Manoranjan Byapari has been awarded the Shakti Bhatt Prize 2022. He will receive a cash prize of Rs 2 lakh and a trophy.
The Shakti Bhatt Foundation has been recognising and celebrating literature from various parts of Asia for 14 years.
A refugee and a migrant, 72-year-old Byapari worked as a rickshaw-puller and sweeper to pay off his debts. A member of the oppressed Namasudra caste, he was jailed for his politics. He taught himself to write and has produced over a dozen novels and multiple volumes of short fiction and essays.
“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 works. 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,” says 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.
Byapari’s much-talked-about Chandal Jibon trilogy begins with an introduction to “Hunger, diffidence, weariness and humiliation compounded over many centuries… It seemed the great famine of 1770 had not yet lifted its talons from a man whose life is unfolding nearly two centuries later,” Koshy said.
The first volume is titled The Runaway Boy, the second, ready for press, is Nemesis, and the third is in translation. “Going by The Runaway Boy, Byapari is doing the indescribable: he is giving words to historic suffering,” Koshy said.
In 2020, Byapari petitioned the government for transfer from his job as a school cook. His request came as the result of a surgery that made heavy lifting impossible. The government granted him a transfer to work in a library as a group D employee.
In 2021, he stood for election and won a seat as an MLA from Balagarh Assembly Constituency representing the All-India Trinamool Congress (AITC) in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly.
Byapari won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his autobiographical book Interrogating my Chandal Life (Itibritte Chandal Jibon), which also won The Hindu Prize for Non-Fiction in 2018. He received the Suprabha Majumdar prize (2014) and the Sharmila Ghosh Smriti Literary Prize (2015).
The Shakti Bhatt Prize recognises and celebrates literature from the South Asian subcontinent, honouring writers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and every corner of India. The prize is administered, judged, curated and funded solely by writers.