Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life – An Autobiography of a Dalit: A Refugee Life Writings of DowntroddenDislocation

Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life – An Autobiography of a Dalit: A Refugee Life Writings of Downtrodden Dislocation
Sushil Sarkar

Abstract

This article seeks to explore how Manoranjan Byapari’s autobiography remembers the Bengal partition, its subsequent forced migration, rootlessness, refugee crisis, poverty, and problems of identity and citizenship. This book is a powerful record of Byapari’s life of extreme hunger, displacement, deprivation, and the forcible relocation of refugees to Dandakaranya, the Andaman Islands, and the inhospitable places of Malkangiri, Dalli, and Bastar districts. This life writing realistically elaborates on his first-hand experience of pathos arising from dislocation from East Bengal to West Bengal and of a tragic metamorphosis from innocence to experience. He depicts his own life in various refugee camps in which families were forced to endure filth and squalor, disease and death, as well as poverty and starvation. They were transferred to Marichjhapi, Dandakaranya, Andamans, and the wilderness of Madya Pradesh. He willingly becomes a prisoner for food in jail and learns letters and words from an inmate of the prison house. Finally meeting Mahasweta Devi metamorphoses him into the writer Manoranjan Byapari. This article will highlight Byapari’s grand scale narrativization of pre cum post partition refugee exodus, identity destabilization, discrimination, vagrant lifestyle, struggle for sustenance, and questions of citizenship. This article will discuss the concepts of dislocation, abjection, and subalternity as an authentic testimony of partition and post-partition by the autobiographical Namasudra refugee narrative.