Discuss the novel Changia Rukh: Against the Night as a Bildungsroman

Changiya Rukh means a tree lopped from the top, slashed and dwarfed. As the title of his autobiography, Balbir Madhopuri has used it as a metaphor for the dalit or an ‘untouchable’ Indian whose potential for growth has been ‘robbed by the Hindu social order’.

Leafless trees look like my kin, my brothers and sisters … When they start growing, their heads are cut mercilessly; the arms and feet are chopped, like branches hacked down. As such thoughts came to mind, the third or fourth part of the slashed tree would take the shape of my father, uncles, and their sons.

Significantly, the lopped tree also denotes its inherent and defiant resilience that brings forth fresh shoots of branches and leaves. Written originally in Punjabi, Madhopuri’s autobiography is the story of a dalit’s angst of deprivation, social exclusion, and humiliation, as well as of resistance, achievement, and hope. The subjective narrative of a dalit writer tends to universalize the caste-based experience of his community. Indeed, it goes further and resonates with numerous Black American autobiographies. No wonder that when Martin Luther King was reminded of his social status, during his visit to India in 1958, while in Kerala, he hastened to declare, ‘Yes, I am an untouchable, every Negro in the United States is an untouchable.’ Though the burden of being a dalit in India may be different from that of a Black in America, there is much in common in their real-life experience of pain and humiliation, as also in the purpose and process of autobiography writing. As far as _____ ______ ____ ______ __________.
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