Mightier Than The Sword

Once a child left for dead, now an award-winning author, Manoranjan Byapari’s life is an astonishing survival saga

- Sanghamitra Chakraborty

January 2018, Chennai. The stage is set for The Hindu Prize 2018 for non-fiction. Five outstanding books from over 500 entries have been shortlisted. Each of the authors is widely celebrated, barring one. So when the outlier’s work, Interrogating My Chandal Life— An Autobiography of a Dalit, is announced as the winner, it is a moment in Indian literary history. Receiving the award, author Manoranjan Byapari, now 69, normally tenaciously unsentimental, breaks down into his gamchha, which he wears around his neck as a symbol of his identity. Many in the audience, his wife Manju among them, struggle to fight back tears. “The joy is not mine alone, but that of all those who are hated and discriminated against. The respect I received here made me cry,” Byapari said later.

Byapari was born in 1950 into a family of fisherfolk in the lush Barisal district (in today’s Bangladesh). As namashudras, the lowest rung of the Dalit people, his family had little to lose, but the derangement of Partition took their home as well. The Byaparis were herded into a truck, along with at least 30 other families, and transported to refugee camps in the badlands of West Bengal. Memories of that terrifying journey—being bumped around in the vehicle in the searing heat, the air clouded with red dust from the tracks, a baby being born en route and an old man dying on the truck—were burnt into the brain of the 4-year-old.