Rage informs every syllable of Baburao Bagul’s short story collection, When I Hid My Caste. But rage for Bagul is a formal principle, an emotion transformed into an artistic tool that carves out his plots, his descriptions and images, and lays bare the pain, blindness, pride and desperation of vividly drawn characters, who often fight against the humiliations of lower-caste existence. Originally published in 1963, this collection represented a radically new approach to the Marathi short story and gifted the more nascent Dalit writing tradition with a model of unforgiving honesty of portrayal. In translating the stories, Jerry Pinto retains the earthiness and immediacy of the originals without distorting the flow of the English representation.
Bagul plunges the reader into the heart of the dark world he knew from the first line of the first story, Prisoner of Darkness. He confines within its bounds material for a novel: caste hatred for the Mahar mistress of a rich Deshmukh, his eldest son’s murderous desire for revenge against the woman which is also violent lust, her own son’s hatred of her, an effort at escape with a mob in pursuit, her understanding of her son as the end becomes inevitable and his agonized love for his mother surfaces at last.
Tenderness is rare and painful in the stories, expressed in the midst of violence, as in Competition, or hideously aborted, as in Monkey. The focus is on roughness, strength, endurance and the dark, frightening beauty of male bodies, unforgettable in Bohada and Dassehra sacrifice. The upper-caste male is pale and weak in comparison. Women’s lives are worse than the men’s: Streetwalker is almost symbolic in exposing how they are stripped of all they have, rendered powerless even to care for a sick son.
The virulence of upper-caste hatred is the theme of the titular story. Perhaps the most terrifying story is Revolt, where a young man rebelling against his family occupation of cleaning human waste faces 32 dry latrines, “each filled with filth, some surrounded by accumulated and rotting waste which was alive with maggots and flies…” As the stench hits him, he wonders what kind of evil nation this is that forces some men to do such hateful work.
When I hid my caste By Baburao Bagul, Speaking Tiger, Rs 399
