pabna to the city, lack of awareness in the villages, the environmental impact of explosion of bombs, are all a part of ‘The Insect Festival’. The insect attack is placed against the backdrop of Larani’s love for Pabna. The villagers are engaged in superstition and ritualistic combat whereas the educated Kanai Maiti sprays his plants with pesticide. The different strands remain as they are even as Larani’s love meets a tragic end.
A note must be made of Aruna Chakravarti’s translation. Where the translation brings to life powerful women such as Sarama and Chintay, it also recreates the linguistic flavour of the local dialect. Commonplace Bangla phrases such as ‘Ei! Ei!’, ‘Ma re!’, ‘Ki go’, ‘jhir…jhir…jhir’, blend seamlessly into the English translation, insisting the reader savour the regional dialect of spoken Bangla. Rising from the Dust pushes the boundaries of Dalit writing to include stories by non-Dalit writers on Dalits along with a focus on the different Dalit communities. The book is inclusive and makes a valuable addition to the ever-expanding continuum of Dalit writings.
Payal Nagpal is Professor, Department of English, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi, Delhi.