Mamta Kalia

This terrible suffering of village life has
not even been touched upon by the epic
poets of Hindi. What a monstrous truth
that is.
That year, most of the houses in
our basti had collapsed. It took us months
to build them again. No grants or subsidies
had reached that basti. All we could
Omprakash Valmiki, a poet and literary critic, is an established name
in Hindi literature with his autobiography ‘Joothan’. He works at Ordnance
Factory, Dehradun.
Arun Prabha Mukherjee is associate professor of Engish at York University,
Toronto, Canada. She is a well known scholar of post colonial studies.
She is also a literary critic.
24 :: April-June 2010
rely on was the strength of our own
hands. Those ramshackle homes were
rebuilt again. The same story was
repeated almost every year. Even the
houses that the rains spared underwent
considerable damage.
Courtesy Samya, Kolkata