Sahityasetu

Abstract:

If autobiographies by the members of the marginalised communities are understood as ethnographic documentation of the lived-experiences of the individual author-narrators then invariably it becomes a reflection of his/her communal memories as well. This becomes especially relatable in case of Dalit autobiographies like that of Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit (2018). Adopting the auto-ethnographic approach the current paper here attempts to address such critical questions as i) how has this autobiography transcended the boundary of the personal and emerged as an expression of the communal Dalit self? ii) What are the objectives of the author-narrator behind writing such an auto-ethnographic autobiography? iii) What kind of responses and understanding does he want his readers to have after reading his autobiography? While at it, the paper also searches for the reasons for which the literary culture of marginalised communities within Bengal were socio-historiographically silenced for such a long time. The paper concludes that Byapari’s autobiography transcends the canonical boundaries of autobiography by deconstructing all the established generic and ethnographic rules and becomes an auto-ethnographic record of the self and the community.

Key Words: Autobiography, Dalit autobiography, Auto-ethnography, Personal and Communal

Introduction:

Indian Dalit literature can be premised as chronicle of Dalit life with its locus being the subjugation and oppression, exploitation and humiliation of the Dalit consciousness. It can be regarded as documented discourse of the continual struggles of the Dalits against a discriminating system in order to reclaim their own space and redefine their own identities. Dalit narratives definitely are motivated by political dynamics that desire to articulate the polyphonic experiences of the Dalit authors in the different locales of life. Understandably Dalit literature in India has always displayed a clear penchant towards autobiographical writings in order to represent the neglected ‘micro-narratives’ and those ‘the small voices of history’ (Guha, 1996, p.1-12) that have been hither to repressed by the mainstream narratives. In fact Indian Dalit literature has produced some outstanding autobiographies that have shaded off the baggage of poetic articulations in favour of expressing authentic experiences of their witness-narrators. Autobiographies like, Baluta (1978) by Daya Pawar, Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (2003) by Omprakash Valmiki, My Life Amidst the Mangroves (2010) by Pokkudan represent objective records of the sub-human experiences and responses to those experiences by their author-narrators. These autobiographical narratives are generally placed against the mainstream ‘macro-narratives’ as sites for epistemological resistances against the practices that denigrate and exploit in the name of caste. Thus Dalit autobiographies are central to the understanding collective Indian Dalit experiences expressed in literature which unpretentiously brings out the double standards of our society.

The Dalit autobiographies of Bengal become critically important in understanding the ethos of Begali Dalit community. The Dalits of Bengal, unlike the Dalits from the other parts of India like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamilnadu or Karnataka, have suffered not only from socio-cultural and religious segregations and oppression, but also from political ostracism and this accounts for the long term ‘nirbakization’ (Bhaumick and Sarangi, p. 38) of Bengali Dalit culture. Judging from this regard Bengali Dalit autobiographies (or any marginalised autobiography in this regard) become sites for epistemological resistance against a disparaging social system. As narratives of lived-experiences of the marginalised they become auto-ethnographic accounts of the politics of identity, marginalization and nuances of feelings that have been intertwined with communal experiences. They become an auto-ethnographic repository of shared identities, experiences, feelings and responses of resistance against socio-lingual discriminatory practices. It is in this regard the current paper engages itself in analysing the self-reflective Bengali autobiography by Manoranjan Byapari, Itibritte Chandal Jivan (2014) which has been later translated by Shipra Mukherjee in Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit (2018) from an auto-ethnographical perspective.

Objective of the Study:

The current paper is an effort to bring out, by using auto-ethnographical approach, the fragmented lived-experiences of a Dalit activist’s life and community in Bengal. It analyses the journey of a Bengali untouchable – Jeevan – a name which is emblematic of both the alter ego of the author-narrator and the floating persona of every Dalit reflected from auto-ethnographic approach. This paper engages itself in an expository study in the context of Byapari’s autobiography and to address such critical questions as:

1. Why and how were the marginalised communities within Bengal were socio-historiographically silenced for such a long time? How has Byapari in the concerned narrative illustrated the different socio-political contexts in the post-independent volatile Bengal that lead to the communal ‘nirbakaization’ of the Bengali marginalised culture?
2. How has this autobiography transcended the limits of ethnographic recordings of the personal experiences and has emerged as an expression of the communal Dalit self?
3. What are the objectives of the author-narrator behind writing such an auto-ethnography? What kind of responses and understanding does he want his readers to have after reading his autobiography?

The current paper tries to find out the hypothetical solutions to these problems by analyzing the previous discourses and different critical dispositions used in analysing those discourses. To achieve this purpose, the author has organized the following paper into several sections. In the first section, the author has discussed the ontological praxis of auto-ethnography as a postmodern research approach. The second section of the paper consists of a brief review of the earlier literatures and the key concerns that have risen in these previous literatures; and while studying the key concerns of the paper, it also attempts to bring forth how they are related to the present study. The third section traces the originary of Bengali Dalit literature against the socio-historical chronotrope so as to apprehend the first question raised in above section of the paper. This segment analyses step by step how socio-political confluence has motivated the historiography of Bengali Dalit literature to silence the voice of Bengali Dalit culture. The fourth section of the essay critically scrutinizes the auto-biography ‘Interrogating My Chandal Life: Autobiography of a Dalit’ from auto-ethnographical approach. The final section of the essay attempts to bring out and analyse the objectives of the author and focuses on the true but unpalatable issues he wishes to address through the auto-ethnographic documentation of his marginalised experiences.

A Study of Auto-ethnography as Postmodern Research Approach:

As Stacy Holman Jones has justly pointed out the term auto-ethnography has three crucial components, ‘auto’, ‘ethno’ and ‘graphy’. As a postmodern research method it strives to record one’s personal experience (auto), and systematically study (ethno) it in order to comprehend cultural experience of a community (graphy) (Holman, pp.763-791). It questions the traditional ways of doing research. It considers research to be a socially conscious and just, and political act (Adams and Holman, pp. 373-390). Thus as a qualitative research approach consciously tries to subvert the social science’s positivist efforts to present a general and objective truth. This approach admits that in a postmodern world of narrative one cannot escape the language game engendered by hegemony and must enter it by accepting the fragmented and subjective narratives if it is to gain an understanding of the whole. Thus critical ‘auto-ethnographies critique harmful, dominant narratives, which often go unnoticed because of their mundanity and/or lack of acknowledgement. Critical auto-ethnographers fervently seek social justice’ (Allen, p.74). In fact, social justice can be identified as a common agenda of auto-ethnographies and as such can be used to explain the concerns not only of social science but also of autobiographies, especially those autobiographies that have been written by the marginalised and Dalits of the society. It can effectively used as a research tool to expose the complex relations that a Dalit has with the mainstream society on both personal and communal level. A further analysis of doing auto-ethnography will assist to elaborate the correlation between the personal and communal.

As a critical research approach, auto-ethnography is not definitely a monolithic understanding; it is certainly a multilayered and polyphonic research method that can adapt according to the experiences of different individuals from different socio-political and cultural backgrounds. As Bolen has rightly surmised ‘there are as many ways to do auto-ethnography as there are auto-ethnographies’ (Bolen, 75). Etymologically the term auto-ethnography suggests an inclusion of traits of autobiography and ethnography. Thus the method combines personal memories and their interconnection with communal memories. As a research tool it embodies the narrators’ effort to document experiences that are subjective and esoteric in order to reclaim the lost small voices and create space for them. Thus the objectives of an auto-ethnographic research is to break free of the epistemological and axiological limitations of the canonical studies that aim to produce general truth; instead, it desires to celebrate the multitude ways of knowing and having meaningful experiences that have been hitherto shrouded by silence. It aims to foreground meaningful and evocative discourses premised in personal experiences in order to sensitize the readers to issues which have been conspicuously neglected and thus attempts to broaden the readers’ horizon of comprehension regarding concerns of people who are different from them and enhance their capacity to sympathize with their concerns (Ellis and Bochner, 2000, pp. 733-768). Thus auto-ethnographic texts serve as meaningful criticism of the hegemonic practices and dominant narratives within a discriminating society through a lens of past experiences as has been perceived in Byapari’s criticism of religion and socio-cultural politics in his autobiographical text.

Review of Literature:

English translation of Manoranjan Byapari’s autobiography ‘Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit’ by Shipra Mukherjee was first published in 2018. In the course of the current study of the text it was found that because of its rather recent originary, there is not a huge amount of literature available on it. However, I have chosen two works that I consider to be of relevant to my current study; the first is Bidisha Pal’s “Book Review: Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit by Manoranjan Byapari, translated by Sipra Mukherjee” (2018); and the second is Aishwarya Js’ “Interrogating My Chandal Life An Autobiography By Manoranjan Byapari As A Social History” (2020).

Pal’s work is a review of the translated autobiography of Byapari by Sipra Mukherjee. Pal has analysed the book as a translated Indian Dalit autobiography and in the course of her review has dealt with i) the linguistic problems of translation that generally limits a Dalit autobiography. A Dalit autobiography is characterised by language that embodies “its marginalization palpably in the earthiness of its dialect which cannot be kept in translation, which tends to be in standard English” (Translator’s Note, Mukherjee, 2018, quoted in Pal, p. 268). Pal follows the translator’s account and compares her work with the original one and finds that the she (the translator) has not made a word to translation but has chosen to keep the thematic essence of the original (Pal, p. 268) which has reduced the volume of the text but ensured success for the same. Pal has also dealt briefly with ii) the problem of positing a Dalit autobiography (micro-narratives) against the ‘macro-narratives’ (Pal, p.265) of mainstream literature. But in the course of her account she has not mentioned how Byapari’s ethnographic documentation of individual experience as a Dalit in an evocative way echoes the experience of his entire community which is one major concern of my work.

Another important work that can be mentioned in relation to the current paper is Aisharwa Js’s Interrogating My Chandal Life An Autobiography By Manoranjan Byapari As A Social History (2020). Aisharwa in her work has concentrated on the individual life journey of Byapari as Dalit and has not focused her lens on the relations that such subjective and esoteric writing may have with the mainstream literature or the objectives and agendas that the author may have had while writing about his own life. The current paper will focus on both the interlaced relation that such self-reflective writing has with the collective communal memory and the objectives that the writer might have had while sharing his own experience with the world readership. But before delving into the above mentioned issues the current paper will try to focus on the trajectory of Bengali Dalit literature in order to understand the first question asked in the previous section of the paper – why and how the socio-literary consciousness of Bengali Dalits were muted for such a long period of time.

A Brief Trajectory of the problematic of Bengali Dalit Literature:

Caste is the monstrous reality of India. One cannot deny that. It is very deep-rooted and bears the foundation of religion. It has religious sanctions. Historically, it could be seen that many changes had been brought in; however the monster still lives... I do agree and admit literature alone cannot bring the change but it can at least spread awareness among the masses. (Arjun Dangle, “Arjun Dangle in Conversation with Jaydeep Sarangi and Angana Dutta”)

The emergence and flow of Bengali Dalit literature has been a concern of great debate even amongst the Bengali litterateurs. Many mainstream Bengali critics and writers had previously downright rejected the existence of Bengali Dalit literature. It is true that Bengali Dalit literature was slow to develop and gained momentum nearly two decades after the Dalit literary and cultural movement in Maharastra (which gained impetus during 1960’s), however, an undercurrent Bengali Dalit literary consciousness can be traced as early as 19th century with the emergence of the Matua Sahitya under the moving influence of Harichand Thakur. Thakur Harichand Biswas (1812-1878) and his son Guruchand Biswas (1847-1937) understood the importance of consciousness building in formulating self-respect of a marginalised community and encouraged communal creative expressions in public gatherings in the forms of i) kathakata (telling of Folklores), ii) jatra (performing of Folk-dramas) and iii) kobigan (composition of witty dialogue in rhyming couplets) (Byapari, trans. by Mukherjee, p. 4118). Now the question emerges if Dalit consciousness is age old phenomenon in Bengali culture, how did it lose its flow in the greater Bengali literary arena? The answer to this lies hidden in the unique relation that casteism has had with the socio-political historiography of Bengal.

Historically the caste system has been both supported and subverted alternatively by the rulers of Bengal. Bengal had been ruled for more than four hundred years (750-1155 AD) by the Pala dynasty that upheld Buddhism and subverted social stratification on the basis of caste. Later the Pala dynasty was dethroned by the Hindu Sena dynasty (1070 – 1230 AD) that reinforced casteism in the Bengali socio-cultural hegemony. The reign of the muslim rulers only served to strengthen the roots of casteism in Bengal. The British rulers on the other hand, had an ambiguous attitude towards the casteism in Bengal. During the post independence period Bengal suffered the traumas of partition and casteism became starkly stringent in the clamour of the refugee camps in Bengal. In this context the observations of Bengali Dalit activist writer Mannoranjan Byapari becomes critically important. Byapari has rightly perceived that the most organised populace of the Bengali Dalit sections were the Namasudras, who were earlier known as the Chandals (Byapari, trans. by Meena Mukherjee, p. 4117). In the pre-independent period, ninety percent of the Namasudras used to live in the East-Bengal which is now known as Bangladesh. The partition of India made them homeless and the initiation of different rehabilitation projects forced to live on the fringes of the mainstream Indian society. Thus what was once a united community got scattered and demoralised. Their collective identity and voice lost in their continual struggles for security and survival in a foreign land that they now called home. At this point any creative literary activity for them became a luxury that they could not afford. This definitely accounted for the much debated literary lull that was perceived in Bengali Dalit literature and culture. However, in the last few decades the Dalit literature in Bengal has become able to establish itself as a major literary canon under the moving influence of such creative persona as Advaita Mallavarman, Manohar Mouli Biswas, Manoj Byapari, Kalyani Thakur Charal. All these writers belong from the oppressed Bengali Dalit communities and have represented their own experiences through their writings that can be clearly understood as symbolic political actions to redefine and reclaim their own rights. Amongst these writers Byapari deserves special attention as a self-learned and ‘otherwise un-writerly’ (Byapari in Epilogue by Mukherjee, p. 348) writer who wrote his autobiography which later has been translated into English; an autobiography that has succeeded in transcending the personal and representing the communal veritably to the readers across the globe.

The Journey of ‘Jeeban’ (Self) - in Byapari’s Autobiography:

If autobiography is understood as ethnographic documentation of the lived-experiences of the individual author-narrator then invariably it becomes a reflection of his/her communal experience; and this becomes especially relatable in case of Dalit autobiographies like that of Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit (2018). It transcends the canonical boundaries of autobiography by deconstructing all the established generic and ethnographic rules and becomes an auto-ethnographic record of the self and the community. In the course of recollecting past memories it comes to represent a method of life fraught with struggles for survival, a space for political activities, where the very process of marginalization in the name of caste is challenged, and the right to form a free identity is claimed. Byapari’s autobiography thus becomes the site for both resistance and response where his selfhood is gradually formed through his continual interaction with his individual narrative and interrogation of past experiences.

Throughout the text Byapari’s clearly articulates the sufferings of being doubly victimized as being both Dalit and poor; as being the scapegoats of politics of exclusion and living the life of a refugee where tolerating the pain of humiliation and hunger become paradigm of strength. In the first two chapters of his book, ‘East Bengal, Partition and West Bengal’(Byapari, pp. 1-24) and ‘Dandakaranya Rehabilitation Project, Food Riots and Calcutta’ (Byapari, pp. 25-39) narrate the time of politically volatile Bengal, a time that saw the trauma of partition and the excruciating pain of people being uprooted from their homeland and losing their own identities. Byapari unfolds the existential crises of his refugee life by depicting the story of his past, by telling the story of a Namashudra child born in ‘the Eight Brother’s House at Turuk-Khali in Barisal’ (Pal, p. 266). The disaster of partition landed his poor Dalit family in the refugee camps created on the fringes of Kolkata. Here he unapologetically brings out the inhuman conditions of these refugee colonies where death by fatal diseases like plague, cholera and malaria was a common reality. Brawls, violence and even murders were everyday occurrences. The traumatic environment of these congested and unhygienic refugee camps naturally became a breeding point of crime and diseases. In the first couple of months these hopeless and homeless people received a bit of cash from the Govt which too stopped with the beginning of different Rehabilitation Projects. Byapari delineates the hypocrisy and apathy of the social and political leaders towards the agony of these hapless, uprooted people as he describes his personal and communal sufferings in Shiromonipur and Ghola-Doltala camps where the ultimate truths of ‘poverty, destitution, starvation and penury’ (Byapari, p. 6) reigned supreme.

Truthfully, Byapari’s whole life is an account of escapade from the nightmare called life, as he says ‘Life has spread skittish mustard seeds under my feet’ and his autobiography is ‘the story of [that] skidding, slipping, fallen-back life’ (Byapari, p. x). The next few chapters of his life ‘I Run Away from Home’ (Byapari, pp.40 -51), ‘My Lone Travels across North and East India’ (Byapari, pp.52-79), ‘On the roads for Five Years’ (Byapari, pp. 80-103) and finally ‘Return to Calcutta’ (Byapari, pp. 104-126) depict the tumultuous journey of his alter ego Jeeban in search of jeeban i.e. a meaningful way of life. He goes to different places, to Assam, Siliguri, Darjeeling, and undertakes different odd jobs of sweeper, collie, cobbler, cook, servant and for a while even that of a beggar on a street; but no matter wherever he goes, or whatever jobs he undertakes, he is victimized and exploited by the upper caste and class of the society. His experience across the country is essential in understanding the universal nature of sufferings of the Dalit marginalized in our society. His personal memories here become an auto-ethnographic reflection of the collective memories of pain and discrimination of the entire Dalit community. No wonder Byapari ‘Returns to Calcutta’ as a rebellious self aiming to alter the fate of his own and that of his entire community. And it is his desire for alteration and zeal to annihilate the fundamentalism of this discriminatory society that motivated him to become an active member of the militant politics of the Naxalite Movement and subsequently influenced him in drifting towards an objectionable way of life. Byapari’s vivid articulations of the tumultuous Bengal in ‘My Entry into the Naxal Movement’ (Byapari, pp.127-132), ‘To Dandakaranya and Back to a Changed Calcutta’ (Byapari, pp.133-150), ‘Life on and around the Railway station’ (Byapari, pp. 151-170) and ‘Bomb Explodes in Bardhaman’ (Byapari, pp. 171-189) narrate the frictions in the witness-narrator’s life as he continually struggled to cast off the categorization of Dalit forced upon him by the privileged section of the society. Yet interestingly, the first positive transmutation that he ever experienced was in a place that, just like Byapari’s own life, has always been shrouded by the dark clouds of crime and punishment, in the confined world of prison (Chapter: Into Jail and World of Letters, Byapari, pp. 190-208), and the paradox has been well voiced by him ‘What can be greater than literacy? What can be worse than being jailed?’(Byapari, p. 217). He continued his journey ‘from darkness to light’ (Byapari, p. 209-214) through the liberating world of letters, even after being released from jail. However, his life finally took a turn for better with his serendipitous meeting with Mahasweta Devi – an iconic Indian writer and activist, described in the chapter ‘A Rickshaw-wallah’s Meeting with Mahasweta Devi’ (Byapari, pp.215-228). That day he simply asked the meaning of a word ‘JIjibisha’ (meaning the desire to live) to his passenger who looked like a teacher, a passenger who looked beyond his shroud of ‘chhotolok’ (a lower caste person) and offered to publish his writings in her journal ‘Bartika’ and thus began the journey of Jeeban as a writer.

The rest of the chapters of his autobiography, ‘A Girl from the Past’ (Bypari, pp. 229-234), ‘Marichjhpi’ (Byapari, pp.235-262), ‘To Dandakaranya, Dalli and Bastar’ (Byapari, pp.263-279), ‘Chhattishgarh Mukti Morcha and Shankar Guha Neogi’ (Byapari, pp.280-307), and ‘After Shankar Guha Neogi’ (Bypari, pp.307-341) relate the account of the narrator’s effort to stabilize his rootless life by marrying and migrating his family to a new place, Chhattishgarh. However, there is a famous Bengali saying ‘No matter wherever you go, you take your fate with you’ and Byapari’s memoir makes us realise that the fate of a poor Dalit is not easy to change. Thus his desire to live a peaceful life was ruthlessly denied by penury, caste stratification, class exploitation, the luxury of his idealism, and his undying dream for a classless society and drove him again to the storm-door of politics. After an exhausted return from politics he decides to go back to Kolkata and to his passion of writing, as he realises that life and age have burdened him down, and that battle too can be fought with a pen. The epilogue of this memoir, unsurprisingly, does not conclude the journey of Jeeban but does complete the cycle of him becoming a rebellious writer one who ‘has [once] sold his blood to get to the pen and paper’ (Byapari, p. 211).

The Interweaving of ‘the Personal as the Communal’:

Throughout the autobiographical journey Byapari has played a variety of roles, a coolie, a cobbler, a rickshaw puller, a naxalite, and finally a writer and through all these roles has engaged personally and communally with the established system of power. Whatever was experienced by him was written with a stark honesty and tragic candour in his narrative. His purpose of sharing his life and memories is not to cater to the romantic aestheticism of the readers, but to drive the readers to the alternate world of experience of the marginalised. As Sharankumar Limbale has observed, ‘Dalit writers give priority to problems of society over the entertainment of the readers. They express their feelings in their literature...their effort is not to transport the aesthete-readers to their own level of experience. Because Dalit writers are not focused on the aesthete-reader, traditional aesthetic values, which are aesthete-reader centered, are not applicable to the evaluation of their literary productions.’ Byapari too accepted and entered the language game to create space for those experiences that go unnoticed, for those voices that remain unheard. He wishes his readers to step out of their safety bubbles and comprehend the undeserved sub-human experiences that people like him and his denigrated community have to go through on a regular basis. In his own words ‘The life that I have lived must be shared with many...It’s important for people to know that someone survived in such horrid conditions. My writings represent all those people who continue to live in such inhuman circumstances’ (J. Sarangi, in Pal, p. 268).

Conclusion:

While the witness-narrator of ‘Interrogating My Chandal Life: Autobiography of a Dalit’ may not have considered his autobiography as auto-ethnographical, but his writing certainly takes on its distinctive features. He has premised the locale of his sufferings in his caste and class identity and it becomes evident as he says, ‘I have lived my life as the ill-fated Dalit son of an ill-fated father, condemned to a life of bitterness’ (Byapari, p.4). He has analysed his experiences in relation to the experiences of his entire community. In the text Byapari takes on the role of a critical insider and engages in a dialectical dialogue with both his personal and interpersonal memories and thus becomes able to identify and represent before his readers a systematic network of power operative behind the facade of objective social reality. Irrespective of the different chronotopes, this nexus of power maintains and sustains social stratification in the name of caste, class, colour and gender. His autobiography thus becomes a self-reflective approach to analyse montages of collective Dalit memories spread across time, his journey the eternal journey of the Dalit self and consciousness, his narrative a site where the personal merges with the communal, in his own words, "You've seen me a hundred times in a hundred ways. Yet if you insist that you do not recognize me, let me explain myself in a little greater detail, so you will not feel that way anymore. When the darkness of unfamiliarity lifts, you will feel, why, yes, I do know this person. I've seen this man." (Byapari in Preface by Mukherjee, p. ix).

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