He used to joke, “You boast that Marathi is the language of Dnyaneshwari to the progressive modern thought of Phule’s Gulamgiri and Dr Ambedkar’s essays. Which is why, Yashwant says he was very disappointed that there was no translation of the book in Marathi. One would assume Valmiki had not made the sale of his book an easy task. Valmiki’s essayistic meditations about his brutal past make for a personal mythology to counter the epic mythologies of how the Churas were tyrannised by the upper castes. The motif is untouchability.Īnd unlike Premchand or Amritlal Nagar’s sagas, this is an untouchable’s fight for self respect and human dignity. When you read Joothan, the experience is nearly impossible to describe in a sentence or two. Even in the era of the progressive Hindi writer, the Chura community was considered an ‘extra’ to the main cast.
The village of Barla, in Muzzafarnagar, in Uttar Pradesh, was not the sort of place from where you would expect one of the finest Hindi authors to emerge. It was Valmiki’s longstanding belief that an author is at his best when he writes what he cannot write, or is not supposed to have written. It was in Maharashtra that he grasped the importance of Babasaheb Ambedkar, the contribution of the Dalit Panther movement, and the tradition of the Dalit autobiographies in Marathi.” It was only Rama and Krishna and the Hindu gods. In Uttar Pradesh, he was exposed to the conventional narrative epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
As poet and confidante Loknath Yashwant from Chandrapur says, “Omprakash Valmiki was shaped by Maharashtra and its Ambedkar-Dalit politics. This is surprising when one considers the years Valmiki worked in an ordnance company in Ambernath and later in Chandrapur. But no translation of the book in Marathi was available. Translations, play-film adaptations followed, and it was also included in the MA course in universities in India and overseas. When Valmiki wrote his searing autobiography Joothan 21 years ago, he was known as the greatest living Hindi author most people had never heard of.
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