If you insist that you do not know me, let me explain myself … you will feel, why, yes, I do know this person. I’ve seen this man. With these words, Manoranjan Byapari points to the inescapable roles all of us play in an unequal society. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit is the translation of his remarkable memoir Itibritte Chandal Jivan. It talks about his traumatic life as a child in the refugee camps of West Bengal and Dandakaranya, facing persistent want—an experience that would dominate his life. The book charts his futile flight from home to escape hunger, in search of work as a teenager around the country, only to face further exploitation. In Kolkata in the 1970s, as a young man, he got caught up in the Naxalite movement and took part in gang warfare. His world changed dramatically when he was taught the alphabet in prison at the age of 24—it drew him into a new, enticing world of books. After prison, he worked as a rickshaw-wallah and one day the writer Mahasweta Devi happened to be his passenger. It was she who led him to his first publication. Today, as Sipra Mukherjee points out, ‘issues of poverty, hunger and violence have exploded the cautiously sewn boundaries of the more affluent world’, rendering archaic the comfortable distances between them. Despite ‘Chandal’ explicitly referring to a Dalit caste, this narrative weaves in and out of the margins.
General
Social Science
Sociology
Cover 1
Sage History Page 2
Half title Page 4
Full title Page 6
Copyright Page 7
Dedication Page 8
Marketing Page 9
Contents 10
Preface 12
Acknowledgements 16
A Note by the Translator 18
CHAPTER 1 East Bengal, Partition and West Bengal 26
CHAPTER 2 Dandakaranya Rehabilitation Project, Food Riotsand Calcutta 50
CHAPTER 3 I Run Away from Home 65
CHAPTER 4 My Lone Travels across East and North India 77
CHAPTER 5 On the Road for Five Years 105
CHAPTER 6
Return to Calcutta 129
CHAPTER 7 My Entry into the Naxal Movement 152
CHAPTER 8 To Dandakaranya and Back to a Changed Calcutta 158
CHAPTER 9 Life on and around the Railway Station 176
CHAPTER 10 A Bomb Explodes in Barddhaman 196
CHAPTER 11 Into Jail and the World of Letters 215
CHAPTER 12 A Rickshaw-wallah’s Meeting with Mahasweta Devi 240
CHAPTER 13 A Girl from the Past 254
CHAPTER 14 Marichjhapi 260
CHAPTER 15 To Dandakaranya, Dalli and Bastar 288
CHAPTER 16 Chhattisgarh, Mukti Morcha and Shankar Guha Neogi 305
CHAPTER 17After Shankar Guha Neogi 333
Epilogue 367
Notes 375
Index 378
About the Author and the Translator 382

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ManoranjanByapari_InterMyChandalLife.indb

Manoranjan Byapari; Sipra Mukherjee

Adobe InDesign CC 2015 (Windows)

Manorañjana Byāpārī

SAGE Publishing

Los Angeles [California, 2018

1st, New Delhi, 2017

PT, 2017

producers:
Adobe PDF Library 15.0

Memory of the World Librarian: Calamitous Annunciation

2025-10-27