Mapping Literary Journeys: Baby Haldar’s Story

This Dalit History Month, Zubaan is pleased to honour the work of some of the extraordinary Dalit, tribal and other marginalised writers that we have worked with. Today we introduce you to Baby Halder, author of one of our best-selling Zubaan Classics, A Life Less Ordinary.

When Baby Halder’s autobiography, A Life Less Ordinary, first came out in English, it created a small disturbance in the upper caste and upper class-dominated world of English literary publishing. Who was this uneducated woman seeking to make her mark in a space held by those who could read and write in the language of power?

Baby’s journey from a life of violence and deprivation to becoming a writer was an unusual one. As a young woman, she took the extraordinary step of walking out of her marriage with her three children and making her way to Delhi where she found work in a home. Her employer, Prabodh Kumar, the grandson of one of Hindi’s best-known writers, Premchand, noticed her love of books and encouraged her to read and then to write. This moment set Baby on the path to change.

She wrote her autobiography, in Bengali and then in Hindi, both languages she is familiar with, the former because it is her mother tongue and the latter, a language she acquired from living in Delhi. The English translation, A Life Less Ordinary, became a bestseller in India and across the world, with translations in 23 languages, Indian and foreign.

As the book made its way into the world, it mapped an unusual literary and activist journey. At the Jaipur Literature Festival shortly after the release of the book, the local domestic workers’ union, along with activists and lawyers in the city, organised a large meeting of domestic workers where issues of work, wages, livelihoods and writing were discussed. Baby read from the Hindi edition of her book, and her story resonated with many women there.

Later, Baby went on to address groups of domestic workers in other places: Chennai, Bangalore, Gurgaon, Mumbai. In Kolkata she spoke to Bengali writers, bringing a fresh new voice to the established world of senior Bengali writers. Her book travelled into many languages, not so much through the ‘normal’ routes of buying and selling, but through local networks of women like her. Her daughter began to proudly say: ‘My mother is a writer’.

Not everything was positive though, and the trajectory of this book also points to the many assumptions that inform the world of literature and writing. Baby’s book was translated into several languages in India and abroad. But one place where it came up against a wall was in the UK where a mainstream publisher looking at it, had this to say: ‘We like this book. It’s a misery memoir and they do well in the UK. But the trouble is, it’s not miserable enough.’

What he meant was that the almost deadpan way in which Baby speaks of the violence of everyday life, rendered that violence ordinary. It did not turn Baby into the poor, oppressed, cowering victim that Western knowledge needed women from the Global South to be.

For Baby, though, the book opened a path to further writing, and new subjects, but also to the difficult realisation that writing, while emotionally fulfilling, is not a viable way to make a living. Since her employer, Prabodh Kumar died, Baby has been working at odd jobs in NGOs; she spent a year with sex workers’ groups in Kolkata, working with their children and documenting their stories. No matter how difficult life is though, the one thing that keeps Baby going is her love of writing. Two more books have followed the first one, and these will soon be available in translation.