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 cultural imagination centres on agrarian abundance, celebration, valour and the historical trauma of Partition. Yet they tell only part of the story, leaving largely unexamined the caste order that has sustained them.

Home to the highest proportion of Dalits of any Indian state, Punjab has always contained histories that remain at the margins of this imagination. Gangrene shifts our gaze towards those social worlds, where caste continues to organise access to land, labour, intimacy, desire, memory and violence. Read together, these stories reveal the social foundations of Punjab’s dominant cultural imagination, showing how control over land shapes labour, mobility, faith, leadership, intimacy and the making of the self.

Unequal exchanges

Integral to the anthology’s achievement are the translations. In their introduction, Akshaya Kumar and Navdeep Singh describe their approach as one of “affective translation”, seeking not merely verbal equivalence but the emotional, cultural and social worlds these stories inhabit. That approach feels especially resonant in an anthology where lived experience informs both the stories and their translation. By retaining terms such as seerie, lambardar and zaildar, the translators preserve the caste relations embedded within the language itself.

It is perhaps fitting that the collection opens with Attarjit’s “Bathloo Chamiar”. Although his name is Sunder, the village knows him as “Bathloo Chamiar”, reducing him to his caste identity rather than his personhood. A Dalit manual labourer, he agrees to fill a roadside sinkhole for a meagre sum. Yet what lingers is not the exploitative labour itself but the way caste reshapes his understanding of dignity and recognition.

Even when another labourer points out that the panchayat has tricked him into accepting far less than the work is worth, Bathloo refuses to see himself as wronged. “Our duty is to serve,” he insists. “Whatever the panchayat pays is enough.” The violence lies not only in the unequal exchange of labour for wages, but also in the way caste transforms exploitation into service and submission into virtue. When Bathloo collapses after days of dangerous labour, the villagers wonder whether he has been possessed by a spirit. It is easier to invoke the supernatural than to acknowledge caste violence. In that refusal, Attarjit reveals one of the many meanings of gangrene: not merely the decay of the body, but the slow erosion of a society’s capacity to recognise its moral failures.

Attarjit’s second story, “Gangrene”, expands the anthology’s central metaphor beyond labour. Jagtar, a Dalit man, and Param, an oppressor caste Sikh woman, fall in love, believing that education, love and the egalitarian ideals of Sikhism might be enough to transcend caste. They are not.

What makes the story devastating is not simply the failure of love but the gradual dismantling of belief itself. The very institutions and ideals Jagtar turns to for dignity become the sites through which caste is reaffirmed. Sikhism’s egalitarian ideals yield to caste endogamy, while education fails to deliver the life he imagined. By the end, it is not only Jagtar’s relationship that has collapsed but also his faith that dignity is possible within the existing social order. If “Bathloo Chamiar” locates gangrene in the extraction of labour, Gangrene reveals how the disease has spread to the very institutions that promise equality.

If Attarjit’s stories locate gangrene in labour and institutions, Mohan Lal Phillauria’s “Cobbler’s Son” turns to the unfinished promises of social mobility. A story of memory as much as transition, it traces movement from village to city, father to son, hereditary labour to salaried employment, and caste-assigned identity to professional recognition. Yet caste accompanies the narrator into every new social world he inhabits.

Having left the village for a government job, the narrator believes he has left behind “the cobbler’s son”, only to discover that the figure clings to him “like a leech” and follows him “like my own shadow.” Employment promises the dignity long denied to hereditary labour, but it cannot erase the memories and inheritances that shaped him.

Phillauria does not romanticise the village or the city. The father cultivates dignity through Guru Ravidas and a refusal to disavow who he is, while the son seeks recognition through education and employment. Yet the story refuses to cast them as representatives of separate worlds. Their memories and inheritances fold into one another, revealing two generations negotiating the same caste history across changing geographies, where caste acquires new forms without losing its hold. Mobility comes at the cost of community without securing acceptance. The story asks what remains of home, kinship and belonging when caste compels one to leave in search of dignity but prevents from letting one arrive.

Makhan Maan’s “Iron-Boned” turns to the complicated relationship between dignity, leadership and recognition. Structured through interconnected vignettes, the story continually revises our understanding of Magghar, casting him as neither a hero nor a villain. Though he occupies no formal position of power, village leaders repeatedly seek him out when they need access to the Dalit community, making him visible only insofar as he is useful.

Maan reveals the costs of that visibility. While Magghar repeatedly risks himself for his community, Nanjo, his wife, bears its burden through debt, invisible emotional labour, backbreaking physical labour and quiet endurance. Yet even as he confronts oppressor caste power outside the home, the home remains one in which the desires and choices of the women in his family are governed through the language of family honour, violence and control. Rather than offering easy moral judgments, “Iron-Boned” becomes a nuanced meditation on the costs of dignity, leadership and visibility in a society that recognises Dalits only through utility, while exposing how the burdens of resistance are unevenly distributed within the Dalit household.

The remains of caste

Nachhatar’s “Cancer” asks what becomes of caste after education and professional success. Gurtej, a Dalit student whose brilliance is recognised by a committed teacher, becomes a renowned surgeon. Years later, he operates on his former schoolmate Simran, only for her grandfather to discover that the doctor who saved her life is the Dalit boy he had once forbidden her from befriending. Professional excellence may transform one’s occupation, but not the social imagination through which one continues to be seen.

In doing so, “Cancer” unsettles the ideology of meritocracy at two levels. First, Gurtej’s extraordinary professional success fails to free him from caste, exposing the limits of excellence as a route to dignity. Second, the story questions how merit itself is produced. Gurtej’s journey begins because a teacher recognises his potential. Rather than mistaking his exceptional mobility for evidence of equality, “Cancer” asks what happens to the countless equally capable children whose brilliance is never recognised in the first place.

Bhura Singh Kaler’s “Cry of the Sky” explores the intimate social worlds produced by caste, where labour, desire and power become inseparable. Lakha, a young seerie, cannot imagine himself worthy of Kaati, while Kaati is drawn to Jinder, the landlord’s son, whose caste position represents a form of power unavailable within her own world. Their desires are never free but shaped by unequal social relations. The story’s devastating conclusion reveals that what Kaati mistakes for the possibility of love is, in fact, another expression of caste power, as her aspiration is met with sexual violence.

At the same time, I found myself uneasy with the narration’s sustained attention to Kaati’s body. Long before the assault, the descriptive gaze repeatedly returns to her physicality in ways that sit uneasily alongside the story’s otherwise powerful critique of sexual violence within the caste order.

If “Cry of the Sky” reveals how caste extends into the intimate sphere, Prem Gorkhi’s “My Story, Everybody’s Story” reveals its violent consequences. The narrator’s final act of revenge cannot be understood apart from the caste order that destroys his family through the exploitative labour relations of the seerie system, the rape and murder of his sister, and the repeated sexual exploitation of his mother. Gorkhi portrays a social order in which the humanity of Dalit households is systematically denied. They are recognised only as a source of labour, sexual access or criminality, never as lives worthy of dignity, grief or justice.

The story’s most unsettling insight lies in its ending, where the law remembers only the deaths of the dominant-caste men while the violence that produced them disappears from view. Rather than asking readers to judge the narrator's revenge in isolation, Gorkhi compels us to confront the conditions that made such violence imaginable in the first place. By the end, the story asks not simply how violence erupts, but whose suffering counts, whose testimony is believed, whose grief is recorded, and whose lives are rendered grievable within the caste order.

Read together, these stories embody what Sharan Kumar Limbale describes as the aesthetics of Dalit literature, where lived experience becomes the basis of literary expression rather than something literature merely represents. Few seek neat plots or moral resolutions. Instead, they accumulate meaning through fragments, recurring images and remembered conversations, assembling a collective portrait of caste’s ordinary worlds. Running through that portrait are two competing ways of seeing Dalit life. The gaze of the oppressor castes recognises Dalits only through the roles assigned to them: labourers, political intermediaries, exceptional achievers, sexualised bodies or criminals. Against this gaze, the stories insist on full personhood. They restore history, memory, desire, interiority, contradiction and moral complexity to lives long reduced to social function.

By the end of the anthology, the meaning of gangrene has shifted. It is no longer merely the decay of body tissue but also a metaphor for the slow corrosion of the social world. The disease spreads quietly, numbing moral perception until exploitation appears as duty, humiliation as tradition, exclusion as common sense and violence as an ordinary fact of life. Caste survives through this repetition until entire societies cease to recognise its violence as violence.

When I first held Gangrene in my hands, I knew gangrene only as the slow death of body tissue. I understand now why I found it so difficult to open the book. By the final page, the title had come to signify something far more unsettling: the gradual erosion of a society's capacity to recognise another person's humanity. The two words that had refused to leave each other before I had read a single page, gangrene and caste, had by the end become impossible to separate.

Kamna Singh is a writer, translator, visual artist and PhD researcher at the University of Delhi. Her work spans literary criticism, translation and visual storytelling, with a particular interest in Dalit literature, memory and life writing.

Gangrene: Punjabi Dalit Short Stories, translated by Akshaya Kumar and Navdeep Singh, Penguin Random House India.

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