Bengali writer Manoranjan Byapari wins the 2022 Shakti Bhatt Prize

A refugee and a member of the Namasudra caste, Byapari, 72, worked as a rickshaw puller and a sweeper before his incarceration over a political fallout. In jail, he taught himself to read and write, and, after a chance encounter with writer Mahasweta Devi, devoted himself to writing stories about the milieu he knew best — the downtrodden, the hungry and the forgotten. Byapari, now an All India Trinamool Congress MLA from the Balagarh assembly constituency, has written over a dozen novels and several volumes of short stories. His autobiographical work, Interrogating my Chandal Life (Itibritte Chandal Jibon), won The Hindu Prize for Non-Fiction in 2018. He has also received the Suprabha Majumdar prize (2014), awarded by the Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, and the Sharmila Ghosh Smriti Literary Prize (2015). The English translation of his novel There’s Gunpowder in the Air was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2019, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019, the Crossword Prize for Best Translation 2019, and the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Prize 2020. While The Runaway Boy was published in 2020 by Eka, the language division of the erstwhile Westland Books, the second book in the series, Nemesis, is due to go to the press soon. The final volume of the trilogy is still in translation.

In announcing the prize, Mridula Koshy, winner of the 2009 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for If It Is Sweet, and a current trustee of the Shakti Bhatt Foundation, said, “His writing bears witness to the violence meted out to refugees, to Dalits, to the working class, often with reference to the unbearable reality of hunger. Starvation as it occurs on the first day and as it occurs days later and as it occurs without reprieve is a recurrent theme in his work. The empty belly resides not only in a body but also in a caste and a class and in a land otherwise marked by plenty. Byapari’s writing isn’t only about the harrowing loneliness of the human experience, but also of the particular quality of loneliness suffered by a class or caste expelled from society as punishment for merely existing.”

Nearly a week before the formal announcement of the Prize, Byapari had declared his intent for the Rs 2 lakh award money. “…There is a family in Banshberia (in the Hooghly district of West Bengal), where I currently live, who are abysmally poor. Mother, father and a son. The father is very old. He pulls a rickshaw. The son used to drive a Toto (e-rickshaw). During COVID, Adani has earned thousands of crores but many have lost a lot more. That boy too had to sell his Toto. At present, he drives mine. Every day, he pays me Rs 150 as rent. I take it as insurance for a day when there might be an accident, when the tyre or something else might need repairing. That money will come in handy then. I will have no problem. All of this is fine. But he is inconvenienced on days when I drive my Toto to go out and meet and connect with people. Those days, he has no income. His family cannot run. So, I have decided that from this two lakh, after tax deductions, I am going to buy a Toto for the son. He’ll drive the new one. And, on days when I don’t need to go out, the old father can drive mine. This is what I have thought…”

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