I belong to Nowhere: Poems of hope and resistance

By Kalyani Thakur Charal / Translated from Bengali by Mrinmoy Pramanick and Sipra Mukherjee

The first English-language collection from one of India’s most hard-hitting writers, these poems brilliantly exemplify writing as an act of resistance. 

Militant, satirical, and biting, Kalyani Charal pulls no punches in eviscerating paternalistic - and patriarchal - bourgeois socialists who speak on behalf of others. Writing from lived experience, Charal delineates the bourgeois values that fuel the social machinery of caste oppression, while drawing parallels with social and racial marginalisation around the world. Thus, in her poetry, the specificity of Dalit lives in Bengal, a region which prides itself on its Leftist history and enlightened culture, and whose partition into India and Bangladesh has left a legacy of communal tension, refugees, and statelessness, is at the same time the universality of precarity, marginality and dispossession. Finally, there is space for love - wistful and full-throated, with an attentiveness to the natural world that speaks to her claim that “all Dalit woman writers are eco feminists”.

*Our copyright page misstated that Dhorlae Juddho Sunischit, Protiti Ratri Jane, Je Meye Andhar Gone, Chandalinir Kabita (Charturtha Dunia Press), and Phire Elo Ulanga Hoye (Pratyush Publications) were published in Bangladesh. The poems were originally published in India. This will be corrected in the next print run.

PRAISE

‘Kalyani Thakur Charal’s sharp writing on Dalit feminism has shaken the system time and again’ — Scroll India

‘This book beckons readers to become active agents of change, awakening, agitating, and weaving the fabric of a more equitable and just world.’ — Adrija Ghosh, Modern Poetry in Translation

contributors’ DETAILS

Kalyani Thakur Charal is a Dalit feminist poet writing in the Bengali language. She has published four volumes of poetry, a collection of critical essays, a collection of short stories, and an autobiography. She edits the Dalit women’s magazine Neer, is on the board of a publishing house focusing solely on Dalit writers, and on the Dalit Sahitya Akademi. She recently edited Dalit Lekhika: Women’s Writing from Bengal.

Sipra Mukherjee is Professor in the Department of English, West Bengal State University, India. Her research interests are religion, caste, and power.

Mrinmoy Pramanick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Indian Language and Literature, University of Calcutta.

More information

• Publication date: 27 July 2023

• Format: B-format paperback (198 mm x 129 mm)

• Extent: 112 pp

• ISBNs: 978-1-911284-76-5 (paperback)/ 978-1-911284-75-8 (ebook)

• Rights held: Worldwide