‘What a long long way…’

With Ambedkar Day just two days away, Dalit writer Sheoraj Singh talks about his displaced childhood and the milestones he has crossed.

Sheoraj Singh Bechain

Sheoraj Singh ‘Bechain’ lives with his wife and two children in one of Delhi’s satellite-towns. This couple, both teachers at Delhi University, places an unmistakeable premium on the value of education. Singh is Professor at the Department of Hindi. A library-cum-study occupies a central location in their home, with the entire set of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches (in Hindi) holding pride of place in a bookshelf against the wall opposite the door.

As they escort me through their residence to the sitting room, Singh says, with obvious pride, “With my background as a mason’s assistant and, then, a skilled mason, I did not need anybody to design my house. I designed it myself. In fact I would help the labourers to lay the bricks, and help them to get the wall measurements correct.

His story — as narrated in his autobiography,

Mera Bachapan Mere Kandhon Par (My Childhood on my Shoulders) — is that of a self-made man. Having lost his father at the tender age of five as a result of an unfortunate drinking episode, Singh (Sauraj, as he was then called) and his two siblings — children of a landless, ‘untouchable’ chamar family — were forced to accompany their widowed mother twice, in quick succession, to new parental homes as she was married off by her scheming father to two different men, one after the other. From then on, as Sheoraj recounts, “it was as if a hurricane had swept through our lives.”

Bhikari Lal, the second stepfather, took an instant dislike to his wife’s children and tried to sell Singh and his sister to labour contractors at brick-kilns. “After our rescue from being bonded labour, we were taken back to the village of my father by our paternal grandfather, where we were put to work as farm hands.”  

During this period, his sister, Maya, was married off at the age of 11-12 to a man almost 15 years her senior. And Singh alone was left with his grandfather. Then he had no dream of achieving a materially secure future or a dignified life, although a hunger for learning always burned deep within. He had indefinite hours of work, and was only paid subsistence wages which, sometimes, took the shape of a meal a day. At the age of eight, he came to Rajouri Garden in Delhi to live with his aunt and uncle. Here he undertook many kinds of jobs to earn his living, including doing odd jobs at roadside restaurants, hawking lemons and delivering newspapers. At the initiative of a philanthropically-disposed Sikh couple, he was able to start a career as a student.

“How did you manage to remember the many experiences that you have put down in your autobiography?” I ask him in wonder. “I put down not the experiences that I could remember, but those which I could not forget,” he smiled at me, sadly. “What a long, long way I have had to travel to reach where I stand today.”

At the end of my visit, he sang lines from a song for me, in the manner of folk-singers from his region in Uttar Pradesh: “ At the end of my travels, I remember my pauses — the houses I dwelt in and the people with whom I stayed./My strength, most of all, I have derived from those who were wretched like myself./Both friends and foes, distant or near, everybody I encountered revealed a human self, despite differences from each other in caste and creed./For centuries I, mute and long-suffering, have been spoken about, misrepresented, by people who do not know me./Of what avail is it to listen to half-truths? Let those who want to hear the real story hear it from me./ The story of my childhood, which is the story of millions of children, I dedicate to those who might be their saviours. ”