Latest news with #AdhirBiswas
The Hindu
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Voices from the margins: Dalit, women refugee accounts of the Bengal Partition
At the launch of The Last Bench (Ekada/Westland Books) in Kolkata last week, Adhir Biswas said his experience of untouchability as a child was painful, but also a treasure. With no one willing to play with him, and the village too boycotting his family of barbers, he had all the time to forage in the forests and discover a world of other beings, like mongooses and mynahs and a dog called Bhombol, invisible to most like he was. However, that is small compensation for the acute caste oppression forced on him, first in an East Bengal (then East Pakistan) village (Magura), and then when his family moved to West Bengal in 1967. Bengal prides itself on being largely caste agnostic, but Biswas's Dalit and refugee memoir flies in the face of it. Biswas did something about the societal slight — he got himself an education against all odds, began writing in magazines from the 1970s, and then launched a publishing house, Gangchil, in 2005 so that stories like his own could be told. 'It's enshrined in my memory — how it feels when you have no place in society — and I wanted to write about it,' he said. His heart-rending account — written as three separate slim books in Bengali — has been translated by V. Ramaswamy into English, giving it a wider readership. His life of hardship will be unimaginable to many, and the session to launch the book at Max Mueller Bhavan was aptly titled, 'Growing up Invisible in an Unjust World.' Just how invisible he felt is described in his classroom travails, when he was asked to sit at the back, far away from everyone; when he wrote every word being taught on his cracked slate, but never had the privilege of being asked a question; when the teacher on day one decided he should be called a 'Paramanik' (because he hailed from a family of barbers) and not Biswas, which was their surname. Caste violence and poverty Read together with Manoranjan Byapari's Interrogating My Chandal Life (Sage), Biswas's voice from the margins is an important addition to studies and understanding of Dalit and refugee life. Byapari has written about his migration to West Bengal, caste violence and poverty, and his itinerant life in his fiction as well, particularly in the 'Chandal Jibon' trilogy, comprising The Runaway Boy, The Nemesis and The Interloper (Westland Books), all translated by Ramaswamy. Scholars are now paying closer attention to the migration that happened from East Bengal/East Pakistan into West Bengal and looking at the afterlife of Partition. In the Foreword to Gargi Chakravartty's new book, Coming Out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal (Tulika Books), Tanika Sarkar writes that partition in Bengal was a very long-term process, violence was sporadic, and migration happened in a long, persistent trickle rather than in a single torrential movement. 'It is, in fact, difficult to put a definite closure on the process, which, Joya Chatterji argues [in her books on Bengal Partition] began and did not end with 1947.' Research has shown, notes Joya Chatterji in her book Partition's Legacies (Permanent Black), that in a myriad ways refugees drove change. 'In West Bengal, where landed elites resisted reforms, refugees threw themselves behind communist agitations, propelling the communists to power in 1969. They seized and then squatted on vacant land, demanded full rehabilitation as a matter of right, pushing and stretching the vocabulary of 'rights' in India's emergent democracy,' she points out. Radical social reorientation Chakravartty's family hailed from East Bengal, and several members had stayed back there. 'Listening to those who longed for the lost homeland and to those who remained there, she came to acquire a deep sense of identification with the land that she had not seen,' says Sarkar. Her mother, the novelist Sabitri Ray, has portrayed their life in a refugee settlement in West Bengal in her novels and short stories. Too often, writes Chakravartty in the Preface, women's experience of Partition becomes a story of loss and victimhood, of violence and oppression. 'While the focus is valid and deeply relevant, it does somewhat marginalise other areas of experience that are no less relevant.' Chakravartty points out that the women refugees of Bengal have not only played an important role in shaping the women's movement, but they have also been responsible for a radical reorientation of the social lives of Bengali women. Chakravartty traces the story of migration — how and why Hindus abandoned their ancestral homes and left East Bengal; and also about the lifelong yearning for the 'land of rivers' they had left behind. In West Bengal, refugees faced enormous problems. In that backdrop, Chakravartty reviews the transition in the lives of the refugee women who came out on the streets and plunged into political activism for survival, seeking shelter, food and employment. In due course, there were immense sociological changes in the lives of refugees living in the colonies, which Chakravartty documents. In his Introduction to Partition's Legacies, David Washbrook writes that Chatterji's Bengal is no less fractured and brutalised by colonialism, Partition, and the post-colonial state. 'However, it does not only stand as a field of negation and lament. [In several essays], she shows how even little people mattered, re-built their lives, challenged and re-made policies of the state, and acculturated themselves to new environments.' Chakravartty's book on the lives of refugee women and Biswas's on his own crushing childhood are an invaluable addition to books on Partition in the east.
Scroll.in
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Adhir Biswas
Stories written by From the memoir: The long shadow of caste discrimination on Dalit writer Adhir Biswas as a schoolboy An excerpt from 'The Last Bench', translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy. Adhir Biswas & V Ramaswamy · 19 minutes ago 'Lockdown crook': Pages from the pandemic journal of a small publisher from Kolkata The editor of an independent Bengali publishing house describes his predicament. Adhir Biswas · Jul 18, 2020 · 05:30 pm
