“There is a saying in Hindi: sab jaga, tabhi savera . When all awake, it is morning,” says one man to another in Manoranjan Byapari’s memoir. Both men are prisoners in a Calcutta jail. They are talking about learning to read.
There is no ‘right’ age to learn, says the Mastermoshai. Anyone can learn at any age. And so, at the age of 24, the young man — a refugee from East Bengal who has never crossed the threshold of a school, and who spent his childhood and youth in desperate hunger and poverty — begins to learn to read.
Letters all around
Suddenly, letters of the alphabet are all around him: “When eating, I drew my letters on my curry-smeared plate. When I had nothing at hand, I wrote in my mind. I saw nothing but letters all around me. In people’s faces, their smiles, their movements, their gestures of the hand, I could see letters of the alphabet. When the man dipped into his large bucket and then raised his hand to ladle out the food to us, I recognised a giant-sized Ta...”
When he emerges from prison, he returns to his trade of plying a cycle rickshaw. But something in his life has forever changed. “In the old days I kept a dagger hidden under the passenger seat of my rickshaw. That dagger’s place had now been usurped by a book.”
Interrogating my Chandal Life ( Itibritte Chandal Jiban ) is a powerful, affecting memoir about hunger and deprivation, but also endurance, struggle and a fierce will to live. Sipra Mukherjee’s English translation brings us the portrait of the development of an artist who has much to tell the world.
One afternoon, Byapari was reading a collection of stories Agnigarba while waiting in the rickshaw stand outside Jadavpur University. A familiar figure appeared: an elderly greying teacher, bespectacled, bag at her side; along with another person. As Byapari had only a few pages left in his book, he asked the next driver in line to take the passengers; but the other man scoffed, imagining Byapari was trying to avoid the load of two passengers.
It was a hot afternoon. As Byapari cycled, he was soon drenched in sweat. Cycling, he suddenly remembered a word he had come across in a book the previous week. He asked the elderly teacher, Didi, can you tell me the meaning of the word jijibisha ?
“ Jijibisha means the will to live,” replied the teacher.
And then she asked him about his life. She asked him to write for her journal; gave him her name and address. When he saw her name, he realised who she was. It was Mahasweta Devi. “I know you well, O great writer!” and he pulled out her book, Agnigarba , from under the rickshaw seat.
Devi asked him to meet her the next morning and have lunch with her. And that is how he embarked on his life as a writer.
Representing multitudes
But Byapari is not only a reader and a writer; he is every man on the margins who has fought to survive. He is every man on the street whom you see and yet do not see. He contains multitudes. “I know I am not entirely unfamiliar to you,” he says. “You’ve seen me a hundred times in a hundred ways... Ferrying goods at the railway station, climbing up the bamboo scaffolding to the roofs of the second or third floor with a load of bricks on my head, driving the rickshaw, walking nights as a guard, the khalasi on a long-distance truck, the sweeper on the railway platform, the dom at the funeral pyres.”
The prose is simple, unadorned, but dense with memories, and somehow it gives the sense that more is left unsaid. The narrative has a vast, sweeping scale — the exodus from East Bengal, the families leaving behind the familiar soil, the ancestral home — but also tiny, incandescent flashes of detail, like the birth of a child in a house where the kitchen fire hasn’t been lit for days. The Kal-Baisakhi on the night of his birth, blowing away the thatched roofs; the father, (like a character in a Munshi Premchand story, notes Byapari) who chops up a mango tree to bring home some rice, tied in a corner of his gamchha ; the bamboo sliver with which the midwife cuts the umbilical cord; the father who breaks down in tears because he cannot manage a drop of honey to place on the baby’s tongue. Not least of all, the devastating matter-of-factness: “So I got no taste of honey at birth. My life has not been sweet. I have lived my life as the ill-fated Dalit son of an ill-fated Dalit father, condemned to a life of bitterness.”
Need for compassion
For all the struggle and the heartbreak, Byapari’s narrative is about the need for compassion and dignity in all human relationships — not only for men and women who labour for survival, but also within the family. In a few deeply felt lines, he describes the struggle of his wife, “cycling ten kilometres up and ten kilometres down. Her first baby had been born through a caesarean operation, the second was a ‘forcep baby’, and then there had been the nasbandi operation of sterilisation. Only she knew how painful it was cycling over hilly roads after these operations. I could hardly bear to look at her perspiring, exhausted face, burnt copper by the sun when she returned from work.”
When Byapari was written about in the Anandabazar Patrika , the writer Nikhil Sarkar wrote: “We had asked him, Why do you write? His answer was, ‘There are certain things I have to tell the people, and it is only me who can tell them of these things.’” Interrogating My Chandal Life is also the story of a man and a people, and of events — such as the tragedy of Marichjhapi — whom history has tried to leave behind in the margins and to erase, but here is a voice that can tell of these things.
Interrogating my Chandal Life ; Manoranjan Byapari, Translated by Sipra Mukherjee, Sage Publications, ₹550.
