The Faceless Millions: Subaltern Life-Worlds in Byapari's Imaan

Abstract

This paper examines Manoranjan Byapari's novel Imaan (2021), translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, as a sustained literary construction of subaltern life-worlds on the margins of urban India. Longlisted for the 2022 JCB Prize for Literature, the novel follows Imaan Ali, who is born and raised within Kolkata's Central Jail system and released into an unfamiliar world of ragpickers, rickshaw-pullers, pickpockets, and street vendors around Jadavpur railway station. Drawing on subaltern studies, this paper argues that Byapari himself a Dalit writer who learned to read and write as an adult  constructs a narrative in which imprisonment and freedom are inverted categories, exposing how state institutions and the "free" informal economy alike produce conditions of subalternity. The paper examines the novel's carceral irony, its ethnographic attention to railside community life, and its interrogation of criminality as a category defined by class rather than morality. It concludes that Imaan extends the project of Dalit-Bahujan life-writing that Byapari began in his own memoirs into fiction, giving narrative dignity and interiority to a population the "faceless millions" of India's informal economy that dominant literary and social discourse renders invisible.