A Chandalini Speaks is a first-of-its-kind collection of Kalyani Thakur Charal's selected non-fiction texts in translation. Ranging from the journalistic to the anthropological and punctuated by Charal's poetic turn of phrase, these essays offer an intimate glimpse into the issues that have shaped her life and writing--the vanishing traditions of her community, the many Dalit women whose voices have long been ignored or undocumented, the place of a Dalit woman within feminism, the plight of working class women in urban areas, and the ecological and cultural implications of caste in Bengal.