It was through translation that the world of Marathi Dalit writing opened up before Dalits of Gujarat, instilling in them an unease, and therefore inspiration to turn injustice and anger into a voice and text. It was through translation of a novel called Angaliyat ('The Stepchild') that I established my relationship with Dalit literature and sociology. The central figure dominating my interface with Dalit literature has been Joseph Macwan, the author of Angaliyat, one of the three most acclaimed novels in the history of Gujarati literature. When Josephbhai passed away at the age of 75 last month, it brought back to my mind a small entry I had made into his life and milieu – the visits to Anand in the scorching heat of summer, meals, conversations and drafts of translation I shared with one of the most arresting storytellers of our times. Josephbhai was dramatic, weaving tales through memory and music, breaking into the elegiac songs (marashiya) or bringing gentle flirtations through wedding songs. A raconteur par excellence, Josephbhai brought his past alive for me, helping me with what I consider as the cardinal function of translation -- parakaya and parasamaaj pravesh
Representing the community
Like his character Bhavaan Bhagat, Joesphbhai was a community archive; storing in his narratives the life and times of the Vankar community he belonged to. Painting with words the aspirations and tragic losses of the untouchable Satiyo, the raped Heta, the elegy singer Hazel, he created a vivid ethnography a region, people and caste.
People who touched his life -- Jeevikaaki, Pataka Kaka, Pannabhabhi, Bhavaan Bhagat -- inhabited his literary landscape and became through Vyatha Na Vithak and Angaliyat, part of Gujarat's collective memory. Josephbhai's fictionalised reality, or realistic fiction, is to my mind, an outcome of a formidable and receding tradition of orality, incidentally produced as written literature.
Josephbhai will be remembered most for his character-sketches that leapt out of Vyatha Naa Vitak , a collection of pen–portraits that also marked his dramatic arrival into Gujarati literature. He had brought with him immense possibilities. His contemporaries recount how he had the charisma of an icon, the groundedness of a Mahasweta Devi, or Premchand, and potential of a chronicler such as Marquez and Achebe. A ray of hope, a beacon for the nascent body of writing, Josephbhai was expected to give a direction and distinctness to Dalit writing in Gujarat, in a way that only he could. However, some of his contemporaries believe that Josephbhai did not manage to go beyond the personal universe and do justice to his claim as representative voice of Dalit literature. The matter remains contestable. Meanwhile, Josephbhai carried the burden of representation and became a concretisation of both Dalit aspirations and disappointments.
Institution
What remains unequivocally true is the amazing ways by which he combined rural idiom of a close-knit, organic community with lyrical poignancy of characters that turn most readers misty-eyed even today. Also, few would deny that Josephbhai was an institution unto himself, and his death has taken with it a tradition of memory as writing. The complex and divided responses to him during his lifetime and even after, only underscore his iconic stature.
(Rita Kothari translated Joseph Macwan's novel, Angaliyat into English (2003))
The Stepchild:Angaliyat, Joseph Macwan, Tr.Rita Kothari, OUP, Rs.295
