Death at a discount

In Baburao Bagul’s collection of gut-wrenching stories, Mumbai’s graveyards, brothels, and slums form the backdrop to a theatre of desperate poverty.

Dharavi, Mumbai, 2010. | Photo Credit: Helena Schaetzle/laif

In the titular story of Baburao Bagul’s classic short story collection Maran Swasta Hot Aahe (Death is Becoming Cheap)—published in Marathi in 1969 and now available in translation as Lootaloot—a poet and short story writer walks through the city in search of a muse but finds, instead, sordid stories of the dispossessed. “This is Mumbai. Here human eats human and death is becoming cheap,” writes the poet after discarding his original ode to the city. The line resonates even today.

“Maran Swasta Hot Aahe is considered a milestone for both: Bagul’s writing and Marathi literature at large,” says the translator Manav Kambli in his introduction to Lootaloot. The book, adds Kambli, “firmly placed [Bagul] amidst the most prolific, impactful Dalit voices of his generation”. It was in the Marathi language that Dalit literature made its first appearance, and the wealth of stories in this language—both fictional and autobiographical— has been steadily tapped for translation in recent decades. Lootaloot comes a few years after Jerry Pinto’s translation of Bagul’s seminal work, his first collection of stories, Jevha Mi Jaat Chorli Hoti (When I Hid My Caste).

Lootaloot

By Baburao Bagul, translated by Manav Kambli

Hachette India

Pages: 200

Price: Rs.499

Bagul (1930-2008), an important leader of the Dalit movement in Maharashtra together with Namdeo Dhasal and Arun Kamble, was also a poet and essayist. Born in Nashik, he spent his childhood in Mumbai’s Matunga Labour Camp, “which happened to be a node for the Ambedkarite and other workers’ movements, and where Bagul discovered Dalit-Marxist writers like Anna Bhau Sathe”, Kambli tells us in the introduction.

In Lootaloot, Bagul lays bare the cruel realities of a milieu he has seen at close quarters; a theme we see across Dalit writing. But his stories also explore the hierarchy of exploitation, the shifting balance of power even among the lowest of the downtrodden, a people united merely by their miserable circumstances. The titular story of this translation, “Lootaloot/Plunder”, is set in a brothel; its “Madam”, who exploits her own niece, is herself a victim. Meanwhile, the brothel as a whole is seen as a victim of an oppressive social and administrative system whose vultures have a pecking order that includes the exploitative Madam, her violent customers, corrupt cops, and an opportunistic landlord.

In “Saktamazuri/Hard Labour”, we see the desperate poverty of a man trying to run a roadside gambling den with his equally destitute companions. The customers they are trying to attract—mill workers—are themselves mascots of the oppressed. When Sikander Sindhi tells Fernandes, the mastermind, “Brother, shut it down. Today, we don’t have any luck on our side”, we see the irony. For them, life itself is a gamble, a game of chance.

Subhuman existence

Bagul’s characters—prostitutes and lepers, slumlords and ruffians, ragpickers and beggars—are bound by the hopelessness of their subhuman existence. Even those seemingly at the rock bottom are afraid of falling further down the abyss; in the story “Lootaloot”, the prostitute Putali fears being sent to a worse place. Those who dare to dream, or to make an honest living, are crushed by fate and put in place. Death is the only release.

Lootaloot is raw, gut-wrenching and graphic. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

In “Tahan/Thirst”, a group of homeless people taking shelter in a municipal school building at night rely on sexual fantasy as a coping mechanism. In “‘Injustice”, a pregnant woman desperately tries to get bail for her innocent husband in a corrupt system that has rendered them both faceless and voiceless. In “Bhook/Hunger”, we see the struggles of motherhood as a fisherwoman burning with fever looks for eels to feed her starving sons, as also in “Aai/Mother”, where a a poem titled “Mother” brings out, in a young boy, a short-lived surge of love towards his single mother, from among various other conflicted emotions.

Bagul takes us on a dark tour into the underbelly of the city. Mumbai’s streets, graveyards, brothels, police stations, and slums—the latter is likened to a concentration camp in “Kavitecha Janma/The Birth of a Poem”—form the backdrop to this tragic theatre of desperate poverty. In “Maidanatil Manse/The People in the Field”, a man afflicted with tuberculosis donates blood for money, members of the Phanse Pardhi tribe (a denotified nomadic tribe that continues to be viewed as a criminal group) find comfort in violence and seek sex for warmth in the biting cold, while a beggar seeks safety and privacy in childbirth, eliciting the sympathy of a hardened strongman from the illicit liquor trade.

Prison of circumstances

Death is the leitmotif, and in the story “Maran Swasta Hot Aahe”, it manifests itself in various forms. A wrestler turned butcher sees his dead wife in the eyes of a slaughtered lamb; an ex-schoolteacher, now homeless, falls unconscious while taking a dump on the railway tracks; a prostitute sells sex for a meal; a cripple forces his daughter into prostitution but she sells herself to a brothel to escape her life on the street. For the poor, the city of dreams is unforgiving, and even those who survive it are dead in spirit. “This country is but a boundless prison. I am an inmate here….” says a learned Dalit, a poet seeking a daily labourer’s job in “The Birth of a Poem”. It is the prison of his circumstances that proves to be the unlikely muse for his poetry, inspiring an ode to death.

Raw, gut-wrenching and graphic in description, this collection shows up a mirror to the soul of a deluded metropolis. Written over five decades ago, its situations and settings remain as familiar now as they were then. Proof that in the fast-paced city of Mumbai, with its contrast of glittering skyscrapers and grubby slums, nothing changes for the oppressed and the dispossessed.

Janhavi Acharekar is an author, a curator, and creative consultant.