The Last Bench: A story that moves readers to question caste norms

This book doesn't call for action to abolish the caste system - yet it leaves the reader wanting to do away with it

The Last Bench

by Adhir Biswas

Published by Ekada, Westland

184 pages ₹399

  Memoirs written by Dalit writers are often memoirs of their community. Whether it is Baluta by Daya Pawar, translated by Jerry Pinto or The Prisons We Broke by Baby Kamble, translated by Maya Pandit, these memoirs are written by adults with social awareness and a Dalit consciousness. What happens when a childhood memoir of a lower-caste person is written in the voice of a child but with the craft of an adult?

 

Set in the 1960s, Adhir Biswas’s The Last Bench, translated by V Ramaswamy, returns to the author’s childhood in