This Dalit comedian serves humour with a dash of reality check

Manjeet Sarkar at The Untouchable Tour in Delhi last year

When a joke lands well, it is meant to elicit laughter. But in the case of standup comedian Manjeet Sarkar, his funny vignettes often stun the audience into complete silence. A YouTube video from one of his live gigs has him recount a time from his childhood, when he went to drink water from a hand-pump in his village in Odisha. "This lady came [out of nowhere]," he says in Hindi, "Let's just call her b''''h. She started throwing stones at me. I felt really bad and stood aside to watch what she was doing... she took some gangajal, and started cleaning the hand-pump with it. I am a ha'''i. I went and touched the gangajal." Sarkar breaks into laughter, but his audience is clearly hesitant. The Dalit comedian serves humour with a dash of reality check.

Bengaluru-based Sarkar will be visiting Mumbai soon, as part of The Untouchable Tour, which is coming to the city for the third time. His thought-provoking jokes on caste dynamics in the country have won him fans across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Delhi.

His journey in comedy began over six years ago. "I was pursuing my graduation in Bhubaneswar, when I came across this club that would let you perform once a month," he shares over a video call. "I hounded the manager for months and finally got a call to perform." He had an important exam to appear for that day, but he chose to go to the club instead.

The 26-year-old's eyes keep flitting away from the screen, as if recalling that performance required all his might. "I bombed really really bad," he says, finally. While that incident should have dissuaded Sarkar, whose family has roots in the Matua tribe of West Bengal, it only strengthened his resolve to continue. "I can't explain what happened, but that day, I just knew that my place was on the stage."

Sarkar first tried his luck in Mumbai. "I came here in 2018, and lived in a one-room-kitchen with four other guys in Malad. But, it was getting very expensive, so I moved to Bengaluru," he says, adding, "I have nothing against Mumbai, but I do not understand why the hustle of the city is romanticised."

It was his Instagram Reels that became a sleeper hit, not just among Dalit youth, but also upper-caste Hindus, who, he says, are his predominant fan-base. "If you see my standup acts, they are not just about the Dalit experience, but also about the human experience. I weave the Dalit narrative in a way that it doesn't seem forced."

That doesn't mean he doesn't show a mirror to society. In one of the Reels, when the audience doesn't react to the joke, Sarkar asks, "Are there any upper caste [people] here?" "Yes, Brahmins," someone in the audience responds. Sarkars asks playfully, "So why don't you take our jokes, like you take our lands?" Awkward laughs can be heard again.

The clip was from one of Sarkar's first all-India tours held late last year. "That video really did it for me, it became viral and many people had their take on it. My standup acts are not intended to shame the upper caste, but I find that many of them do not even try to hear what we are going through," he says. "City crowds that constitute maybe 20 per cent of India, do not want to take an effort to know what is happening with the remaining 80 per cent."

Sarkar also doesn't shy away from talking about his circumstances growing up. The son of a truck driver, he worked as a child labourer, and only began going to school when mid-day meals were introduced. "I have lived this life and I want people to know that there are so many like me who might have had it even worse."

His Dalit experience, he says, will continue to influence his brand of humour. "[In my village] we find humor in the most inhumane thing. I remember my father narrating an incident from one of his truck-driving trips. He said it was his turn to sleep while his partner drove. He only woke up when a bomb went off and blew a car right behind them," Sarkar says, "We lived in a Naxal area. My father found the entire incident funny. He said, if their truck had blown up, he would have died in his sleep."