Synchronizing the Dalan, Chandal Aesthetics and Namashudrayan in ManoranjanByapari’s Autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life

Abstract

The study looks into the vexed issues of caste and marginality in the context of the Partition experience in South Asia. The discussion takes clues from Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life (English trans. Shipra Mukherjee, 2018). The paper situates itself between two significant strands - one the Partition and the second, the Dalit consciousness to critically examine the positionality of the Namashudra refugees during/post Partition resettlement in Bengal. The discussion treats Byapari’s text as an auto-ethnographic account that introduces “Chandal aesthetics,” Namashudrayan to foreground the contested issues of subalternity, religiosity, spatiality and socio-political identity in a post-partition South Asia. The Dalit voice, represented through the writings of Byapari, records the micro-narratives of the lower-caste/subalterns/marginalized people who have been denied spaces in nationalist/majoritarian histories and their archives. The paper attempts to locate the largely silent zones of Bengal’s partition histories and their intergenerational shared memories and re-representations that have occluded, evaded and circumvented the questions of caste and, specifically, the Dalit experience.