‘Gangrene’: Sobering stories about Dalit life from the margins of the Punjabi imagination

It was a hot May afternoon when I received the book. I tore through the parcel. A crisp shade of electric blue emerged from the dusty yellow envelope. The cover read: Gangrene. Until then, I knew gangrene only as the death and decay of body tissue. The byline read: Punjabi Dalit Short Stories, translated by Akshaya Kumar and Navdeep Singh.

Gangrene. Caste. Gangrene. Caste.

I had not even opened the book, yet the metaphor had already begun its work. The two words kept returning to me, refusing to leave each other. I left the book where it was and walked away. Over the next few days, it seemed to stare at me from across the room. I ran away from it. What was I running from? I wasn’t sure. Or perhaps I knew only too well.

It was only weeks later that I found the courage to return to the book. By then, the stories haunted and fascinated me in equal measure. As I moved from one story to the next, the meaning of gangrene began to change.

Bringing together 12 stories by various writers, translated from multiple Punjabi dialects and registers and spanning nearly five decades, the anthology compelled me to look more closely at Punjab. Much of whose dominant...

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