PRE-READING
Who do you call a poor person? Is there social and economic quality among the people of your locality or village? Have you noticed how poor people eke out their livelihood? In villages, such people wander in the fields after harvest and collect the leftover stacks of paddy called the parige in the Telangana region. you find rag pickers in urban areas. some resort even to begging.The poor and the Dalits were treated inhumanly by the landlords and upper caste people in Telangana during Nizam rule. Here is a touching story of a Dalit who was put behind bars for no faults of his.
ABOUT THE STORY
'Parige' is about the plight of a Dalit who leads a miserable life in jail for an offense he never committed. As the sole bread-winner of the family,mallaiah, the main character sets out in search of food for his aged and bed-ridden father and twelve years old sister, and gathers parige, some leftover stack of paddy from a harvested field. But eventually, on his way back home, he was stopped by a rich farmer and branded as a thief who stole paddy from his thrashing floor. This is told in flashback. Later, while serving jail term mallaiah learns that his father was dead months ago and the whereabouts of his sister were not known. Mallaiah's mental agony and the injustice meted out by the police Patel are portrayed poignantly.'parige' gives us a vivid description of the sufferings of the community i.e., people belonging to the lowest rung of the social hierarchy. Its theme is so tragic that we feel deeply touched.
