'The Runaway Boy' by Manoranjan Byapari: Touch of reality, felt and lived

In a career spanning nearly 40 years, Manoranjan Byapari has written nearly a dozen novels and more than 70 short stories. ‘Nothing much,’ many could claim. However, if these works, most of them autobiographical, form the genesis of Bengali Dalit writing, it is a big deal.

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A Dalit boy growing up in post-Partition refugee camps, a Naxalite rebel who taught himself to read and write in jail, a rickshaw-puller who became an author after a chance meeting with writer Mahasweta Devi, Byapari, like his protagonists, has perennially subsisted at the margins. Even numerous awards and recent appointment as chairman of a newly constituted Dalit Sahitya Akademi in Bengal have not been life-changing enough for Byapari, who worked as a cook till recently.

He doesn’t need to imagine his characters. “I am one of them, so I write about them.” The protagonist of ‘The Runaway Boy’, Jibon has many similarities with Byapari’s own life. Jibon arrives at a refugee camp in West Bengal as an infant with his Dalit parents. He grows up perpetually hungry for hot rice in the camp, much like Byapari who recalls his own days: “We would get worm-riddled rice once every fortnight in the camps.”

When he’s 13, Jibon runs away to Calcutta to find work and bring back food for his starving siblings and clothes for his mother, whose only sari is in tatters. Set in mid- 20th century India, the novel, first of the ‘Chandal Jibon’ triology, is a heart-wrenching account of a reality that India is still grappling with in the 21st century — hunger, caste violence and communal hatred. — TNS