Two Bengal academicians win A.K. Ramanujan Prize for translating Dalit woman poet’s works

Two academicians from West Bengal have won the coveted A.K. Ramanujan Prize for translating into English the works of Dalit poet Kalyani Thakur Charal, titled I Belong to Nowhere, becoming the first Bengalis to win the honour.

The book is an anthology of Ms. Charal’s poems, curated from five of her collections published between the 1990s and the 2020s. The poems were translated from Bengali over a period of two years by Sipra Mukherjee, professor of English at the West Bengal State University, and Mrinmoy Pramanick, professor of Comparative Literature, who recently joined Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

“There’s a certain defiance in Kalyani’s poems that I find very attractive—a defiance couched in lyricism. And there is a stark bareness in the images she weaves with her words. This directness comes through in the name she has given herself: Kalyani Thakur Charal. When she found people treating her with condescension disguised as civility, she decided to speak their unspoken discrimination into her name. Charal is a distortion of Chandal, her community’s earlier name,” professor Mukherjee said.

“The discrimination is still with us, and so she makes it a part of her name. So, this was not one single book we were translating; we were translating poetry from many of her books. The translated text, therefore, captures many facets not only of Kalyani, but also of the collective consciousness of the people who inhabit Dalithood every day, their romance, their aspiration, their cynicism, their anger, their struggle,” she said.

Ms. Charal, 60, belongs to the town of Bagula, where her father worked as a security guard in a nearby school and her mother was a housewife but literate. According to the translator, the mother would sometimes send the young Kalyani with a basket to sell vegetables at the station if they had a good crop. She grew up to join the railways (but later resigned) and built a library in her mother’s name in that town, though she spends most of her time now in Kolkata.

“There is not much writing by Dalit women in Bengali available in English translation, and Kalyani is a powerful author. We thought this alternative voice of marginal lives should be available for the wider audience,” said co-translator Mrinmoy Pramanick.

“This translated book talks about the experiences of people who saw the Partition and who became refugees and lived in Chhitmahal (enclaves in India as well as Bangladesh) without having any nation of their own. I am happy we have won this award, because this international recognition gives an important space to Dalit writing,” professor Pramanick said.