A young Anupam Debashish Roy with his paternal grandmother and aunt. They were among members of his family who adopted Brahmin myths and names to pursue reading and education, practices once considered taboo for people from the Namasudra caste.
A young Anupam Debashish Roy with his paternal grandmother and aunt. They were among members of his family who adopted Brahmin myths and names to pursue reading and education, practices once considered taboo for people from the Namasudra caste. Credit: Anupam Debashish Roy
Culture

My “Namasudra Brahmin” family’s quest for caste dignity in Bangladesh

A personal memoir of one Dalit family’s mythological and actual battles against caste discrimination and religious prejudice in Bangladesh, East Pakistan and colonial Bengal
Anupam Debashis Roy

Anupam Debashis Roy is the editor-in-chief of Muktipotro and a DPhil candidate in sociology at the University of Oxford.

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MY GRANDMOTHER died over a decade ago. Every now and then, I am reminded of the tales she used to tell me when I was a child. Many were from the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic that she taught herself to read. She kept her copy in a cloth case, striped yellow, red and blue, on top of an almirah in our railway officer’s housing in Chittagong (now called Chattogram), in south-eastern Bangladesh. It was her belief that one should keep the Mahabharata at the highest place in the room, in recognition of its sanctity. 

My “uneducated” but self-taught grandmother taught me how to read the Mahabharata – and the Bhagavad Gita, the philosophical treatise contained within it – as well as the other famous Hindu epic, the Ramayana. To this day, I remember many shlokas, or verses, from these sacred texts, simply because she had me recite them over and over. 

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Bangladesh
caste
Bengal
B R Ambedkar
Dalits
Himal Southasian
www.himalmag.com