‘The Nemesis’ book review: Mirror, mirror on the wall

Express News Service

Uncensored fictional accounts of those living at the intersection of caste discrimination and poverty often evade mainstream English literature, the production of which, through lineage and dominance, is predominantly an upper- caste, upper-class phenomenon in India.

To break barriers,whether personal or systemic, is no easy task. Against this backdrop, it is translation
that gives us access to the richness of Bangla literature, a significant part of which is dedicated to works on social disparity, written with great empathy and a desire to bring about social change.

Full marks to V Ramaswamy for this brilliant and seemingly effortless translation of Manoranjan Byapari’s The Nemesis,the second book in his Chandal Jibon trilogy, which is infused with bits of transcribed phrases embedded for emphasis and atmosphere.

Jibon, the protagonist, did not want to be called chandal Jibon. In fact, he did not quite choose or relish being born in a chandal (of Namasudra caste) family. He was just born. And the caste of his parents condemned him to the harshest life of hunger, humiliation and violence.

In this loosely autobiographical novel, Byapari has woven his life story into a work of fiction. While chandal Jibon is the protagonist’s caste and first name respectively, the words also mean “life of the chandal”,and this individual tale maps the destiny of an entire community.

In this volume, the runaway boy of penniless refugee parents has now grown to adulthood and grapples with the twin concerns of livelihood and of what to make of his life.Jibon’s coming-of-age coincides with the flashpoint of the Naxalite movement in Bengal in the early 70s. Sustenance and survival are difficult enough; therefore, politics holds no grand solutions. Yet, the everyday violence he is subjected to,and what he witnesses hanging around various tea stalls, offers no other recourse, but a way out via greater, organised reprisal. As luck would have it,a friend tampering with a wall brands him a Naxalite.

He is dragged into the movement’s fiery belly when advancing policemen with automatics are fended off with crude handmade bombs. This misstep agonises his ailing father, and to save Jibon’s life,the family relocates to a refugee resettlement village in the dreaded Dandakaranya, now in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar.

This shift gives Jibon his first love and amoebic dysentery. Used to milder climate, pliable soil and the water bodies of the greater Padma basin and delta, no refugee family likes their new home or can eke out
a living here on varied millet and hardy indigenous pulses like kulith (horse gram). Leaving is almost impossible. Desperation, violence and ticketless travel bring him back to Jadavpur in Kolkata.

The author’s super-power is that he writes of Jibon’s rage through the prism of his own. He writes of the protagonist’s experiences by having intimately known each blow, each insult and many consecutive nights of hunger. And he knows the topography of his tales so profoundly that his stories are intricate with tiny portraits that detail the lifestyles, places and subjects he explores. Rickshaw-pullers, the unemployed, guards, labourers, criminals and househelp, as friends, reveal their struggles, whether in cities or in familiar rural areas. This master storyteller relies on his craft and innate love for literature to transform lived experiences into a panorama of caste sufferings that are ubiquitous, yet go unnoticed.

A common thread that runs through Jibon and his associates’ experiences is the role of government officials in dominance and torture, in not aiding but making things much worse for men like him. Whether employees in ration shops, ticket checkers, the police, procurement officers or government liaison officials in Bastar, all are out to wring money out of the poorest of poor, sometimes using brute force.

The true mark of a great book is when it opens out worlds inaccessible, and leaves knots within the reader. The telling has all the markers of an epic. Militant in its condemnation of things as they are, this reorients much of our mainstream thought processes and points a finger at each of us.

<br /> Uncensored fictional accounts of those living at the intersection of caste discrimination and poverty often evade mainstream English literature, the production of which, through lineage and dominance, is predominantly an upper- caste, upper-class phenomenon in India.</p> <p>To break barriers,whether personal or systemic, is no easy task. Against this backdrop, it is translation<br /> that gives us access to the richness of Bangla literature, a significant part of which is dedicated to works on social disparity, written with great empathy and a desire to bring about social change.</p> <p>Full marks to V Ramaswamy for this brilliant and seemingly effortless translation of Manoranjan Byapari’s The Nemesis,the second book in his Chandal Jibon trilogy, which is infused with bits of transcribed phrases embedded for emphasis and atmosphere.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });</p> <p>Jibon, the protagonist, did not want to be called chandal Jibon. In fact, he did not quite choose or relish being born in a chandal (of Namasudra caste) family. He was just born. And the caste of his parents condemned him to the harshest life of hunger, humiliation and violence.</p> <p>In this loosely autobiographical novel, Byapari has woven his life story into a work of fiction. While chandal Jibon is the protagonist’s caste and first name respectively, the words also mean “life of the chandal”,and this individual tale maps the destiny of an entire community.</p> <p>In this volume, the runaway boy of penniless refugee parents has now grown to adulthood and grapples with the twin concerns of livelihood and of what to make of his life.Jibon’s coming-of-age coincides with the flashpoint of the Naxalite movement in Bengal in the early 70s. Sustenance and survival are difficult enough; therefore, politics holds no grand solutions. Yet, the everyday violence he is subjected to,and what he witnesses hanging around various tea stalls, offers no other recourse, but a way out via greater, organised reprisal. As luck would have it,a friend tampering with a wall brands him a Naxalite.</p> <p>He is dragged into the movement’s fiery belly when advancing policemen with automatics are fended off with crude handmade bombs. This misstep agonises his ailing father, and to save Jibon’s life,the family relocates to a refugee resettlement village in the dreaded Dandakaranya, now in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar.</p> <p>This shift gives Jibon his first love and amoebic dysentery. Used to milder climate, pliable soil and the water bodies of the greater Padma basin and delta, no refugee family likes their new home or can eke out<br /> a living here on varied millet and hardy indigenous pulses like kulith (horse gram). Leaving is almost impossible. Desperation, violence and ticketless travel bring him back to Jadavpur in Kolkata.</p> <p>The author’s super-power is that he writes of Jibon’s rage through the prism of his own. He writes of the protagonist’s experiences by having intimately known each blow, each insult and many consecutive nights of hunger. And he knows the topography of his tales so profoundly that his stories are intricate with tiny portraits that detail the lifestyles, places and subjects he explores. Rickshaw-pullers, the unemployed, guards, labourers, criminals and househelp, as friends, reveal their struggles, whether in cities or in familiar rural areas. This master storyteller relies on his craft and innate love for literature to transform lived experiences into a panorama of caste sufferings that are ubiquitous, yet go unnoticed.</p> <p>A common thread that runs through Jibon and his associates’ experiences is the role of government officials in dominance and torture, in not aiding but making things much worse for men like him. Whether employees in ration shops, ticket checkers, the police, procurement officers or government liaison officials in Bastar, all are out to wring money out of the poorest of poor, sometimes using brute force.</p> <p>The true mark of a great book is when it opens out worlds inaccessible, and leaves knots within the reader. The telling has all the markers of an epic. Militant in its condemnation of things as they are, this reorients much of our mainstream thought processes and points a finger at each of us.<br />