Narrating the Margins: Memory, Voice, and Resistance in the Autobiographies of Balbir Madhopuri, Manoranjan Byapari, and Manohar Mouli Biswas

Abstract

Dalit autobiography has emerged as one of the most significant literary forms for documenting the experiences of marginalized communities in India. More than personal narratives, Dalit life writings function as testimonies that challenge dominant historical accounts and recover voices systematically excluded from mainstream discourse. This paper examines Balbir Madhopuri's Changiya Rukh, Manoranjan Byapari's Interrogating My Chandal Life, and Manohar Mouli Biswas's Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal through the interconnected frameworks of memory, voice, and resistance. It argues that these autobiographies transform individual memories of caste discrimination, social exclusion, poverty, and humiliation into collective narratives of struggle and survival. By recollecting experiences that official histories often ignore, the authors create alternative archives of Dalit life and challenge the silence imposed by caste society. The study further demonstrates how autobiographical writing becomes a political act through which marginalized subjects reclaim agency and assert their right to narrate their own histories. Through a comparative analysis of these texts, the paper highlights the role of memory as a mode of resistance and self-representation. Ultimately, the autobiographies reveal that remembering is not merely an act of recollection but a powerful intervention against social erasure and historical marginalization.