Book: Interrogating my Chandal life
Author: Manoranjan Byapari
Translator: Sipra Mukerjee
Pages: 356
Inam ul rehman
A poor man holds unto no ideology except that of bread. It is the lack of bread that haunts
him and his family. But the burden of providing blood for any revolution, or change, is always on the poor men.
Manoranjan Byapari’s autobiography is a tale of few decades but it encapsulates centuries of oppression that the upper caste Hindus have wielded on their lower castes.
Byapari comes from the lowest caste of Hinduism, and as such is unschooled, and oppressed. He learns lessons of the life on the streets, through punches, humiliation, scares, cheated, stealing food from mongrels, every worse thing except never giving up on the life. He runs away from his family in order to work and feed them, but returns home dust handed a decade later cheated and duped by most of his proprietors. During his runaway a police official rapes him. Male rapes are underreported. No one wants it be reported, or speak a word on it. Byapari is not shy to say that he was raped in his preteens.
Byapari, in his autobiography, does not write scathingly on discrimination Hinduism does to lower castes rather he dispassionately writes a few sentences for those readers who are not familiar with it. His family is refugee from the then East Pakistan, and settle in Calcutta. Here they eat grass, frogs, snakes, whatever they can lie hand on. In trying to escape his grisly poverty he joins political party, and obviously the first party he joins is the Communist Party. But his delusion is short lived as he witnesses the ruthless face of it.
The Communist Party, according to him, massacred the refugees of East Pakistan. It was in the area called Marichjhapi where first the government forces cut off essential services to the people. Some who tried to smuggle essential things from rivers where drowned by “the speedy boats of the government forces”. He avers that the tigers of the Sundarbans forest became men eaters after government forces killed between 500-1000 lower caste Hindu refugees in the area, and let them rot there. Byapari says that when they came from East Pakistan as refugees the government provided them land at Dandakaranya, spread in Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh, but the same Communist Party advised them not to go to the “stony land”, and it will support them in being rehabilitated in Bengal itself. But when the same refugees demanded land for rehabilitation at Marichjhapi as promised by the CPI, the latter had no qualms in hunting them. He realises that be it Marxists, Congressmen, BJPian, it is the poor who fight and kill each other for their ideology.
Then he flings with the Naxals, or Naxals come to him. Here he questions why violence is necessary when they are not for succession, and demand only better life for the downtrodden. Revolutions had to take recourse to violence because, a Naxal leader tells him, “Nowhere would the ones in power sacrifice their privilege and position peacefully. Lives would be lost, lives would be sacrificed.” Not only the Naxals of the 60s and 70s had to face brutal retaliation from the state, but common people of the area faced the burnt with many killed in staged encounters.
Byapari also had to taste the cold walls of jail wherein he meets a sagacious person. This person makes him to think constructively. Distraught with his life, Byapari feels he is doomed to live in jail forever. Here his sagacious friend inspires him to look things constructively. “The truth is,” he tells him, “ (h)e who searches, shall find. Men have been coming here ever since prisons were made thousands of years ago. Those who wept, died weeping. Those who survived were those who conquered their tears. And those who could laugh are part of our history.”
It is in prison that Byapari learns to read and write. He writes that in prisons rape accused are most hated by their fellow prisoners.
After his release from the jail, once in an inebriated condition he delivers a fiery speech which brings him into the notice of Chattisgarh Mukhti Morch activists. It becomes important point in his life. He meets the CMM founder, Shankar Guha Neogi, who is a Marxist himself, but is considered a pseudo one because he critiques the then Soviet Russia. Neogi tells Byapari that his party’s slogan is “construct to destroy, and destroy to construct” but violence as a method to change the system is not viable.
Byapari is surprised that Neogi is not just a leader but man committed to uplift the lives of people, particularly of labour class. “We are trying to break down a system. But if we fail to show the people the alternative system that we will build in its place, why would people be encouraged to destruction?” His discipline among his cadres is displayed when Neogi is kidnapped by the police so that he can be murdered, his cadres take a few policemen as hostages to protect their founder, the police fires on protestors killing 11 people, but his activists do not harm cops at all. Any guess who was ruling Madhya Pradesh then? Well, it was the BJP. The modus operandi of this party has not changed.
Despite the then BJP government throttling every attempt of mass contacts by Neogi, the CMM calls for a meeting of all the workers of the Bhilai steel plant. The BJP government announces section 144, banning the meeting. But here the organisational skill of Neogi comes to fore. He shifts meeting to Raipur, almost 33 kilometres from where the original meeting was proposed, making all arrangements for their food, drinking water, medical facilities in case of emergency. His cadres walk down the roads of Raipur in three parallel rows each six miles long, making the meeting a grand success, and in the process annoying his capitalist rivals, who decide that if he stays in the political arena they may have to live a life of penury. Political and extractive class is never at peace with those who not only propose but show alternates to better life for the people, so Neogi must go. He is murdered, and then the government unleashes violence in his area scattering his cadres once for all. With Neogi gone the CMM never recovers from the blow. Byapari is then again lost.
And once again his belly needs take him to work against the very ideology he was a proponent of. He veers from one job to another, and at the end of the book he is a full time cook, but never gives up his writing.
This autobiography reinforces that it is the blood of the poor people that runs every revolution but the same poor people have to pay huge costs for this romance. And once this change, or reformation, takes place the poor are left to fend for themselves.
There is also mention of Kashmir when the purportedly relic of the Prophet (SAW) is stolen from Hazratbal Shrine leading to riots in Calcutta.
