Abstract
Baburao Bagul, Lootaloot, Translated by Manav Kambli, 2024, 200 pp., ₹499 (Paperback), Hachette India. ISBN: 9789357317733.
Dalit literature in India, both creative and literary, has successfully showcased the day-to-day deprivation and humiliations caused by caste and class oppression. However, most of this powerful work remains unknown to English readers. Marathi Dalit literature, which is sharp, experimental and emotionally dense, is less visible to the wider audience. Baburao Bagul’s Lootaloot or Maran Swasta Hot Aahe (Death Is Becoming Cheap) in Marathi, translated from Marathi to English by Manav Kambli, is a significant volume in this context, as it translates a collection of stories by Baburao Bagul into English that open up the inner life of Mumbai’s Dalit slums while preserving the edge and immediacy of his Marathi prose.
Baburao Bagul, also known as Baburao Ramaji Bagul, is a poet and writer born in 1930 in Nashik. He grew up in Mumbai’s Matunga Labour Camp, a place that was shaped by Ambedkarite politics and working-class movements. Dalit writing was frequently caricatured as unsophisticated because it did not follow the ‘standard’ Marathi. Still, Bagul relies on just that non-standard language, as well as dialect and stream-of-consciousness, to evoke minds and bodies under duress. His narratives are not confined to the village; instead, he moves to the congested slums of Mumbai and their uneasy contact with ‘civilized’ city spaces, registering new forms of labour, precarity and aspiration.
The very first story of this volume, ‘Plunder’, set the tone, as it were, in brutal clarity. We walk through a slum with narrow alleyways, sheds, bad smells and constant noise. In the interior, people lack food security, safety and stable employment. The adults leave at dawn for any kind of work, construction, rag picking, begging and so on, but may not come back by night. As locals become desperate with hunger, they raid whatever they can. This includes leftover food found in garbage heaps, bits of metal and small saleable objects. They are not born thieves; they are human beings who are starving. It is society that calls them ‘plunderers’. Set in a brothel, it also shows the life of the sex workers, who fall prey to their rage, but it is clear that the villains in this cycle of oppression are the men in power. Meanwhile, the wealthy who benefit from their unpaid labour never get called out. Bagul, in this chapter, shows through his writing that the poor are easily criminalized.
The second story, ‘Hard Labour’, explores the life of a Dalit woman who undertakes the most arduous, low-paying jobs to keep her children alive. She is breaking stones, ferrying heavy loads and sweeping in the scorching heat without taking a break from morning to late evening, as her husband does not support her and she has no savings. Although her body pains and she becomes sick, she cannot rest, as her children will go hungry. Employers were taking advantage of her labour while insulting her caste and gender. At the same time, neighbours dismissed her suffering as fate rather than injustice. The writer showed us the links between caste and patriarchy through the body of a woman.
The subject of ‘Hunger’ is taken up directly in the third story. Bagul here presents hunger not merely as a physical lack but as a catalyst that erodes the usual sense of right and wrong. The writer makes it quite clear that hunger is not natural. It is produced by inequality in caste and class that decides who will live in deprivation all the time and who will have abundance. The story quietly questions our own sense of fairness and responsibility.
The fourth chapter, called ‘Mother’, takes this into the home. The mother represents the suffering, patience and weary strength of Dalit women whose motherhood’s dignity is undermined as they cannot feed and protect their children. She is not the idealized, selfless mother of devotional literature, but a woman worn down by the daily struggle, still holding the household together. The author shows us that society praises motherhood in the abstract while denying real mothers the material goods they need.
In the fifth chapter titled ‘The People in the Field’, the focus shifts from the city to the countryside. From a particular segment of society, it turns to another—landless labourers who work on other people’s land. They rely on landlords for their wages and employment. Even after working all day, they remain poor and insecure. While landlords enjoy comfort and status, food producers are hungry and cannot even call the streets their home. Because of their caste, it is difficult for them to organize themselves or demand fair wages; they are treated like a tool that can be replaced. Through this story, the writer shows the irony of the hands that feed others being unable to feed themselves. It shows how little the link between hard work and dignity in a caste-bound agrarian order works.
In the sixth chapter titled ‘Education’, it invokes the well-known call of Ambedkar, ‘educate, agitate, organize’. Bagul said that slums do not just miss out on education; they are also kept away from it. This chapter explores how the uneducated people are used as a tool to ensure cheap, unquestioning labour. Although schools exist, they cannot attend them because their parents cannot afford the fees. The story implies that universal equality in educational opportunities will not lead to social justice. According to the story, Dalit children being removed from classrooms is not an accident, and accidents will not be able to achieve social justice.
In the seventh chapter, ‘Death Is Becoming Cheap’, the author takes this logic to its extreme. This story discusses how, in an impoverished neighbourhood, survival itself is a daily struggle, with people living amid hunger, sickness, dirt and fatigue. Under such conditions, when a labourer dies after days without pay and little food, when a child never sees a doctor, when an old woman collapses from weakness, no one is shocked anymore. The death of each is mentioned, and life goes on. Bagul evidences how society has ceased to be taken aback by the deaths of the poor, since their lives were never valued as being worth a full count.
The eighth chapter, ‘Ruffian’, examines how easily some Dalit men are labelled dangerous. It also examines the economic exploitation, caste prejudice and lack of opportunity they face. In the end, the audience is compelled to question just who the real scoundrel is, the man who lashes out or the social order that made him.
In the ninth chapter titled ‘Injustice’, the writer shows us how a hardworking Dalit who only wants to live peacefully is accused of a crime while the real culprits, protected by status, remain safe. The police, the courts and the public, all together, turn law into an instrument of oppression.
In his tenth chapter titled ‘Thirst’, Bagul highlights that water, too, can be used to enforce caste lines. Dalit men and women suffer from excessive thirst despite the availability of nearby water bodies. This is because the upper castes deny them access to wells and taps. Here, thirst is not natural but socially produced; it stands for the refusal to share that which is most basic.
The last tale of the book, titled ‘The Birth of a Poem’, serves as a quiet reflection on Bagul’s conception of literature. The poem is ‘born’ out of the foetal pain the toiler experiences when turning the pain, suffering and injustice inflicted on him into words. This is not poetry for the comfortable. It is a cry. A cry for resistance and truth. It is a way to confront misery, not to escape it. According to Bagul, Dalit literature embodies revolution incarnate, and this belief is self-evident in the story.
Lootaloot is striking not for its portrayal of suffering, but for the buttress it offers to conflicting responses to that suffering. Bagul portrays characters who do not strictly fit the category of victims, as is often the case in protests and political movements. However, underneath this repetition of the words ‘helpless’ and ‘futile’, a stubborn movement of revolt takes shape: the ruffian who refuses social death, a mother who continues to fight for her children and a poet who makes language out of injury. This book presents a dense cluster of lives caught between plunder and protest, compelling readers—especially in the Indian context—to rethink what they know about hunger, labour, education, law and poetry in a caste-stratified society. In addition, the author deserves recognition for presenting the book in clear, accessible language, free from heavy academic terminology, making it approachable.