Manoranjan Byapari

Cooking up a Tale
Translated from Bangla by V. Ramaswamy
(Poetry / Winter 2021)

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Manoranjan Byapari was born in the early-1950s in Barishal, Bangladesh. His family migrated to West Bengal in India when he was three. They were resettled in Bankura at the Shiromanipur refugee camp. They were subsequently forced to shift to the Ghola Doltala refugee camp, in 24 Parganas, and lived there till 1969. However, Byapari had to leave home at the age of fourteen to do odd jobs. In his early twenties, he came into contact with the Naxals, and he landed up in jail after that, where he taught himself to read and write. Subsequently he joined the famous labour activist Shankar Guha Niyogi, founder of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha at the Dalli Rajhara Mines, who were leading a struggle to reclaim Adivasi lands from the feudal lords who had appropriated them. Later, while working as a rickshaw-puller in Kolkata, Byapari had a chance encounter in 1981 with the renowned Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, who urged him to write for her journal Bartika. He has published twelve novels and over seventy short stories since. Some of his important works include Ittibrite Chandal Jibon (an autobiographt), Amanushik, the Chandal Jibon trilogy of novels, Anya Bhubon and Motua Ek Mukti Senar Naam. Until 2018, he worked as a cook at the Helen Keller Institute for the Deaf and Blind in West Bengal. Byapari's first major recognition came in 2014, when he received the Suprabha Majumdar Prize, awarded by the Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, for Ittibrite Chandal Jibon. In 2018, Interrogating My Chandal Life, the English translation of this autobiography by Sipra Mukherjee, was awarded the Hindu Prize for non-fiction. He is currently the chairman of the Dalit Sahitya Akademi in Bengal and was elected to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in 2021.