Description
The first English-language collection from one of India's most hard-hitting writers, these poems brilliantly exemplify writing as an act of resistance. Militant, satirical, and biting, Kalyani Charal pulls no punches in eviscerating paternalistic - and patriarchal - bourgeois socialists who speak on behalf of others.
Writing from lived experience, Charal delineates the bourgeois values that fuel the social machinery of caste oppression, while drawing parallels with social and racial marginalisation around the world. Thus, in her poetry, the specificity of Dalit lives in Bengal, a region which prides itself on its Leftist history and enlightened culture, and whose partition into India and Bangladesh has left a legacy of communal tension, refugees, and statelessness, is at the same time the universality of precarity, marginality and dispossession. Finally, there is space for love - wistful and full-throated, with an attentiveness to the natural world that speaks to her claim that "all Dalit woman writers are eco feminists".
This is how birds and people of colour become one and the same
An adjective blossoms, 'migrants'.
"Kalyani Thakur Charal's sharp writing on Dalit feminism has shaken the system time and again" - Scroll India
About the Author
Kalyani Thakur Charal is a Dalit feminist poet writing in the Bengali language. She has published four volumes of poetry, a collection of critical essays, a collection of short stories, and an autobiography. She edits the Dalit women's magazine Neer, is on the board of a publishing house focusing solely on Dalit writers, and on the Dalit Sahitya Akademi. She recently edited Dalit Lekhika: Women's Writing from Bengal. is Professor in the Department of English, West Bengal State University, India. Her research interests are religion, caste, and power. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Indian Language and Literature, University of Calcutta.
Book Information
ISBN 9781911284765
Author Kalyani Thakur Charal
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint Tilted Axis Press
Publisher Tilted Axis Press
