Bangla Dalit Writer Writes Back: Selected Essays on Life and Works of Manohar Mouli Biswas

Recent years have witnessed the rise of literary output by dalits from another cultural positions in India. Translation from regional languages to English plays an important role in transferring power dynamics in a stratified caste pyramid in Indian society. This ‘cultural rigging’ endorses the fact of ‘cultural silence’. Literary productions by the dalits of Bengal are centuries old. Manohar Mouli Biswas’ literary corpus glitters with militant use ofmetaphors, phrases and punctuations and achieves laurels in the reading world with a semiotictag, ‘writing as resistance’.

About the Author

Manohar Mouli Biswas was born on 3rd October 1943 in a Namashudra community in a remote village Matiargati of the district Khulna of undivided Bengal. He is a popular bilingual dalit writer and activist, and is at present president of the Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sanstha. He edits the Dalit Mirror, a culture magazine. Biswas is the author of a number of signal books in different genres. He has six books of poems, four in Bengali and two in English, two books of short stories, six books of essays, out of which one is in English titled, An Interpretation of Dalit Literature Aesthetic Theory and Movements: Through the Lens of Ambedkarism.

Jaydeep Sarangi is a bilingual writer, academic, editor, interviewer, translator and author of a number of significant publications on Postcolonial issues, Indian Writing in English, Australian Literature, Marginal literatures and Bangla dalit writings in reputed journals/magazines. With Angana Dutta, he has transliterated and edited Surviving in My World: Growing up Dalit in Bengal which has been reviewed in many leading journals in the world like EPW, Biblio, Commonwealth Essays (Sorbonne University),South Asia Research (London), TNL(Australia), Indian Literature, Voice of the Dalit (Sage Publication),The Book Review, etc.