Name Chuni Kotal Died 1992 | Education Vidyasagar University | |
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Chuni Kotal was a Dalit Adivasi of Lodha Shabar tribe, a Scheduled Tribes of India, who in 1985 became the first woman graduate among the Lodha Shabars.
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Her death through suicide on 16 August 1992, after years of harassment by officials, united the Lodha Shabar community in a big way. Eventually her story was highlighted by noted writer-activist Mahasweta Devi in her book in Bengali, Byadhkhanda in (1994), ( The Book of the Hunter (2002))
Biography
Born in 1965, in village Gohaldohi, in Paschim Medinipur district, West Bengal, into a poor Lodha family, Chuni Kotal survived a childhood of impoverishment to become the first woman from a 'primitive' tribe to complete High School. Thereafter, she got her first job as a Lodha Social worker in 1983 at Jhargram ITDP office, surveying local villages.
Eventually she graduated in anthropology from Vidyasagar University, in 1985. Two years after graduating, she was appointed as a Hostel superintendent at 'Rani Shiromoni SC and ST Girls' Hostel' at Medinipur, here again she had to face the social stigma attached with her tribe.
Trouble really began for her when she joined the Masters course (M.Sc.) at the local Vidyasagar University. Here she was continuously discriminated against and insulted by her upper caste Brahmin professors (like Professor Falguni Chakraborty and others) and university administrators, who refused to give her the requisite pass grades, despite her having fulfilled the criteria, who opined that a low-born person coming from a "criminal tribe", a Denotified tribe of India, hence did not have the social privilege and pre-ordained destiny to study "higher discourse" like the social sciences. In 1991, after losing two years at the course, she complained, and a high level enquiry commission was set up by the state Education minister to no avail, once the fact that she belonged to a former criminal tribe came to light.
It should be noted that Professor Falguni Chakraborty, who played a leading role in her death, continues to teach and supervise Ph.D. scholars in the Vidyasagar University Anthropology Department till 2016.
Death
On 14 August 1992, frustrated by years casteist and racist harassment at Medinipur, she left Medinipur and went to meet her husband, Manmatha Savar, who had been working at Railway workshop at Kharagpur. They had known each other since 1981 and later married in 1990 through a court marriage; Manmatha was a high school graduate himself. It was here that she committed suicide on 16 August 1992, at the age of 27.
Her death became the focal point of immense political, human rights and social controversy in the media in West Bengal, and eastern India, where the discourse is traditionally Brahmin-Baniya dominated. However, her death did not receive the attention of Indian American social science professors as it did among Western social scientists who were studying the Indian caste system, like Professor Nicholas B. Dirks at Columbia University and Professor Jan Breman at the University of Amsterdam.
Upon her death, Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sanstha, Kolkata, organized a mass movement through different seminars and street corners, street play protesting against university teachers, on the street of Kolkata. Since 1993, it organizes the Annual Chuni Kotal Memorial Lecture in Kolkata every year. Later a motivational video film has been produced on her life story by Department of Education, Govt. of India