'Chandal Life in History': A Struggling Writer of a Dalit Life/ ‘ইতিবৃত্তে চণ্ডাল জীবন’ : এক দলিত জীবনের সংগ্রামী লেখোয়াড়

Abstract

In the corpus of Dalit writings in India, Manoranjan Byapari is a significant name. He has given voice to those voiceless whose pain and suffering have never found a place in the grand narrative of the Indian nation-state. In his literary oeuvre, the lived reality of the Bengali Dalits found a greater place. Published in 2018, his seminal work Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography stands as a witness to the dislocation of the Bengali Dalits. Due to an unjust political problem i.e. Partition, a large number of Bengalis had lost their homeland and became refugees. These people were forced to migrate to the Sunderban area of Bengal or to the jungles of middle India. Manoranjan Byapari was one of them. Carrying the anguish of his own life, this book offers a pen picture of the refugee crisis, particularly the Dalit issue. Therefore, the paper aims to explore: (i) the lives of the refugees (ii) the author’s experience with the dirty politics of Bengal, and (iii) how Dalit Autobiography became an emerging literary genre.