Shiraz Hassan, a journalist, blogger and a photographer rolled into one, has translated it from Hindi to Urdu. No wonder then that it was translated into Punjabi, English, Malayalam, Tamil and few other languages of India. Joothan was published in 1997 and created a furore as it unmasked the horrible face of caste ridden society of India. Once he started, there was no looking back. He began jotting down his life story at the behest of one of his friends. He published three collections each of poetry and short stories during his literary journey. And yet, Valmiki braved all this and studied hard and was later smitten by the literary bug. Their status in the village was much worse than the animals. It was believed that Dalits didn’t have any purpose in life apart from serving others. His was a life that was nothing but humiliation, caste discrimination and persecution at the behest of so-called ‘Upper Castes’ who treated Dalits in a bestial manner to say the least. It became his magnum opus and is regarded as a classic today.īorn in a village of Muzzafarnagar Uttar Pradesh in a Dalit family in 1950, he had to face unbearable poverty along with so much else. Om Prakash Valmiki wrote poetry and fiction but it was his memoir Joothan which made him one of the top notch Hindi writers of the modern era.
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