BALUTA
Daya Pawar
Translated by Jerry Pinto
Speaking Tiger
299 pages; Rs 350
"I have tried best to forget my past. But the past is stubborn, it will not be erased easily. Many Dalits may see what I am doing here as someone picking through a pile of garbage. A scavenger's account of life. But he who does not know his past cannot direct his future."
Daya Pawar wrote this in 1978 in Baluta, the first autobiography by a Dalit, in Marathi. With this English translation, Jerry Pinto has done us all a favour.
In the preface to Mr Pinto's translation of the book, Shanta Gokhale, the famous writer and translator of works, wonders whether today's readers will feel the same sense of shock that she did on the first reading of Baluta years ago. Ms Gokhale, it may not shock readers today but it will certainly burn through their skins by the time they are done reading the 299 pages of the book.
The book is set in the slums of Mumbai of the 1940s and 1950s and in a Maharwara in rural Maharashtra. The Maharwara was the area designated for the Mahars - a Dalit community to which Pawar belonged - to live away from the main village in order not to pollute it.
Baluta takes you to places all non-Dalit Indians must visit even today - the secluded corners where Dalit inhabitations persist in rural India and the decrepit urban slums of the cities where the poor and the excluded communities of the country mostly live. Don't be mistaken, they exist even today.
This is not a book in which the author unleashes his rage and explodes reality like a bomb in the reader's face. Pawar deploys narrative tools that are simple and yet permit a complex reflection on his life. The essence and physical reality of his existence injects itself slowly into the heart and mind of the reader like a toxic chemical.
When you read Baluta, the words help you walk the lanes of his memory and of the chawls in which he grew up. His phrases draw you in to the corner of his village reserved for Mahars. You feel his anguish build as he grows up and learns of the dark shadows of untouchability and the economic lockdown it imposes on the lives of his people. You feel his exhilaration at finding the little joys that he is able to steal from the squalor that defines the lives of Mahars. You are amazed by the candour he shows in narrating the anecdotes that illustrate the changes in his life and sketch the lives of others around him.
But as Pawar makes you walk the grimy memory lanes of his life the systematic and deep social injustices you see strewn across his path the essence of his existence seep in to your thoughts. Pawar does not play the victim, as Pinto rightly points out. He does not speak for his community and he does not use rhetoric. He reflects upon his life, the lives and ways of the people and the communities around him and he can be as scathing and as deeply introspective of himself as he is about others.
Fascinatingly, the autobiography also takes you through the patches in Pawar's heart and life when he is conscious of the changes education and the love for written words brings to his life. The act of learning distances him from lives of others even as it provides him the tools to reflect upon his and their lives.
Mr Pinto explains that baluta, the word Pawar chose to name his autobiography, refers to the practice once prevalent in villages of Maharashtra that forced the Mahar community to work as bonded labour. It refers to the "lowly" jobs and duties Mahar's and some other communities were forced to do for the village without payment. They got a share in the village's produce instead and that was called baluta. Pawar writes about how the Mahars never looked upon baluta as alms but as their right. Obviously, other "higher-castes" did not think so. Pawar does not explicitly call it bonded labour. But his craft of story-telling is so perfect, you cannot escape the unstated truth. You cannot escape the reality of Dalit oppression reflected in Baluta. Thank you, Jerry Pinto, for capturing it so richly in the translation.
