We too have our Sun', writes a woman Dalit poet, challenging the established canons of Bangla literature that resist Dalits entry. With translations from Bengal only beginning in the twenty-first century, Dalit writings have remained largely unrepresented in the corpus of pan-Indian Dalit literature. Yet Bangla Dalit literature has a long history: the songs of Sufis, Bauls, Fakirs and many other grass root religious sects rebelling against brahminical domination. Largely unknown in mainstream Bengal, this was a robust and popular body of oral literature from the margins. The challenges and rebellions that characterize modern Dalit literature are not unique to modernity, existing in the living traditions.
In the late twentieth century, Dalits' writings have been published by small publishers and little magazines, ushering a new vibrancy in Bangla literature. This anthology presents translations of a selection of essays, songs, poetry, short stories, extracts from autobiographies and novels as an introduction to a spirited and dynamic literature from Bengal.
Debi Chatterjee retired as Professor in the Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University, and has also taught in the Departments of Political Science, Human Rights and Human Development, at Rabindra Bharati University, Department of Sociology, Calcutta University, and the Human Rights Programme under the Department of Anthropology in Calcutta University. She was Coordinator of the Centre for Refugee Studies and of PG Diploma Course in Human Rights and Duties Education, Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University.
Among her books are Dalit Rights/Human Rights, Ideas and Movements against Caste in India: Ancient to Modern Times (Rawat, 1998, 2010); Up Against Caste: Comparative Study of Ambedkar and Periyar (Rawat, 2nd ed, 2019) and, Sociology of National Integration (Minerva, 1993). She is the Founder-Editor of Contemporary Voice of Dalit.
Sipra Mukherjee is Professor at the Department of English, West Bengal State University. Her research areas are modern literatures, religion, caste and power. She has worked on small religious sects after her interest in literatures of the margins took her to the early missionary journals of Northeast India.
Her publications include The Languages of Religion (Routledge, 2019), the translation of Interrogating My Chandal Life: Autobiography of a Dalit by Manoranjan Byapari (Sage-Samya, 2018), which won The Hindu Non-fiction Award, 2019; Literary Contexts: Modern English Literature (Orient Blackswan, 2016) and 'Religion and Language: International Journal of the Sociology of Language (de Gruyter, 2013). A founding member of the Centre for Studies on Borders and Movements, Kolkata, Sipra is presently archiving the local cultures of Bengal's North 24-Parganas.
India's biggest malady is her caste system. It stands at the root I of many of the other social maladies that India suffers from, including, bonded labour, child labour, trafficking, manual scavenging, caste-based violence, indignities, economic backwardness and educational handicaps of vast sections of the population, to mention but a few. The origins of this malady are fuzzy, during the early Vedic period (1500-1000 BC), the first signs of the emergence of the caste system were evident. Since then, traversing a long period in history through many tortuous phases, the system proceeded to entrench itself as a cancerous growth on society. A hierarchy of castes came into existence. They were endogamous and encased in the frame of a host of do's and don'ts pertaining to social interactions, for instance, no inter-dining between the sub-castes even within a varna, and occupational activities that effectively made the interactions between castes extremely limited.
Theoretically, today's caste system is seen as rooted in the fourfold varna system of societal ordering, even if it had been a historical reality rather than a textual analytical category as suggested by some. By the early medieval period it was transformed into a system marked by the existence of numerous jatis. There are wide variations in the size of these jatis; some groups have a million members, while others have barely a thousand. To further complicate matters, the numbers of the jatis have hardly remained constant. Fissions and fusions have led to the birth of new castes. Time has seen the repeated occurrences of changes and mutations in caste being propelled, inter alia, by various factors ranging from transformations in production mechanisms and relations of production to the impact of politics and unfolding struggles from below. However, despite the changes, the essential characteristics of caste, inequality and social exclusion, have largely remained intact.
Deceptive notions of purity and pollution permeated the social ethos. There were the so-called upper castes and the low castes; the former pure, the latter impure; the extent of impurity of the latter supposedly depended on the level in the hierarchy at which the caste was located. The untouchables were at the lowest rung of the ladder, doomed to suffer discrimination amounting to untouchability and exclusion. Institutions and practices revolving around the caste ethos were formed. It is imperative to understand that even though ideology is indeed an important element of caste, its life extends beyond religious belief. The materiality of caste is as important, if not more, as its ideology.
While inequality is present in all societies, caste inequality stands clearly apart from others. It is inequality that is deeply rooted in the religious philosophy of the Hindu brahminical order, evolving over time to reveal itself as a unity of subjective and objective reality. Caste stratification of society based on the Hindu brahminical philosophy of Varnashrama Dharma, entrenched the socio-cultural and economic marginalization of the low, and particularly 'untouchable castes. Time and again, ritual power and state authority joined hands to ensure the smooth continuance of the order and the ruthless suppression of the untouchables who account for around 16 percent of the total population of the country. The latter forms what is known as the Dalit population today.
Within the parameters of the brahminical cultural perspective, the culture of the upper castes has been traditionally projected as superior, or, to put it differently, upper-caste people are said to be 'cultured', whilst others referred to as the 'uncultured' folk. Multifarious tools, ranging from religious jargon and educational manoeuvrings to overt uses of violence, were systematically relied upon for the purpose of propagation and sustenance of Brahminism.
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