Manoranjan Byapari – who was recently appointed chairperson of the first Dalit Sahitya Academy in West Bengal by the state government – has been named candidate of the Trinamool Congress. Mamata Banerjee named Byapari as candidate from Balagarh constituency in Hooghly district.
Byapari is an acclaimed writer who has been translated into English. He was born in 1950 in East Pakistan, and migrated to West Bengal when he was just three years old. He has lived in a camp in Kotulpur in Bankura and moved to a refugee camp in Ghutiyari Sherif of South 24 Parganas. Later, he lived in Jadavpur. Byapari has moved to several parts of the country, including in Assam, to work as a daily wage labourer.
After having spent his childhood in refugee camps, he ran away from poverty-stricken home at the age of 16, and continued to face poverty, brutality and exploitation even while working as a daily wage labourer. He returned to Kolkata in the 1970s he got involved in the Naxal movement and political killings. While in prison, he learned Bengali at the age of 24. On being released, he worked as a rickshaw-puller and ferried author Mahasweta Devi, who helped and inspired him to become a writer. He has worked a cook in a school for many years, and only recently he was appointed chairperson of the Dalit Sahitya Academy.
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He is the author of the memoir, Itibritte Chandal Jiban and Batashe Baruder Gondho, among others. Both books have been translated to English (Interrogating My Chandal Life and There’s Gunpowder in the Air).
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Also read: An excerpt from his book, Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit
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