Rising from the Dust brings together twelve stories that talk about the Dalit experience in Bengal. What distinguishes this collection is the gendered lens that explores the Dalit woman’s cause and holds it up to the light.
While literary stalwarts like Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay and Prafulla Roy share their profound understanding of the Dalit woman’s fears and traumas, hopes, dreams and aspirations, contemporary voices Manoranjan Byapari, Bimalendu Haldar, Manohar Mouli Biswas, Kalyani Thakur Charal, Anil Ghorai and Nakul Mallik explore aspects of survival and social ostracization with both sensitivity and angst.
Spanning an entire century of writing, the stories in this collection capture the essence of a way of life marked by the enduring defiant spirit of the dispossessed and the marginalized. Translated by Aruna Chakravarti with her trademark expertise, this is a must-read not only for literary enthusiasts, but also for students and scholars of Dalit and caste studies, development studies, Indian literature in translation and gender studies.