On the Margins of History: An Autoethnographic Study of Manohar Mouli Biswas's Surviving in My World: Growing up Dalit in Bengal

Manohar Mouli Biswas’s autobiography, Surviving in My World: Growing up Dalit in Bengal, is the restoration of vital truths that have been hidden for too long. It shows that the Dalit lived reality of Bengal is different than other parts of the country. His life narrative acts as an autoethnography and testimony of the Bengali Namasudra community. It portrays a world that is quite different from the elite Bhadralok society. The autobiography characterizes authentic kaleidoscopic events, from framing the days of Biswas’s childhood in the poverty-stricken Namasudra community to the struggling years as a Dalit refugee in post-colonial West Bengal. Biswas reiterates the disparities that exist in this society and urges the marginalized people to voice against the injustices that were meted out against them. His works contain serious research possibilities, as one can investigate the link between Dalit aestheticism and subaltern historiography in the genre of postcolonial Dalit literature.