My struggle is entirely my own

Heavyset, with eyes that appear divorced from anything uncritical, Manoranjan Byapari doesn't look like your usual suspect at a literary festival. But reality is stranger than fiction, and the Sahitya Akademi Award winner, by his own admission, is many characters rolled into one. A boy in the post-partition refugee camps of Bengal, an idealistic youth swept up in the Naxalite movement, a political prisoner who took to reading, a rickshaw-wallah turned author — the 'characters' all share their basis in unforgiving reality. It takes nothing less than toil and tenor to turn such realities into the collective voice of the dispossessed, and in his 65+ years, the author of Itibritte Chandal Jiban (Byapari's autobiographical novel) has mastered the crude art.

"In the refugee camps, the government would give us worm and dirt-riddled rice once every fortnight," says Byapari of his first brush with hunger. His family, like many others uprooted from erstwhile east Bengal (now Bangladesh), was granted asylum in Dandakaranya, an unyielding region in present-day Bastar (Chhattisgarh), evoked in the Ramayana as the land of exile. Their own exile seemed just as unjust to his father, who, on refusing to move, had the family struck off the government's register, officially rendered homeless.

As an adolescent, Byapari was quick to realise that his Dalit, working class identity would stand in the way of a respectable life. "The upper caste refugees were given 149 colonies and land in the suburbs, but we did not stir such strong emotions in the hearts of the politicians," recalls Byapari, who would go on to see his sister and father succumb to starvation. Driven away by hunger and fear, he fled home to work in tea stalls. It was 1967, and the young runaway found himself in the backdrop of the Naxalbari movement, the armed peasant revolt originating from Naxalbari, West Bengal. "The snippets of conversation I heard told me that this too, was a fight against hunger," he says.

The reckoning eventually led him to the movement raging through the heart of Calcutta, and in effect, a life-changing spell in jail, where he learnt to read and write. It was in jail, in the company of a teacher, that the hunger he'd carried around for years morphed into an appetite for the written word. If life so far could be described as dissonant at its worst and prosaic at its best, there was a certain poetic prophecy about Guru ji (as he remembers his teacher) pointing out a tiny sapling struggling through the jail wall, out towards the neighbouring National Library.

One could argue that such a metaphor also underlined Byapari's meeting with writer and social activist Mahasweta Devi, whom he asked, while ferrying her on his rickshaw, the meaning of the Bengali word jijibisha (will to live).

"But I don't believe in fate," protests Byapari, refusing to let a vague force like serendipity lay claim over his hard-earned story. And why not? It was he who chose to ply rickshaws after being released from jail, he who struck up a conversation with the lady he'd mistaken for a college professor — he submitted the essay Rickshaw Chalai (I Pull a Rickshaw) to Devi's magazine Bartika, and continued writing fiction, years after drifting away from the author, and non-fiction.

"To get to the water at the bottom of a well, one has to dig through earth and rock. Some get there after ten feet, some after twenty. I dug through a thousand feet, for the little water that I've found. So no, fate has given me nothing," he reasons.

Byapari isn't ungenerous in labelling his achievements — a dozen novels and over a hundred short stories critically recognised as touchstones in Bengali Dalit writing — "little water". For all the accolades, the author continues to live in financial strife, working as a cook for a school in Kolkata. "I'm like the proverbial big pond, which doesn't hold enough water for a pot to be dipped in," he says. "I am not an individual, I am a concept, and my agony sells.

Nobody ever asks about me once the (literary) event is over. So what if I'm invited to festivals? The day before I leave, I will chop vegetables, light the fire, cook. The day after I return, I will stand in front of a blazing furnace and cook for 200 kids. My struggle is entirely mine," Byapari reflects.

Fortunately for us, in Byapari's struggle survives his dissent, and in his dissent, the promise of a revolution. "My next book is going to be about a land where there is no ruler or ruled, where men and women are equals. I'll start as soon as I have some time on my hands," says the man who, despite the many disenchantments of life, named his children Mahasweta and Manik (after Manik Bandopadhyay, a pioneer of modern Bengali fiction) —his literary heroes.