Reader’s Digest
90 august 2019
“When she shared her name and
address, I was amazed—she was
Mahasweta Devi herself! I showed her
the copy of her book I was reading and
she gave me a big hug,” recalls Byapari.
Byapari started visiting Devi, who
soon became his literary mentor. “I
tried for a month to write my story and
ended up wasting a lot of paper. My
writing was terrible—I couldn’t read it
myself,” he laughs. But in the end, it was
published in Bartika magazine titled
Rickshaw Chalai [I am a Rickshaw
Puller]. And so, a writer was born.
Byapari has written 16 books and
numerous social and political essays.
Much of his fiction is inspired by
his own experiences, and peopled
by characters he has encountered
on his remarkable journey. Says
Arunava Sinha, translator of There’s
Gunpowder in the Air: “Byapari has an
extraordinary empathy with everyone
he saw struggling to survive, just like
himself. He could have foregrounded
his own unique experiences in all his
fiction, but he chose instead to tell the
stories of these other people, united in
that they were all victims fighting back
and refusing to surrender.”
Byapari’s political thinking is
informed by his activism, not just
in Bengal but his work in Chhattisgarh
with Shankar Guha Niyogi, the
legendary trade union leader,
who became his political mentor in
the ’80s, when he moved to the area.
Byapari has battled on relentlessly,
through his writing, againstBrahmanvad and Manuvad, not to
mention the oppression, violence and
injustice against his people. He has
spent the past four decades, bringing
to the fore their untold stories, which
would otherwise have been lost.
You hear despair in his voice, talk-
ing about the current socio-political
climate: “Even through years of Com-
munist rule in Bengal, the scourge
of casteism remains insidious ... All
these years of work of rationalism and
scientific progress have been negated
by regressive forces in one sweep.
We have fallen back by hundreds of
years.” Yet, not one to be defeated, he
calls himself a lekhowar, one who has
weaponized his writing, and uses the
fierceness of his prose to fight back.
When Amazon Westland launched
their language imprint Eka, this year,
their goal was to publish great writing
in Indian languages apart from English
and take them to a wider audience.
Says Minakshi Thakur, publisher,
Language Division: “Byapari is a writer
who must be moved from the sidelines
of publishing to the mainstream. His
ideas about caste and inclusivity, about
home and identity, nation and borders,
must be heard by readers across states,
especially the youth. They are relevant
now more than ever in our current
political climate. His writing stems
from deprivation, rage and isolation; it
is raw and uncoloured by training. And
most importantly, he speaks about a
world he has seen and lived in a world
which isn’t a fair one.”