translation of Bengali Dalit women poets

To the ruler, the oppressor

I am but a woman – battered and helpless

My education, my accomplishments are  insignificant

I have no voice, no home

My place is only at the feet of the ruler

But why is it so? I am a citizen of this independent India

          I belong to this continent called Asia

          I belong to this humanity to this world

I am fenced in

                   For centuries after century

I am forever bereft of human rights

The road ahead is inviting

I have kept retreating long enough

And now my back is against a wall

So this is the time I stand upright

And walk forward

This is the time to break fences

Time to get my rights

When I was born

          There was no discriminatory mark on my body

          Nobody is born like that

Every word out of my pen will adorn me with hundred arms

          And thousand weapons

In my hands

          With those weapons

          Will be defeated those high caste rulers

The sky, the wind will be filled with the lightening of my revolt

That fire will burn the audacious head of the ruler.

The great song of equality will echo everywhere

The thread of friendship will tie all lives

3

The leaders keep losing the ideologies

We know that, yet

We take the great leap

The leader finds success – exploiting the workers’ fate

They pose as the dalit’s friend and exploits the dalit’s fate

Yet we believe in their brightly packaged ideologies

The hopeful mind gets hurt

The workers- the dalits remain where they were

The only who climbs the ladder of success are the leaders

Holding hand with the landlords or the dalit haters

We applaud

Some of us know it all

Some don’t

This is a paiful time

A time of frauds and liars

To the middle class

Peaceful fraud is acceptable

A compromise for some small benefits

Why disrupt peace by exposing the frauds?

Let them gulp down all they want. What is it to you?

It is the government’s chore

The Government! Who is that! Where does he stay?

My opportunist friend keep talking

Little do they know

Still we share a fake laugh

And we talk

All alone

5

They barred my grandfather

                   From entering the school

My father was barely allowed

To learn to write his name

Only on leaves with charcoal

My mother had to carry cow dung

To obtain prasad from the temple after durga puja

Did you not know?

She was to clean the space she stood in with cowdung

For the dung, the holy cow dung

Was a lot more pure than the dalit’s foot print

In my office, my colleagues use words like

          ‘chamar, chanral, dom’ for slander.

It seems they have completely forgotten that these are also races

The gentlemen , my colleagues, they seem to have forgotten that

There may be dalits in other parts of the world , but not here –

There may be racism in the rest of India, but not here –

They grab my neck and teach me

Say – we are all one

Nothing happens here

After getting to work for one generation

They are abolishing reservation

Strangling my neck they say ---

If you ask for reservation in private sector

There will be nothing worse

Say it – that we don’t need anything more

We have got everything

(original authors mamata mandal, kalyani thakur)