Surviving In My World: Growing Up Dalit In Bengal

A translation of the author's autobiography Amar Bhubane Ami Beche Thaki (2013), this book consists in addition a detailed interview of the author that bridges the gap between Biswas's days of struggle as a dalit child labourer, as narrated in the autobiography, and his later (so far unrecorded) life as an accomplished dalit literary activist, as one of the leading members of the Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sanstha that supports dalit literature. Born in 1943, in a family of small agriculturists among the formerly untouchable namashudra community in Metiargati, a village in the Khulna district of East Bengal, a wetland, Biswas has grown up not only wrestling poverty, starvation and discrimination against dalits but also practising their customs, participating in their economy and experiencing their cultural richness. Incredibly moving, written with great direct simplicity, this also reveals the beliefs and practices of the namashudra and their coherent worldview with the Matua cult of Sri Harichand and Sri Guruchand Thakur undergirding their lives, also leading them to political mobilization against the upper caste stranglehold that operated socially and economically.