Trauma, Protest, Transcendence: Voice of a Bengali Dalit Playwright

The anthology with a number of illustrations is a collection of four plays by Raju Das, a Bengali Dalit activist and playwright, in English translations by translators including the author Dr. Chakraborty Paunksnis. Nothing of the kind is to date available as far as Bengali Dalit plays, or for that matter Bengali literature as a whole, are concerned. The book intends to make readers familiar with the complex system of caste through the plays of a Bengali Dalit playwright, Raju Das. This study is devoted to an aspect of Bengali literature that has so far received no international recognition at all. Dalit literature, i.e. the literature produced by low-caste (so-called “untouchable”) communities with social emancipation as its main aim, has to date mostly been associated with Marathi and Hindi literatures, and it was hardly known that there is such a thing as Bengali Dalit literature. It is therefore a very significant event that this study sheds light for the first time in the English medium on a highly significant development in the Bengali public sphere.