Indian Dalit writer, translator, and publisher Yogesh Maitreya believes in the freeing impulse of literary translation: “a conscious and political decision and process [which can] reclaim the humanness of an oppressed person and make him a free man in the imagination of readers.” He problematises, however, the Anglophone literary production in India, denouncing the Brahminical hegemony that governs it. It comes as no surprise, then, that in Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton University Press, 2022), Akshya Saxena sketches Maitreya’s poetry as “self-defense,” operating on “an imperative to write in English” that emphasises language’s function in class and politics. Such writing pursues a continual question: how can the liberated Dalit writer exist within the linguistic imaginary of their former colonial rulers, the British, and the current neoliberal one, the Brahmins? “In writing in English, Maitreya not only takes ownership of a language but also enters a hegemonic discourse that has excluded him,” Saxena adds. It is in this very material condition that Maitreya established Panther’s Paw Publication in 2016, an anti-caste press specialising in original writings in English and translations from Indian languages—especially Marathi and Punjabi, based in the city of Nagpur, Maharashtra.
In this interview, I conversed with Maitreya on his latest book, Water in a Broken Pot: A Memoir, out this year from Penguin Random House India; his translations of essays and poetry by Marathi-language Dalit writers; the centuries-old oral tradition of shahiri as music, cultural criticism, and poetry; and the archaic ethnopolitical ideologies of India’s caste system, epitomised in literature, literary translation, and publishing.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I love what you pointed out in your essay on the Dalit poet-filmmaker Nagraj Manjule: that the world sees India through the lens of writers from the Savarna upper-caste, such as Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Agha Shahid Ali, and Pankaj Mishra. For those of us non-Indians in the global literary community, can you tell us how caste is deeply rooted in the Indian worldview and way of life—especially in literary, cultural, and knowledge production?
Yogesh Maitreya (YM): Well, so far, the writers from India who have been writing in English and who are known to the world come out of a class that represents 2 or 3 percent of the total population of India—the Brahminical class, who have had the advantage of being with the British administration and their cultural programs from the beginning. Hence, their command over English as both language and literature is overwhelmingly hegemonic. In their English writings, with borrowed sensibilities from the West, they undeniably percolate caste values, which is rooted in denying many people fundamental human rights and ascribing to a few individuals a superior position in society from the moment they are born. India is a linguistic rain-forest, and English, within it, is the most aspirational season to be in, for several decades now.
English was an aspiration for me, too. However, I eventually had to consider that if my life—lived and imagined—is missing from this language, then I am essentially either not present in it, or I must have been erased. How come the Indian writers I had read for close to a decade did not communicate any sense or sensibilities of the life that was happening around me in their literature? I thought about it for a while—and then I realised that language is also a matter of confinement, in which some are allowed and made into a subject of intellectual contemplation and fascination, and others are denied their right to exist. This happens when the language is subjected to the practice of a certain class, where the majority of society is not present. As caste always gave privileged position to the Savarna class in cultural, literary, and knowledge production, it has been obvious that they have utterly failed to produce the sensibilities of the masses in their works of arts or literature. In fact, they could never do so because theirs is a life in total contradiction with Dalit-Bahujan masses. There is no desire in a caste society for assimilation. English literature from India by a Brahminical class is the most prominent example of it.
AMMD: Given the current hegemonies haunting the literary landscape in India, in what ways has the anti-caste press you founded—Panther’s Paw Publication—been an answer?
YM: Back in 2016, when I had thought of establishing a publishing house from my hostel room in Mumbai, I had a simple vision: to translate Marathi writers into English and publish them. Because Marathi is the language in which I have grown up, it was obvious for me to think of it with English, which came to me as an aspirational language of class, and also an indescribable form of freedom because I had read and seen people (mostly whites) being portrayed as “free” and “intellectuals” in it. I wanted to be both those things, and you can say that I also wanted to see my people, my history, and my emotions as being “free” in English from everything I was taught in caste society. English, excluding the writings of Brahmins and Savarna writers from India, felt much more respectful towards me, my history, and my people—hence why I chose it. I remember the first time I had written and read and recited my emotions in English, I felt a certain amount of separation from the drab life around me, and imagining or translating my life and the history of my people into English felt like a touch of liberation to me.
So I decided to follow the feeling. I crowd-funded books from time to time, and people helped in the process. Gradually, I published sixteen books over the last seven years—translations from Marathi, Hindi, Punjabi, and Telugu into English, and also English original writings by Dalit-Bahujan writers. I have published writers like J.V. Pawar, Loknath Yashwant, Sunil Awachar, Sangeeta Mulay, Tanya Singh, Kamal Dev Pall, Sumeet Samos, and Pasunoori Ravinder. All the books I have published so far have, even if in the smallest way, given a new perspective to readers across the different linguistic states. Reaching readers across linguistic barriers in India is only possible with translation.
The anti-caste literature democratises the world of feelings in India. But because we all speak different languages, and rarely share the stories or empathise with people from different linguistic states, we remain where caste always kept us: in ignorance. I have a feeling that by publishing anti-caste literature at Panther’s Paw Publication, it is attempting to create an irrevocable light in the domain of darkness that caste has nurtured in our minds.
AMMD: In Water in a Broken Pot: A Memoir, you disclosed your grandmother’s peculiar beliefs and your father’s almost mindless fascination with Bollywood—movies that caricature, or even ridicule, the Dalit way of life: “A man who cannot see his own erasure in the national imagination, through movies or literature, is a man fettered by the times.” While the Dalit memoir and autobiography, as a body of work, certainly brings to light transgenerational trauma, your book seems to be about breaking away from familial patterns, refusing to be defined by them.
YM: The fascination of cinema by oppressed people across the globe has very deep roots in their quest to see themselves in the larger scheme of the global existence. In cinema, they relate to what is theirs and always theirs: dreams. However, India, being the country whose existential fabric is made up of caste(s), is the most divisive society to have ever existed. In this society, as Dr. B. R. Ambedkar pointed out, intellectual honesty has never been practiced, be it in the cultural or political world, and cinema is not an exception. Thus, although cinema stands for dreams, in India, it was constructed on the social and cultural mutilation of the oppressed castes, and it alienates Dalit individuals every time they see it—my father included.
This emotional complexity of Dalit people has remained unattended, unexplored, and undescribed, and I realised that much of the emotional complexities of myself and my father’s generation—the traumas, dreams, vulnerabilities, or even the strength to challenge it in various times and spaces—have remained undocumented, especially in the literature written by ourselves. While writing my memoir, this always lingered at the back of my mind, and I would tell myself that if my story is to be honest or relevant in the future, then it should be written in its most undefiled form, as broken as it has been for the last two generations. I followed my instincts while writing. I have never felt the necessity to tell the world anything big about life or my struggle, I’ve simply written about moments in my life which either destroyed me or reconstructed me.
AMMD: You translated Loknath Yashwant’s Broken Man: In Search of Homeland (co-translated with K. Jamanadas, 2017), J.V. Pawar’s Ambedkarite Movement After Ambedkar (2016), and Sunil Abhiman Awachar’s We the Rejected People of India (2019) from the Marathi into English—all published by Panther’s Paw Publication. Can you give us a glimpse of your translation process for these three Dalit writers?
YM: I never learnt anything about translation before I began doing it; I simply started converting one sentence from Marathi into English. I knew that I could work with these two languages—Marathi which is my mother tongue, and English which I had been practicing for a few years by then. My intention was to translate the understanding I received from reading the language.
I wanted the Marathi stories of my people to appear in English—the language in which I began to feel my story taking place. So I really did not have a particular way of translating these works. I simply began, and then went back and checked if the text made sense to me. Sometimes, what I translated did not sound proper to me, but I went ahead with it, thinking, let the reader and time decide. I feel that translation is an act that we are not always convinced about—yet, we go ahead. And I think it is because we want readers to be part of it, to make the text a collective expression. I think most translations work better as they are consumed by the readers.
AMMD: In a 2018 event with four other poets held at Sahitya Akademi, India’s national academy of letters, you never mentioned any Indian Anglophone poet as an influence, even those from and writing about working-class origins. Instead, you turned to Dalit oral culture in Indian languages.
YM: Poetry is about life, and never about language. I never felt related to the poetry written by Anglophone poets. My historical world, or the history of my community, stands opposite to the life of Anglophone poets and their imagination in poetry. A long time before poetry came into existence as “text,” it was invented as song, a sound, a noise. Our lives, so rich with noise and sound, were never heard by Anglophone poets.
AMMD: The oral texture shaping your poetry, as Akshya Saxena wrote, comes from the centuries-old tradition of the shahiri and the Dalit shahirs—thespians and songsters who used music as a critique against caste. Can you talk about the shahiri and how it has been reimagined to popularise the teachings and philosophies of the statesman, activist, and scholar Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a major Dalit figurehead? And how has it percolated into your poetry?
YM: Before we began to read Ambedkar, we heard him in songs. He came to us as the sound of someone who is talking about us, for us, and speaking loudly against the forces that intended to humiliate us, subjugate us, and eradicate us. He became our light in the voices of shahirs before becoming our conscience in the books of my people, and it was shahiri that made Ambedkar a muse of our struggle, emancipation, and utopia.
Music, in various forms, has been almost inherent to the Scheduled Caste (ex-untouchable) communities in India. After the arrival of Ambedkar into public life during 1927, his ideas started to resonate with people—to the extent that they found in it the path to liberation. Then, Schedule musicians from Maharashtra decided to spread his teachings, his ideas, and his philosophy through their music by walking into villages and singing about Ambedkar as the conscience of their music. Pioneers like Bhimrao Kardak, Wamandada Kardak, Vitthal Umap, Pralhad Shinde, Sushma Devi, Vilas Ghoghre, Shantanu Kamble, and Sambhaji Bhagat created a legacy of this music; not only did it reach where words failed, but it also established Ambedkar as a powerful philosopher and emancipator of the last century. We grew up listening to shahiri, sometimes paying little attention, sometimes paying no attention at all, but songs and music succeeded in reaching our conscience; they became our memory, and reading words later, as an adult, rekindles this conscience. When I began to write as a serious persuasion in life, Ambedkar was there, behind almost everything I could write in my poems.
AMMD: Some literary historians declare that the anti-caste literary movement was pioneered by the fictionist Premchand, a Gandhian reformer and Progressive Writers’ Movement leader—but Premchand isn’t a Dalit. On the Dalit and the anti-caste literary movements, where do they intersect with each other and where do they depart?
YM: It is an insistence of the oppressor that, in a time when they can longer afford to be regressive and orthodox, they must be hailed as progressive. In the literary world, they lay these claims of being the “representative” of the oppressed by writing about the oppressed, and the Brahminical class of writers in this domain have been, until recently, unapologetically insistent on this. For them, charity is more important than equality. This claim to write for the oppressed in order to make their world visible could be a noble intention, but how could it be in the interest of the oppressed to have their emotional and intellectual worlds represented by the oppressor? The metaphorical liberation of the oppressed lies in being the voice, the author, and the producer of their stories in the literary field. The oppressor, by making this almost impossible, can only be hailed as the pioneer of oppression and injustice; they snatch the dignity of the oppressed by claiming agency in the literary domain. The writers from Brahminical class, despite their good intentions, do not have a role to play in Dalit literature—except by being readers and intellectually honest critics, if they know how to intercept the element of honesty in Indian literary tradition.
AMMD: In your essay “The Birth of the Dalit Protagonist,” you wrote of the Dalit as a figure excluded “from their own story, reduced to being mere receivers of justice.” Would that be applicable in real life—in particular, with thinkers from the upper-caste getting credit on Dalit activism and writing about Dalit scholarship, over Dalit intellectuals themselves?
YM: Yes. It is so true that upper-caste activists, writers, and overwhelmingly, academics get all the credit for advancing oppressed castes in this society. Their fascination is so intriguing that it makes you feel why they cannot stay away from this—to perhaps engage themselves in learning a bit about the life of the oppressed castes rather than being the author of it. Well, this is a peculiar characteristic of the caste society, in which “intellectual honesty,” as Dr BR Ambedkar said, is hardly considered by intellectuals and writers. Before the advent of social media in India, these elites went almost unnoticed, and thus there was no change in their actions. But this has begun to change recently because now, they are subject to the scrutiny by oppressed-caste writers and intellectuals. In most of the state languages (mother tongues), there is a long history of Dalits changing this depressing scenario in literature. However, in the world of English, upper caste writers have persisted in using Dalits as data and making them the premise of their writings, scholarship, and intellectualism. The struggle of a Dalit protagonist then involves not allowing anyone else to dictate their subjectivity—to say: I will appear as what I am in my story, in front of the world. My resistance is to own and protect my subjectivity, in my words.
AMMD: Rita Kothari, in Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature (Bloomsbury India, 2022), describes your poem “Ontology of Our Language” as “the unspoken and unarticulated history of pain inherited like language, quietly,” and that it is accomplished by “not speaking of language linguistically but rather as the inherited scars of experience.” Would you say that silence is a thematic of your original works of poetry and prose? What about your works of translation?
YM: Yes. Silence has been one of the most prominent themes in what I have managed to write so far. My relationship with language has, over the years, become so full of dilemmas; I feel myself belonging to its sensibilities, but I also, frequently, find myself as a subject impossible to be understood by it.
English, as a language, has not been the language of my pain and my laughter; it is something I acquired with whatever reasons I had for acquiring it. If you erase pain and laughter from the life of a writer, you are basically erasing the language with which he began to identify himself in life. Neither the pain nor the pleasure of my life took place in English; I had to create that later in my life, and it was a struggle to make myself feel that the language I am writing in is where I am inhabiting myself. My reflections about life in my poetry or prose are subject to my position in relation to the language, and this is also the relation of a writer to silence, which is impossible to be written any language.
The translations I worked on gave me more or less this same feeling. However, translation is an opportunity to plant a seed of a story that doesn’t already exist. This is important. We do not know how the seed will grow, but planting is crucial to testify our own vision. This is what I have written recently, thinking of silence.
I have seen men in Basti from
grandfather’s generation
from father’s generation
from my generation, died,
an unnoticed death. I seen their funerals,
them turning to ashes by morning
and we carried it and immersed
in the river. I seen them as men, ashes
and eventually in water.
My poems are inspired from them
My poems are them, will become ashes
and eventually will immerse in water.
AMMD: Who are the Indian, South Asian, and Global Majority intellectuals whose works shaped your critical writings? What about writers and translators who influenced you?
YM: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and bell hooks have undoubtedly had a huge impact on my writing in English. But you see, a writer must be politically and philosophically educated before writing prose or poetry, and this political and philosophical education has been provided to me by Dr. Ambedkar—precisely by his illustrious writings. There is no denying that my imagination in English is guided by his vision.
Erich Fromm’s work is also hugely responsible for the way I think and write. Marx has been a writer and philosopher I have been trying to understand for years, and it is only recently that I could begin to see, slowly and in a small way, what he meant in his writings. In recent times, My Name Is Why, a memoir by Lemn Sissay, left a greatly enduring impact on my mind; it is an undefiled rumination on life and suffering. I admire poems by Adrienne Rich. Claudia Rankine’s prose poetry, especially Citizen: An American Lyric, is deeply close to my heart. Daya Pawar, Namdeo Dhasal, Baburao Bagul from Maharashtra and Lal Singh Dil from Punjab have immensely helped shape my imagination of life around me. I am currently reading the Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe’s A Personal Matter, and its style and literary acumen is growing inside me as an influence.
AMMD: In your opinion, which works from the Marathi, Punjabi, and other Indian languages, modern or from antiquity, deserve another look—and retranslation?
YM: I think all the works by Daya Pawar, Baburao Bagul, Lal Singh Dil, or Omprakash Valmiki deserve new, fresh, and impactful translation efforts. You see, English as a language is limited when it comes to capturing our sensibilities—the smell and sound of our lives. All of the translators of Dalit literary text have been from the Brahminical class, and they had been totally devoid of any human connection to our life. Then, one day, they decide to translate our lives in English. Is not this strange? Having no empirical connection or intimate dialogue with us and suddenly finding oneself ethically eligible to translate our stories, our pain and suffering, into English—the language of which they were custodians for many decades in India.
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on Dalit-Bahujan Memoir, what books and works (in Indian languages and/or in translation into English) would you wish to include as key texts? Who are the essayists, nonfictionist writers, autobiographers, and memoirists—classic and contemporary—that you would be inclined to incorporating to the syllabus?
YM: I would suggest: Poet of Revolution by Lal Singh Dil, Baluta by Daya Pawar, Aaydaan by Urmila Pawar, Karukku by Bama, Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki, and many more. I would definitely include Raja Dhale as an essayist and a cultural critic. Namdeo Dhasal’s poems are inevitably included if I have to imagine a course on this subject. I would also include poems by S. Joseph, a poet from Kerala.
Yogesh Maitreya is an Indian Dalit poet, translator, fictionist, essayist, and publisher. He is the founder and editor of Panther’s Paw Publication, an anti-caste publishing house dedicated to Dalit-Bahujan writers in English and in translation from Indian languages such as Marathi and Punjabi. He is the author of the memoir Water in a Broken Pot (2023); short story collection Flowers on the Grave of Caste (2019); essay collections Of Oppressor’s Body and Mind (2020) and Singing/Thinking Anti-Caste (2021); and poetry volumes Ambedkar 2021 (2021) and The Bridge of Migration (2017). A PhD scholar at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai where he took his MA, he has translated three Marathi books into English: Loknath Yashwant’s poetry collection Broken Man (2017), JV Pawar’s book of political history Ambedkarite Movement After Ambedkar (2016), and Sunil Abhiman’s poetry collection We the Rejected People of India (2019), all published by Panther’s Paw Publication. His essays and interviews have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Indian Express, The Bangalore Review, Scroll, Centre for Stories, Buzzfeed, among others. He has spoken at events organised by Goldsmiths College, University of London, and at the 2023 Jaipur Literature Festival.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), essayist, poet, and translator from the southern Philippines, is the editor-at-large for the Philippines at Asymptote. Author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), contributor to The Best Asian Poetry, and nominee to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essay, their latest works have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. They’re formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: