Tr. from the Bengali by Asit Biswas
[Tilted Axis Press; 2026]
The brief novella Andhar Bil by the Dalit feminist poet Kalyani Thakur Charal begins with departure and arrival. A group of mostly Namasudra refugees leaves East Pakistan (current-day Bangladesh) after Partition and settles in India near Andhar Bil, a waterbody similar to those in their native land. The refugees are members of the Matua sect of Hinduism, which has a social-justice bent and strives for equality between castes. The refugees share the bil “at a stretch of a hand for everyone,” build their houses, and raise their families. The bil provides fish and other food to eat and sell.
Much of Andhar Bil is told from a collective, omniscient perspective that reflects the variety of voices and people who populate this newly established village. At times the narration settles on following the youngest daughter of a refugee family, Kamalini. She tags along with an old woman to collect branches and leaves for fuel. She goes with her mother to watch processions during the festivals to celebrate Thakur’s birth. She watches children be born and adults die. One afternoon when she is playing at her friend’s house who has no father, she puzzles through the complicated relationships of adults, how widows are referred to by their dead husband’s name though they live in other men’s houses. She witnesses a man beat one of his two wives and later talks to her mother, who explains by saying, “Man does everything for peace.” Meaning, I think, that the beating brought peace to the man. But Kamalini knows better: “Who will the beating bring peace to? … Kamalini cannot understand. She closes her eyes and whispers to herself, ‘Peace, peace.’ The words reverberate in her head and all around her.” She is frightened by these sudden bursts of violence and acutely attuned to the suffering of others.
The overall tone of the short chapters is less akin to a child’s point of view and more to a wide-ranging nostalgia that shifts among memories and connects them through related feelings and imagery. As Charal writes in her introduction, “The story here centres round my village, my childhood, my beloved Andhar Bil.” The fragmentary, timeless narrative mimics how everyday memories live in our minds, in which we’re at once always young, never sure what happened before or after, and free from retrospective intrusions. In Andhar Bil, time is compressed and characters grow up quickly, and at other moments time stretches and Kamalini doesn’t seem to get older.
Mid-way through, Kamalini begins to take on more responsibility, like selling fruit in the market. Collecting and selling fruit is considered a male’s task, but Kamalini’s father takes pride in the fact that his daughter can do this type of work, and she embraces it. “Kamalini talks to all her customers freely. She considers herself a bit masculine.” She wanders about the countryside without worrying what people think. “Kamal does many things that are generally done only by boys,” the narrator observes. The novella’s end comes when she goes to class X in south Kolkata, leaving the bil forever. She “starts for the city and an ever-migratory life” and begins to long for the natural and populated bil of her childhood. At the time, Kamal “has no opinion of her own” about staying or going, yet just a few pages earlier, the narrator wonders, “How can people like this, who have such a deep connection with the bil, ever live wholeheartedly in the city?” Away from the bil, some part of Kamalini will always be missing. In addition to the disconnection that comes from trading plants for concrete, leaving the bil means leaving the relative safety of this particular community. Though it is not mentioned, the narrative context implies that in south Kolkata, Kamalini’s intersectional identity of being a Dalit female will lead to her marginalization by an upper-caste, patriarchal society.
The nostalgic tone of the author/narrator for her childhood home mirrors the nostalgia of the adult characters who remember their native land with a mystical reverence. When Kamalini asks her father about the village he left, he answers, “The water was so beautiful, clear as crystal. You could use it to drink, bathe, cook, serve meals, bathe the cattle, whatever you wanted. God sends everything man needs. That is sufficient.” Yet Kamalini knows from school that diseases can be passed through any type of water. Like these invisible diseases, the systematic discrimination that the Matua people faced in East Pakistan remains a mostly unspoken detail of their native country among the community.
In India, the community’s relationship to the water and bil distinguishes Kamalini, her family, and the village as lower caste. Kamal’s experiences working with the bil illustrate these conditions: she “knows how to keep the fishing hook, the ucha, daon, the earthworm, the fishing net and everything else properly. All these things have a slight meaty, fishy odor to them. And close to the cowshed there’s the smell of cowdung and fodder. This is the mark of farmer families, this smell.” At the market, other children “often make fun of the bil people. And Kamal feels a kind of inferiority complex.” Her father tells a story of when he was in his native land sawing down trees and “the tree owners allowed [him] to sit in the courtyard close to the house. [He] was so hungry [he] could have eaten a mountain of rice.” Instead of carrying the food down, a woman from the family threw the rice and dal from an upper story onto the ground, and Kamalini’s father thought “How can they hate some human beings so much?” These injustices are woven sparingly into the text, so lightly that if you aren’t looking for them, you might miss them. In a way, the author’s light touch reflects Kamalini’s father’s focus on his children’s self-worth, perhaps knowing what the world outside the bil will strip away. Kamalini’s father sends his oldest daughter to an upper-caste school and the girl brags of being friends with these higher-caste students, and he is proud of Kamalini’s boyish pursuits.
Charal is especially attuned to the power of taking what the majority says is shameful and declaring it as a source of pride. Andhar Bil is a place without caste or gender, where its youth can freely explore all aspects of their identity. Much of Charal’s writing about the bil focuses on how the bil gives Kamalini pride in doing something well, being outside and connected to the land, able to wander where she pleases. It is only when confronted with others outside her community that shame about being from the bil arises. Similarly, in the early 2000s the author adopted Charal as her last name, a derogatory term for Dalit people. These choices center Charal’s and her characters’ subjectivity and agency while challenging the assumed biases of those who are invested in the privileges of the caste system.
Andhar Bil was translated from the Bengali by Asit Biswas, yet unlike other books in translation, many words remain in the original language, sometimes with or without a gloss. As an English-speaking reader, I assumed these words were Bengali, but according to Dr. Surabhi Jha in her paper “Language as Archive: Indigenous Lexicons and Cultural Survival in Kalyani Thakur Charal’s Work,” these are “indigenous expressions, oral idioms and culturally specific lexicons.” Dr. Jha argues that Charal’s choice to use these words gives voice to those who were “otherwise silenced in dominant upper-caste narratives.” While reading, the effect of Charal’s decision to use this localized language was often lost on me, and I wish the translator’s note would have spent a few sentences explaining that Charal’s use of dialect also caused disorientation among a majority of Bengali speakers. I think particularly of Deepa Bhasthi’s translator’s note, “Against Italics,” at the end of Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, where she explains Bhasthi’s multiple languages and how they are used to enhance the specificity of her character’s experience.
By writing about her remarkable upbringing in words her community uses, Charal demonstrates the Dalit people’s strength and beauty, showing her readers what they may have been too biased to see. Despite her doubt and shame, Kamalini is not like the boy in the village who marries an upper caste girl, “departs and never looks back at his village. But every now and again he remembers, within himself, the poverty and dishonour of his past.” At the same time, Charal does not romanticize her childhood. Andhar Bil is honest in its depictions of poverty, senseless beatings, and misogyny. It depicts a place and time that no longer exist—by the end of the novella, the bil has dried—and that, in a way, according to those upper-caste narratives, never existed. Yet Andhar Bil insists there was such a place where a person could be casteless and genderless, free and roaming through the waters and marshes and fields.
Amber Ruth Paulen is a writer and educator living in rural Michigan. She earned her MFA in fiction at Columbia University and is currently writing a multi-generational novel. www.amberpaulen.com.
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