Lamakaan invites you to a book launch and talk about 'Water in a Broken Pot: a memoir' by Yogesh Maitreya.

About the book: Incredibly moving and hauntingly honest, Water in a Broken Pot is the memoir of Yogesh Maitreya, a leading independent Indian Dalit publisher, writer, and poet. Encompassing experiences of pain, loneliness, deprivation, alienation, and the political consciousness of his caste identity, this intimately moving memoir is a story of resilience and raw brutality. Growing up in a working-class family with meagre wages to get by in life, Yogesh writes of his father’s struggle against alcohol and passion for cinema; of intergenerational dreams shattered; working day and night shifts in factories; the struggle of being lost, overlooked, and unmentored in India’s schooling, college, and university systems that continue to be casteist, exclusionary and hostile, and feelings of lovelessness, loss, and heartaches.

Having hopped from gig to gig to make ends meet, he writes of his eventual discovery of the the written word, literature, and the Ambedkarite legacy, which helped shape his dreams, identity and the eventual career choice of publishing books. In sharing his story, this fresh and a radical voice tells his truth in the frankest and unfiltered of ways, as it happened, giving us readers permission to also be vulnerable in telling our tales.

About the Author: Yogesh Maitreya is a writer, poet, translator, and publisher. He is the founder and editor of Panther’s Paw Publication which is dedicated to publishing literature by Dalit-Bahujan writers (in English and as translations from other Indian languages). He is the author of Flowers on the Grave of Caste (2019), a collection of short stories, Singing/ Thinking Anti Caste (2021), a book of essays on music and memories, and Ambedkar 2021 (2021), a book of prose poetry.

ALL ARE INVITED