Untouchable Goa: Dadu Mandrekar's writings return in translation
It's the commitment to truth-telling that gives the book its raw, cutting power. 'The book has a raw and angry voice, but at the same time, it is not brash,' says the translator. 'It is a mixture of rawness with composure, frustration with beauty, and with all the ugliness that is caste. I wanted to keep all of this alive and tried hard to do so by revisiting his work and my translation multiple times.'
In one striking description, Dadu describes how Mahars, who eat mutton and chicken proudly in their kitchens, treat fish as a pollutant. He asks, if gods could take the form of a fish (Matsya avatar), why is the actual fish suddenly dirty? Nikhil, who stayed close to Dadu's tone, shares, 'I think a lesser writer, or even a 'lesser human being' would have found it impossible to maintain the balance between horror and humour in such contexts. It is easy to laugh at the expense of others, but these people weren't 'others' for Dadu, nor are they 'others' for me.' You see this balance most clearly in how the rituals for the dead are described: women's corpses buried face-down, surrounded by torn clothes and seeds, so their spirits, if they rise, stay busy stitching or harvesting instead of haunting the living.
The writer also shows how women are punished, not just for being born, but for bleeding, for giving birth, for dying in the 'wrong' house. A menstruating woman or a woman postpartum is forced into isolation, her utensils marked, her touch feared. But if she dies during that time, the cruelty multiplies. Her body is buried in secret, turned away from the sky, with needles and shredded clothes meant to trap her spirit. Dadu recalls how a woman who died in her maternal home was hastily buried by her family (so that her spirit wouldn't claim on the living and their possessions), only for dogs to later unearth and 'devour' her body. For Dadu, this brutality reflects a culture where women are molested in life, mutilated in death, and treated as worthless once married.
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