Two Dalit Stories

From the Outlook obituary'The Mountain Parted':
"Dasrath eked out a living as a farm hand, toiling in the fields of local landlords on bare subsistence wages. One day, in the early '60s, his wife Phaguni fell ill and Dasrath set off with her to the nearest hospital. She died on the way. If only there was no hill blocking the road to the town, Dasrath would have made it to the hospital in time, and perhaps his wife's life would have been saved.

The villagers of Gelaur had to take a circuitous route and travel 19 km to Wazirganj, the nearest district town. This was because the massive 360 feet long, 25 feet high and 30 feet wide sheer rock came in the way of the shortest possible route between the village and the town.

The situation would have brought about a feeling of resignation or fatalism in the average man—as if God had himself put this giant obstacle in the path of his ailing wife. Dasrath's response was different and radical—at once unthinkable and stunningly simple. He decided to alter geography with chisel and hammer. To cut a road through the huge mass of rock.

After 22 years of back-breaking, single-handed toil, Dasrath finished in the mid-'80s."
FromBBC News:
"But the sixty-something Dalit from Dumka in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has published a newspaper every week without fail for the past 21 years, highlighting discrimination against the poor and local corruption.

Mr Rajak's four-page, handwritten Hindi-news Din Dalit is photocopied 100 times and sold to subscribers or pasted onto Dumka's main traffic lights, bus stands and roads.

Din Dalit is not just another small town news sheet - the newspaper is registered with India's Registrar of Newspapers, thanks to the efforts of India's first Dalit President, KR Narayanan, after Mr Rajak wrote to him.

Since its first edition in October 1986, Din Dalit has made a difference to the lives of local people, even helping a resident to secure social security from the authorities after his plight was reported in the paper.

Mr Rajak says he decided to bring out the newspaper after he was humiliated by local authorities when he took some people to meet them to help enlist them in a government social security scheme.

"I was very hurt. I approached the local media to highlight the incident but they did not show any interest. So I decided to go ahead and bring out my own newspaper," he says.

Over the years, Din Dalit has run stories on diverse subjects like a local scam in the distribution of specially-made cycles for disabled people, and bungling in a government housing scheme and kerosene oil distribution for the poor.

After washing clothes through the week for a living, Mr Rajak concentrates on bringing out the paper by selecting the news, deciding on the editorial page content and headlining the articles on Sundays.

The paper now even boasts a reporter - 45-year-old Ravi Shanker Gupta, who works in a grocery and goes out to collect news when he gets a work break."