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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
Scroll.in
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Scroll.in
May nonfiction: Six newly published books that present the many ways of seeing India
All information sourced from publishers. Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, Azad Essa In the past decade, under the Narendra Modi-led government, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with the country's sharp turn towards authoritarianism and Hindutva, little attention has been paid to the way India has leaned on Israeli weapons, military tactics and technical support to build its own ethnonationalist state. As a leader of the much-lauded Non-Aligned Movement, India was once perceived as a pillar of pro-Palestine solidarity. New Delhi had equated Zionism with racism, after all. It was the first non-Arab state to recognise the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. How, then, did Israel become a cornerstone of India's foreign policy? If India was an opponent of colonialism and apartheid, why does its agenda in Kashmir look so similar to Israel's settler-colonial project in Palestine? And how did a traditional supporter of the Palestinian cause become such a willing partner to Israel's genocide in Gaza? Hostile Homelands puts India's relationship with Israel in its historical context, looking at the origins of, and connections between, Zionism and Hindutva. It examines the nature of India's changing position on Palestine and its growing military-industrial relationship with Israel from the 1990s onwards. The Last Bench, Adhir Biswas, translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy A village barber's son who migrated with his family from erstwhile East Pakistan to India in 1967 revisits his childhood in the lost land. When his father set up a hair salon in the local weekly market near their new home, it fell to the little boy to seek out customers and bring them to the shop for a haircut or a shave. But the father was keenly aware that only an education could offer his boy a way out of the penury that had been their lot. Disappointed in his older sons who had both dropped out of school, he now pinned all his hopes on the youngest son. But school was brutal on the young boy who was always shown his 'place', the last bench, where he sat alone, with his cracked slate and a wet rag to wipe it clean. His only refuge was his ailing mother, with whom he sometimes forayed into the woods and up to the outskirts of the village. They saw the world through each other's eyes. And after her passing, he found another constant companion: Bhombol, the dog that followed him like a shadow. The Last Bench is a poignant childhood memoir about what it means to be invisible in an unequal society, about the exchanges between man and nature, and most of all, what it means to lose those whose absence changes everything. Adivasi or Vanvasi: Tribal India and the Politics of Hindutva, Kamal Nayan Choubey Akhil Bhartiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, popularly known as Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram or VKA is the tribal wing of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). As the largest tribal organisation in the country, it works in many areas of Kerala, Jharkhand and the North-east of India. Till the late 1970s, VKA's work was limited to a few districts of Chhattisgarh (then Madhya Pradesh), Jharkhand (then Bihar), and Odisha but it has gradually and continuously expanded its footprint in different parts of the country. It is noteworthy that from its inception, VKA focused on spreading Hindu values by organising religious rituals in tribal areas and working in the area of education and hostels. It has tirelessly worked to provide medical help to the tribals from the mid-1960s. However, after the late 1970s, it started to work in different aspects of tribal communities' lives. By the 1990s, it also formally began to raise questions related to the rights of tribal communities over forest land and its resources. Exploring its genesis, historical journey, the nature of ideological discourse, and various functions of the VKA, this book opens a window to the contribution of an organisation, which largely remained untold and therefore unknown. Hijacked: A True Story of Surviving 331 Days with Somali Pirates, Pralav Dhyani On 11 April 2010, Pralav Dhyani, a freshly minted deck officer in training on a cargo merchant vessel, was contemplating the intense discipline life at sea would require from him, when armed pirates forcefully boarded the ship off the coast of Africa. As confusion ensued, one thing became clear to Pralav: the MV RAK Afrikana was being hijacked. It was the beginning of a nightmare that Pralav – then all of 21 – has never been able to forget. The crew was taken to an obscure location in Somalia, from where negotiations commenced with their ship's company for their release. For 331 days, the small band of men, who had come together from different countries to earn a living for their families, stuck together through mock executions and mental torture, terror and betrayal, as a complex web of politics and piracy revealed itself to them. It would be eleven months before Pralav and his crewmates would be free again. Learning To Make Tea For One, Andaleeb Wajid In the summer of 2021, India was throttled by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospitals were running out of oxygen and the daily news recorded the soaring death count. Families were torn apart as beloved ones were quarantined or confined in intensive care units and lost to the deadly virus – leaving survivors without even a chance to say goodbye. In that cruel summer, Andaleeb Wajid lost her mother-in-law, and then just five days later, her husband, even as she was hospitalised with COVID herself. Wajid's grief struggled to find words as she returned to a home that was shorn of the love that had once inhabited it and was now empty, but for her two children. Wajid finally turned to her writing to make sense of it all. She found herself wanting to tell the story of her life and her loss. She chronicled her family life, of growing up as a cherished daughter of a father whom she lost too early. She wrote about her marriage, the happy companionship that marked it, and the many ways in which her husband and she looked at life so very differently. She described the incredible joys and the unbearable pain of motherhood too. Learning to Make Tea for One is Andaleeb Wajid's journey through her grief. Chasing a Conjecture: Inside the Mind of a Mathematician, Chandrashekhar B Khare A conjecture is like an unfulfilled fantasy in the world of pure mathematics, where the most fantastic things happen routinely. Proving a conjecture is like trying to make a fantasy come true, and it can consume a mathematician for years, just as the effort to produce a great work of fiction, music or art can take over the life of its creator. This unusual, beguiling memoir is about such a journey. It begins with a child growing up in Mumbai, fascinated by mathematics, and ends with a man, just turned 40, winning a prestigious prize for proving, with a fellow traveller, one of the most important conjectures in number theory – the branch of mathematics that studies whole numbers.
