ABSTRACT
Dalit literature in India, articulated in non-canonical literary genres, has been impacted by this activist orientation. The sub-subaltern category of Bengali ‘Dalit’ literature focuses on the emancipation of the Bengali Dalit narrators. Often digressing from the conventional norms of autobiography, Itibritte Chandal Jiban (2012) by Manoranjan Byapari (trans. Interrogating My Chandal Life: The Autobiography of a Dalit (2018) by Sipra Mukherjee) is more a socio-political testimony than a mere record of ‘lived experience.’ While immersed in socio-political and cultural upheavals and revolutionary political ideologies, this text is engrossed by the micro-social layers of the history of Bengal and Bengali Dalits. This translation takes the form of ‘translaboration’ where the translator becomes a collaborator with the writer in the movement; together they act towards gaining social transformation and power switching. Translation thereby becomes not only a literary and linguistic journey from source to target text, but becomes also a socio-political journey—‘a catalyst for social change.’ By comparing and analysing both the original and the translated autobiographies this chapter examines how the writer and the translator transmit the Dalit discourse of Bengal and how translation becomes a significant socio-politico-ideological movement engaged in by marginalised people.
