Jerry Pinto, a writer and translator of such classics as Daya Pawar’s Baluta, has just published a compelling English translation of another explosively powerful work of Marathi Dalit literature, Baburao Bagul’s Jevha Mi Jaat Chorli Hoti (When I Hid My Caste).
Unlike Baluta, Bagul’s book is not an autobiography, but a collection of ten short stories, each of which is eruptive, disruptive, cathartically poignant.
Originally published in 1963 when Bagul was a feisty 32 years old (that is, a decade before the launch of the revolutionary Dalit Panthers, in which he played an inspirational role), Jevha Mi Jaat Chorli Hoti shocked the Marathi literary community, which had been dominated by the formalist style of ‘high-caste’ authors. It shocked because of the explicit, anti-romantic representation of violence, of penury, rape, caste humiliation, and because its protagonists were a motley cast of pimps, prostitutes, gangsters and outcastes. Decades on, all of...
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