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Bechain Hai Yeh
WSN Bureau  

Sheoraj Singh Bechain is a man of many firsts: ndia’s first Dalit columnist  in Hindi journalism; in fact, first dalit columnist in any language; then first Dalit anchor on TV when he presented a show with Kamleshwar, the grand man of letters; first to do a doctorate on Dalit journalism, first to study Ambedkar as a journalist. And he hasn’t stopped. At the country’s prestigious Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, he is the first Dalit to enter its portals as a Fellow In Residence. By itself the fact that the Rashtrapati Nivas, where the Institute is located, has had to wait all these years to see a Dalit participating in intellectual exertions, betrays the deep seated prejudices that the world of academia has harbored over the years. Bechain’s autobiographical narrative has been published, in installments, in various Hindi journals such as Hans, Amar Ujala and Aam Aadmi from 1996 onwards , and is due to be released next month (June 2008) in book form by the Delhi-based Hindi publishing house, Vani Prakashan as Bachpan Mere Kandhon Par (My Childhood On My Shoulders).  

Very soon, the world of English letters, already having known Bechain through his serialized autobiographical pieces in Tehelka, will get to know him better as Oxford is also due with a translation. A Dalit child’s struggle to acquire an education, his haunting memories of illiterate parents, of a grandfather who sold the skin of dead animals and women members of the family working for the local landlords. 

Bechain has known life in all its myriad colors: starvation, child labour, marriage of sisters when they were just 11, an uncle who was a cobbler, and then the world of work. Work is rather a poor name for what he was doing: polishing shoes, selling eggs and bananas, nimboos. He did queeze life out of everything he did. It was while selling nimboos that he hammered out a coupled about them. Could we call it his first poem? If it was, it certainly smelled of sweat, the sweat of hard labour. A Sikh couple at one stage tried to adopt Bechain, then called Sauraj, but the mother could not bring herself to giving away the male child. So he was doomed to poverty. Only a quirk of fate ensured that he gets acquainted with the written word: he worked as a labourer in a school where some would give him shelter, someone goaded him to join the school.  

Work continued, as did the hard life. Graduation and masonry work went on side by side. In 1987 he joined Amar Ujala, did his MA in 1988, and became a teacher in a gover nment-run school in Delhi in 1989. It was here that he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation while teaching in a school. His life symbolically tells the story of millions of Dalit children, who seldom become full-time students, but every single one of them is certainly a teacher, a teacher who graduates from a university called Life. Sheoraj has seen this university, as well as the ones we trudge through, trying to seek an education. It is Life that he engages him, that teaches him that it is high time the doomed learnt to sculpt tools to debrahamanize the system, and humanize it so that all Saurajs can go to a school, can hope for a life, and should not have to wait to keep scoring ‘firsts’. It is time Life came to our universities, our world of academia.  

By keeping out the Dalits, the ethnic minorities, the religious minorities, the poor, the downtrodden, the Indian nation state can never hope for the kind of egalitarianism that defines hope and change.

28 May, 2008
 

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