The story of Bengali Dalit literature is a story of silence, the silence of a community too dispersed to come together as a united force. After Partition, a large chunk of Bengal’s Namasudra population—chiefly from the districts of Khulna, Faridpur, Jessore, and Barishal in erstwhile East Pakistan—found themselves on the wrong side of a border drawn without their consent. They had fled home in darkness, leaving behind their lands, friends, and sense of belonging. Once in India, they ended up in refugee camps in Dandakaranya in east-central India and the Andaman Islands, where the question of survival consumed them every hour. Under such conditions, “Creative activities like writing were unaffordable luxuries,” wrote the Bengali author Manoranjan Byapari in the essay “Is There Dalit Writing in Bangla?” (translated by Meenakshi Mukherjee, Economic & Political Weekly, January 2007). You cannot build a literary movement when you are figuring out how to eat.

For generations, Bengal has told itself that it is progressive, literary, enlightened, above caste, without caste, and so different from the rest of India. The Renaissance happened in Bengal, as did Rabindranath Tagore. So, the question “Is there such a thing as Bengali Dalit literature?” could be asked in educated literary circles in good faith. As though the absence of recognition proved the absence of existence, as though silences did not denote a hidden malaise.

The Bengal Renaissance had produced reformers who wrote with genuine sympathy about the marginalised. What it did not produce, as Byapari pointed out, is writing from within. Modernist writers like Bibhutibhushan or Manik Bandopadhyay observed and diagnosed the pain of the underclass, sometimes even wept over it. Yet, as they say: “Those never bitten by a snake will never know the agony of poison.” The bhadralok literary tradition wrote about the marginalised without ceding the pen.

The word bhadralok, literally “gentle folk”, practically “respectable upper-caste Bengali”, does some heavy lifting. It marks who belongs in drawing rooms and who does not, whose grief is literature and whose is sociology. Its opposite term, chhotolok, meaning “the lowly”, goes beyond denoting economic status to also marking caste boundaries in the garb of class. The genius of this vocabulary is that it allows Bengal to maintain every hierarchy while disavowing them all.

When I asked the Bengali Dalit feminist writer Kalyani Thakur Charal why anti-caste movements have never got the traction that feminist movements have in Bengal, she replied: “In Bengal, the open platform [the maintream] is not ready to listen to our views or speeches.” She added: “But the cold-room lecture, delivered within the precincts of the academia, is acceptable.”

The seminar room may open a crack, but the drawing room stays closed. Even religious traditions that might have offered an alternative—Matua Dharma, a mass Namasudra movement built on radical anti-caste philosophy—are “now caught in a tide of Brahminical politics”, Thakur Charal explained.

She has described this in verse: “Labour leaders benefit out of / interests of the labourers. / Dalit sympathisers rise to / exploit the Dalits. / Still we trust ideals, and / the optimistic minds are hurt. / Labourers and Dalits remain static. / Masters and Dalit haters climb up / steps of a ladder of success / we clap hands knowingly or unknowingly” (from the collection Poems of Chandalini: Poems by a Bangla Dalit Womanist, translated and edited by Zinia Mitra and Jaydeep Sarangi, 2024).

Wake up!

In 1911, the Namasudra community successfully petitioned the British colonial government to change their official caste designation from “Chandal” to “Namasudra”. Chandals—the untouchable, the cremation-ground workers—became the Namasudras. The name changed, the connotations did not. A century later, Thakur Charal’s colleagues in the Railways had been using the term charal (derived from Chandal) as an insult, casually throwing it around in the workplace. At the Kolkata Railways office where she worked, Thakur Charal had to make do without a chair initially: when she got one at last, it came with the smallest table, in the furthest corner, away from the fans. At an Ambedkar anniversary celebration, her name was not called. She went home and made charal her surname.

One of her compositions in Poems of Chandalini goes: “The early birds call, I call too / Wake Up black men! / Thousand-years-asleep-men / Wake up!”

In an interview with Debdatta Chakraborty and Sarbani Banerjee (“I am Chandalini, and I am Proud of that. You must Accept and Respect it”, 2024), she stated: “If one can feel proud of one’s Brahminical identity, I can feel proud of my Chandal identity.... Charal and Chandalini are integral to my identity. So I will write Charal and Chandalini, whether you like them or not.”

In another poem, she writes: “My grandfather was prohibited / From stepping into the tol [rural grammar school] premises. My father became literate / Using palm leaf and ink of charcoal / After a long struggle. My mother visited Durga bari / With cowdung on her left hand / To paste on the place where she would stand. / Oh! God! Cowdung is holier / Than the touch of a Dalit!”

She says later in the poem: “I’ll have to remember / There is no Dalit in Bengal! / Dalits are everywhere in the world / NOT HERE! Caste discrimination exists everywhere / NOT HERE! They throttle our throat [sic], / Train us to say— / We are all equal, no caste stratification here.”

Her life was split between two geographies—the rural area of Bagula in Nadia district of West Bengal and Kolkata—and she has written about both halves. The world of her novel Andhar Bil (translated by Asit Biswas, 2022) is all about the Bagula half, with its dark lake, the ducks called home every evening with ai ai choi choi, the boroi tree, the floods survived by the entire village together, the cows and calves and snakes, her father telling her she is as capable as her brothers, her mother reading Sri Sri Hari Leelamrita (biography of the social reformer Harichand Thakur, founder of the Matua sect) aloud to the neighbourhood women by lamplight.

Thakur Charal writes in Andhar Bil: “The river continues to flow. She can have no history. She washes all sins away.... While the river washes all sins away, the bil [the lake] merges all sins unto herself. She is witness to everything in the village.”

The world of her autobiography, Ami Keno Charal Likhi (Why Do I Use Charal, 2016), is located in the Kolkata half: the city, the Railways office, her colleagues, the discrimination, the gradual build-up of humiliations that had to be survived with the help of sleeping pills. The city that called itself progressive showed her daily what progress looked like from the wrong side. She resigned from the Railways in 2014 but kept writing.

But no publisher would touch her work. So she published them herself: four poetry collections, an autobiography, essays, short stories. She and her friend Swasti Acharjee co-edited Neer Writupatra, a journal started on a hostel wall that grew into a platform for Dalit women writers across Bengal. She co-ran Stall 22 on College Street: part of the Bengali Dalit literary movement, Chaturtha Duniya, it sold exclusively Dalit titles once a week, for a few hours. She edited anthologies of Bengali Dalit women’s writing so that the scattered voices could be collected and gain force.

Besides working in Bengali, Thakur Charal collaborated for years with her friend Ramesh Bhagat of the Oraon community for a book on the grammar of the Kurukh language. The bhadralok Bengali literary tradition overshadows not just Dalit writing but also the aboriginal languages of Bengal and the surrounding areas. “These languages should have their right to live,” Thakur Charal said. If these languages die, the communities that speak them become deracinated and disconnected.

Her body of work is more than the sum of her titles; it is an entire ecosystem built in response to the “polite” exclusion she faced. When I asked her about the politics of Bengali literature, she brushed it aside, saying: “Who wants a share of their literature?” And then, almost as an aside, she said: “Only when someone crosses the English Channel, they discuss it.” Recently, Thakur Charal’s own collection I Belong to Nowhere: Poems of Hope and Resistance (2023), translated by Sipra Mukherjee and Mrinmoy Pramanick, crossed the Channel too.

Collaborative translation

The translation took two years. Thirty poems were selected from her oeuvre to “represent her works and nature of her writings and their development through three decades”, said Mukherjee. Every decision was made collaboratively, with the author, translators, editor all working together through “each word”.

The challenge was substantial. Mukherjee said: “Kalyani comes from a background that is close to the soil, so to say. She has grown up seeing the processes of farming—the sowing, the harvesting, the winnowing—and she is familiar with these particular words of which urban people have absolutely no idea.” Beyond vocabulary, there were poems “[alluding] to folklore and legends”, poems embedded in medieval literary texts. Pramanick and Mukherjee used footnotes to convey what the translation could not. “Since translation requires bringing both the meaning and the intent into another language, this frequently meant that we arrived at approximations, rather than at perfect reflections. While translating an entire rural culture into English was frequently a challenge, it was also deeply satisfying,” Mukherjee said.

In February 2026, I Belong to Nowhere won the A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies to extraordinary works of literary translation. Pramanick and Mukherjee became the first translators from Bengal to receive the prize. For Pramanick, the award meant more than just recognition: “This book is not a classic one, but the jury members chose it for the prestigious award. This is a sign about the changing world of new literatures,” she said.

Note where this different sign comes from: an American academic association. Note what it took: two translators spending two years recreating farming terms and border memories in a completely different language. It is not surprising that the validation came from outside rather than from inside: even Thakur’s poems have acknowledged this possibility. “I’m a freedom seeker / therefore, sent off the boat alone / Flowing beyond rivers and seas / to a foreign land,” she says in Poems of Chandalini.

But there are some recognitions more precious than an award. “Earlier, there would be only one or two [Dalit] voices. [There are more such voices these days because] the new generation can communicate better than them,” Thakur Charal said. At the annual Kolkata Book Fair, readers inevitably find their way to the little magazine section, to the table of Neer Writupatra, which Thakur Charal still edits. “‘Is a new issue out?’ they ask. I feel so drawn to these readers,” she said. She has every reason to feel possessive: hers is a readership built from scratch, sustained entirely by her stubborn insistence.

So, who cares if the drawing room stays closed? Kalyani Thakur Charal has built a whole new room for herself.

Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world.

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