by Kalyani Thakur Charal, translated by Sipra Mukherjee and Mrinmoy Pramanick

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”.

This is how birds and people of colour become one and the same

An adjective blossoms, ‘migrants’.

*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.