The blood, the gore, the muscle beneath the skin

This 2008 Odia novel, now published in an excellent English translation, could well be a report from today’s newspapers

September 02, 2017 04:00 pm | Updated 04:00 pm IST

Twenty-five Dalit houses were burnt down by Thakurs. In turn, the Dalits organised a rally, led by a charismatic leader, which turned violent when it clashed with Thakur supporters. The Dalit leader was jailed.

A young Dalit, upset by the exploitation of his people and the smuggling of wood from community forests, mobilised villagers to fight against the local trader-politician nexus. The Dalit leader was jailed.

In my blood

One of these is a real-life event from May this year. The other is from Bheda, an Odia book by Akhila

Naik, translated by Raj Kumar. The difference ends there. In every other cool, understated detail that leads inexorably to the novel’s end, Naik’s book is a razor-sharp reflection of real life that could well be journalistic narrative and not fiction at all. And narrative that’s set in the here and now of a modern, young India that is ready, we are told every day, to sweep the world off its feet with its vision and energy.

It would be wonderful if some of this energy was directed at removing the staggering inequity that continues to dog citizens like Laltu, the headmaster’s son, in Bheda. His family and several others are Doms, untouchables, lowest of the low. Today, they can study and become teachers or clerks, if lucky, but they must stay outside the pale; subservient, invisible, despised.

Akhila Naik also comes from a Dom family in Odisha’s Kalahandi district. They lived in Dompada, the Dom colony, just outside Bhalpada, the ‘good’ colony, where the ‘bhallok’ lived. He grew up wretchedly aware that he belonged to the ‘bad’ people, whom nobody would touch or eat with, until he went to university and discovered Phule and Ambedkar and the written word.

Naik published this story first in the Odia magazine, Paschima, writing it in just 15 days. “The incidents described in this novel had lived in my blood for many years,” he says.

“Reading Bheda was no pleasure at all,” says translator Raj Kumar. It’s true. This book is neither easy nor light, nor will it give ‘pleasure’ in the way the word is understood. What such literature does is “locate us in our human world”, and Bheda turns a searing light on the magically invisible but very real lives lived on the margins of our own. I don’t say this in the spirit of some new discovery of untouchability to be made via this book, but more with a kind of despairing wonder.

Naik published his story in 2008. It was the year of the IPL launch and Bindra’s shooting gold. Nano was the talk of town. In a year, the country would launch its first nuclear submarine. And it was the year of Mumbai’s terror attack.

It was also possibly the year when unknown numbers of Dalits were thrown out of jobs, thrown into jail, or had their homes burnt down because their son dared wear a watch. None of these latter tales made headlines, nor did Naik’s book.

Now we have this excellent English translation, an aide memoire, if you will, to help recall that untouchability is still alive and kicking. But also that some of the best writing today comes from the margins that we refuse to acknowledge.

Living, remembering

The slim novel is unusually crafted, each of its seven chapters telling the story from the life and point of view of one character. In effect, this makes the novel a cross-sectional dissection in prose, slicing away layers and facades, revealing the blood, the gore, the muscle underneath, and doing so with an unsentimental, coldly objective scalpel.

The timeline and the narrative keep shifting and moving, following the natural rhythms of living, remembering, reliving. An undulating, unhurried movement much like the motion of a country boat and with the same sense of acquiescent timelessness.

A village in Kalahandi is the locale, but the culmination is in Bhawanipatna, the district headquarters. Bheda, which means ‘difference’, is a simple enough story: About Laltu, the headmaster’s son, who becomes a Dalit activist and stands up to local power centres. About the headmaster’s wife Mastrani and her Sanskritization in order to be accepted by the upper castes.

About Semi Seth and Baya Lawyer and the shakhas they launch to tell the Doms that everyone is Hindu. About the journalist Santosh Panda and his shaky support for Laltu. It’s a slice of the now hackneyed “other India” that finds a saviour in a charlatan like Ram Rahim possibly because nobody else promises even a mock shot at upward mobility.

What makes the book so vivid is its proximity. Laltu could be Mevani or Chandrashekhar from today’s headlines, and Bheda the nuanced story of a class clearly struggling to choose between painfully slow, frequently stalled amelioration on the one hand, and justice and equality proactively grabbed from an unwilling system on the other.

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