The Almond Flowers and Other Stories, a collection of thirteen short stories by Anil Gharal in translation, highlights the experiences of marginalisation and oppression of communities at the periphery of our society. Set in coastal Bengal, Odisha and the forest kingdom of southwest Bengal, Anil Gharal's fiction provides an authentic documentation of Dalit voices from the eastern part of the nation.
Exploring themes of Injustice, destitution, resilience, and the desire for love and for revenge, these stories centre on the lives of the most disempowered and vulnerable, and give a voice to a hitherto Invisible section of society. In these poignant stories, we meet a Banjara girl who refuses to accept the sexual abuse of the women of her community by the police; a poor midwife faced with an opportunity to avenge her husband's murder by an upper-class landowner; an outcast leper who finds himself shunned at his rich son's wedding; and in the titular story, an old, decrepit father who, in his struggle to earn a livelihood, unknowingly brings home danger that ruins his young daughter's hope for a better life.
A visceral portrayal of the experiences of being a Dalit, these stories question the development paradigm by focusing on the heart of underdevelopment. Translated by Anuradha Sen and Arun Pramanik and edited by Indranil Acharya, this collection offers a breadth of vision reminiscent of the works of Mahasweta Devi.
ANIL GHARAI (1957-2014) was a writer from Midnapore, West Bengal. He has authored seventy-four books and many of his stories and novels focus on the life of the marginalised in rural Bengal. For his outstanding work in Bangla prose fiction, he has received awards such as Sanskriti Puraskar, Bharat Excellency Award, Tarasankar Puraskar, Sopan Sahitya Puraskar, Bankim Puraskar and many others. His major works are Nunbari, Dourbogarar Upakhyan, Ananta Draghima and Parijan o Onyanno Golpo.
INDRANIL ACHARYA is Professor and Head of the Department of English, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal. He has authored, edited, and translated several books and is the Chief Editor of Janajati Darpan, an international multilingual series on indigenous studies.
ANURADHA SEN is a translator and teacher based in Kharagpur, West Bengal. She graduated from the University of Calcutta and completed her Masters from Vidyasagar University. She translates Dalit literature from Bangla to English.
ARUN PRAMANIK is Assistant Professor of English at Gour Mahavidyalaya, affiliated to the University of Gour Banga, Malda, West Bengal. His essays and translations have been published in various academic journals and edited volumes.
SAYANTAN DASGUPTA teaches Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University and is the co-ordinator of the Centre for Translation of Indian Literatures. He is also a member of Advisory Board (English), Sahitya Akademi.
In modern Indian Dalit literature, autobiography remains the most powerful genre for the assertion of Dalit consciousness. Sharankumar Limbale's Akkarmashi, written at the age of twenty-six, created a huge furore in the world of mainstream Marathi literature. His book reveals how his mother was bartered away to three landlords for bare survival. This autobiography resonates with the conflict one can identify in African-American literature of the late twentieth century. The authentic quest for truth in Dalit autobiographies exposes a harsh and naked reality that can never be discovered in the writings of eminent non-Dalit writers like Premchand, Manto, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, Manik Bandyopadhyay, Mahasweta Devi and others, despite their acute and often powerful portrayals of the dispossessed and those living on the extreme margins of society and humanity. Sadgati, Hnasuli Bnaker Upakatha, Aranyak, Padma Nadir Majhi, Chotti Mundar Teer-all these classic creations on subaltern reality are essentially third-person narratives. They fail to register the fierce protest against Brahminical social order in the first person. In this regard, Marathi Dalit authors have played a pioneering role. Daya Pawar's Achhut, Lakshman Mane's Upara, Prahlad Kamble's Ayetwan Chopakshi, Shantabai Kamble's and Baby Kamble's autobiographies have formed a unique oeuvre of protest literature that represents a hitherto-suppressed subaltern experience narrated most passionately. A trenchant critic of Premchand, Omprakash Valmiki, in his book Joothan, has also challenged the deep-rooted system of exploitation in the name of untouchability. Of course, Dalit writings in Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and other languages of south India have assumed the dimension of a people's movement.
In this context, Anil Gharai's fiction in Bengali may be closely analysed. He did not produce any autobiographical writing as other Dalit authors in other regions of the country did. But his novels and short stories have questioned the representation of Dalits in mainstream Bengali literature. Along with Gharai, Kapil Krishna Thakur, Jatin Bala, Nalini Bera, Afsar Ahmed, Achintya Biswas, Shyamal Kumar Pramanik and many other Dalit authors have challenged the literary Brahminism in Bengal. Their literary outputs resonate with the protest tradition of African-American literature on the one hand, and on the other, with the incipient literary creations of Dalit poets in the earliest Charyapada texts of Bengal-the first utterance of Dalit identity vis-à-vis a Bengali identity.
Dalit literature has been a visible category of Indian literature for many decades now. Writers of Dalit literature from languages such as Gujarati, Marathi and Tamil have by now become popular even in language spaces outside their own, thanks to translation.
However, it is only much more recently that the Dalit literary movement in Bangla has gathered steam. The widespread idea that Bengal had not seen a Dalit movement and there was no Dalit literature worth its name in Bangla has now been well and truly put to rest. While many of these writers have been writing for several decades it is again over the last decade or so and again thanks, not in a small measure, to translation that this has happened. Powerful works written in Bangla by writers such as Kalyani Thakur, Manju Bala, Manohar Mouli Biswas, Manoranjan Byapari and many others have today become more visible. These writers have today been recognised as being among the leaders of Bangla Dalit writing today. We are well on our way to seeing Bangla Dalit writing as an important category within Bangla literature.
A number of Bangla Dalit literary works have been translated into various languages, particularly into English, over the last few years. This is again significant as far as the growing visibility and accessibility of Bangla Dalit literature is concerned. Anil Gharai is one of the most important writers from the oeuvre of Bangla Dalit literature. This anthology of thirteen very powerful short stories by Gharai is a timely effort and promises to make this writer accessible to a larger section of readers as well as to augment our understanding of the nuances and diversities within Dalit literature.
While the Dalit autobiography has probably enjoyed the greatest visibility and popularity among scholars and critics, many critics have also pointed to the fact that fiction from the Dalit literary canon imbibes a large quantum of autobiographical elements. In that way, Dalit literary fiction negotiates between life and literature in a unique way, and it is therefore being increasingly seen today as a mode and genre that can foster a better understanding of our contemporary Indian realities.
Gharai's short stories definitely fulfill this promise. The stories translated for this volume focus on characters from the grassroots of Indian society. These stories explore the underside of modern India. It is instructive to note that Gharai's protagonists include the vagrant slum dweller ('Bindiya'), the unlettered and unemployed youth who leaves his ancestral home and travels to new places in search of work ("The Eternal Bond'), the ill-paid village midwife struggling to look after her ailing son ('German's Mother'), and the poor village chowkidar ("The Chowkidar').
People who make a meal by scavenging for leftovers at village feasts and people who compete with dogs in their struggle for survival are characters we encounter in this writer's works. That is the brutal, dehumanised reality that Anil Gharai depicts in his fiction. His stories focus on the most deprived and the oppressed and give a voice to the voiceless, a visibility to the plight of those rendered invisible in the national imaginary.
Another important theme is violence, which manifests itself in many different forms in Gharai's fiction. Sometimes violence figures as revenge as in the story 'Bindiya, in which, the protagonist finds no other way to save herself, her dignity and her family.
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