The political and aesthetic significance of contemporary Dalit literature

Abstract

This article attempts to offer a critique of cultural critic D. R. Nagaraj’s theoretical approach to the analysis of contemporary Dalit literature. According to Nagaraj, contemporary Dalit literature is a literature of decultured Dalits which articulates rights and entitlements in liberal polity. Rejecting claims of a separate aesthetics for Dalit literature, he locates Dalit literary contributions in the broad sphere of Indian culture and argues for a new aesthetics for Indian culture. His aim is to recover from the Indian tradition the civilizational contribution of Dalit writers, such as folk and oral cultural forms. This framework undermines the theoretical innovation and aesthetic significance of contemporary Dalit literature. Proposing Dalit literature as a form of contemporary politics in the sphere of modern Indian literary culture, Marathi Dalit critic and writer Baburao Bagul presents Dalit literature as a modern, written, and Ambedkarite tradition that reconfigured modernity, invented new modes of writing, and imagined Dalit as a generic identity, lived experience, and perspective in modern Indian literary history. Dalit literature is human and democratic, Bagul argues, as it draws on the humanist legacy of Buddha, Christ, Phule, Ambedkar, and also the Western Enlightenment. A reading of some Dalit texts, following the discussion of Bagul, illustrates the limitations of Nagaraj’s approach.

My attempt in this introductory essay is to appreciate the theoretical innovation and current significance of contemporary Dalit literature through a brief overview of some seminal contemporary approaches (Nagaraj, 1993/2010; Bagul, 1992) to the study of Dalit writing. According to cultural critic D. R. Nagaraj (1954–1998), Dalit literature is a literature of decultured Dalits and it articulates rights and entitlements in the liberal polity. Nagaraj chooses to locate Dalit literary contribution in the broad sphere of Indian culture, and argues for recovering the civilizational contribution of Dalit writers from the Indian tradition, such as folk and oral resources. Proposing Dalit literature as a form of contemporary politics in the sphere of Indian literary culture, Marathi Dalit critic and writer Baburao Bagul presents Dalit literature as a modern, written, and Ambedkarite tradition that reconfigured modernity, invented new modes of writing, and imagined Dalit as an identity, experience, and perspective in modern Indian literary history. Dalit literature is human and democratic, Bagul argues, as it draws on the humanist legacy of Buddha, Christ, Phule, Ambedkar, and also the Western Enlightenment. This article offers a critique of Nagaraj’s framework and attempts to understand the significance of contemporary Dalit literature with reference to specific examples of Dalit writing.

D. R. Nagaraj’s The Flaming Feet (1993/2010) is widely read as a theoretical study that outlined a framework for analysing Dalit literature and culture. A brief overview of Nagaraj’s framework is worth rehearsing here. Nagaraj describes Kannada Dalit literature as “an expression of Ambedkarite cultural politics” (1993/2010: 187). Nagaraj characterizes the contemporary Dalit movement as an Ambedkarite movement inspired by Western ideas of social justice, mobility, and cultural protest. This movement for self-respect is conceptualized in terms of civil rights, equal opportunities in economic matters, and social intercourse in a modern liberal democracy. Nagaraj argues that this Ambedkarite project is part of the Western project of modernity that set up liberal democracy as the ideal form of society.

Nagaraj further suggests that Dalit politics of identity is a product of colonial modernity. Ambedkar exclusively focused on organizing untouchables into a political force with a distinct identity. The Dalit movement characterized “the entire history of the Dalits as a tale of humiliation and violence, both physical and mental” (1993/2010: 105). This reading of history rejects completely “the traditional Dalit self which is steeped, by and large, in the Hindu ethos” (1993/2010: 222). Nagaraj is referring here to Ambedkar’s view that Dalits (untouchables) are not members of the Hindu religious community. They are the lowest social group in the hierarchical caste order of the Hindu religion. They have no right to enter the Hindu temples. Therefore, Dalits are a separate social group. This Ambedkarite assertion of a distinct identity, and the rejection of the Hindu cultural heritage leads to what Nagaraj calls “self-minoritisation” and “self-closure” of Dalits (1993/2010: 115). Following this process, Nagaraj identifies two perspectives on Dalit culture: the integrationist and the exclusivist. The integrationists highlight “the organic and consensual links of Dalits with caste Hindu society” and the exclusivists focus attention on the autonomous cultural universe of Dalits (1993/2010: 201). The Dalit movement, according to Nagaraj, usually tends to support the exclusivist view.

Nagaraj reproduces a standard description of Ambedkarite politics here. B. R. Ambedkar (1891−1956) was a Western-educated scholar, activist, and political thinker. Born in an untouchable family, he personally experienced untouchability and caste discrimination. He was trained in the liberal intellectual and political tradition of the West, and was highly critical of traditional Indian society and its Hindu religious culture. He was one of the first political thinkers to describe the caste system as a form of graded inequality and argued for its annihilation in order to build a democratic society. He was a pioneer of the Dalit movement and the Dalit critique of Indian society. Therefore, the pan-Indian Dalit movement is often called the Ambedkarite movement and its politics Ambedkarite politics. The concepts of human dignity, equality, and freedom are central to Ambedkarite politics. As a chairman of the drafting committee of the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar was successful in achieving the status of a minority social group for the untouchables (the legal term is “scheduled castes”) in the parliamentary democracy that was set up in India. This standard biography of Ambedkar is revised by re-reading his campaigns and struggles against untouchability and his application of abstract liberal thought in the concrete Indian situation. It is rightly observed that “the ideological–theoretical liberalism that he imbibed from distinguished liberal Western academic institutions […] came into conflict with his experience and understanding of the socio-political realities on the ground in India” (Rao, 1993: 34). Nagaraj locates Ambedkar’s thought in its context of origin but not in its context of practice and revision. Dalit writing is yet another rewriting and reinterpretation of Ambedkar’s ideas. Ambedkar and Dalit writers were highly critical of the slowness of the process of modernization of Indian society, especially in the cultural domain. Put differently, Dalit critique highlights both the promise and the limitations of modernity in India.

Nagaraj suggests that the Dalit literary movement is informed by Western cultural and political ideas. Locating Dalit literature in the broad field of Indian culture, Nagaraj argues that the Ambedkarite trend in Dalit literature repudiates “the culture” of the traditional village society. He identifies two modes of Dalit literature in the Kannada Dalit literary movement: one, the school of social rage and two, the school of spiritual quest. The dominant trend in the Kannada Dalit literary movement is the mode of social rage that focuses on “the experiences of anger, agony and revolutionary hope” (1993/2010: 220). This is a typical Ambedkarite mode. The second school of spiritual quest attempts to understand deprivation and Dalit identity in terms of “metaphysical dismay over the nature of human relationship. The ethos of the portrayal of life is not informed by anger and agony, but by a celebration of the joys of life and its possibilities, which also include the will to change” (1993/2010: 221). The school of social rage, Nagaraj observes, employs realism as a mode of writing. Realism represents the rationalist and empirical world view of the modern middle class in the Indian context (1993/2010: 229). Therefore, in Nagaraj’s view, the realist mode is not the most appropriate mode through which to portray “the collective psyche and world view of the lower castes” (1993/2010: 229). The school of social rage, with its realist mode, totally rejects “the traditional Dalit self which is steeped by and large in the Hindu ethos”, whereas the school of spiritual quest attempts to explore “the symbolic and religious life of lower castes from a positive perspective” (1993/2010: 222). Nagaraj cites Kusumabale (1996), a novel written by Devanoor Mahadeva, a Dalit and a Gandhian, as an example of the school of spiritual quest.

The school of spiritual quest represents the Gandhian mode of the mutual transformation of the Hindu self and the Dalit self. Nagaraj valorizes the “village centred vision of Gandhiji” as the site of authentic Indian identity (1993/2010: 58). While recognizing the advances made by the Dalits in the spheres that had been exclusively upper caste in “societal administration and political management” (1993/2010: 161), he suggests that upward mobility of a certain section within the Dalits also created “willful amnesia regarding one’s own past” (1993/2010: 33). In Nagaraj’s view, village India (he calls it “the traditional village society”, “Indian rural society”, “the caste Hindu society”, and so on) and its “organic community” is a site for the resolution of the conflicts generated by the institutions and the culture of modernity (1993/2010: 125−45). It is evident that the normative “human” (“a common humanity”, “shared humanity”) figure of Nagaraj’s new project is the composite Hindu self, which is a collective self-inclusive of the upper-caste person, the Dalit, and other lower-caste identities (1993/2010: 35). According to Nagaraj, this is a Gandhian mode of theorization or a school of multiple interactions.

Nagaraj further suggests a shift from an identity politics towards a civilizational politics, and from a politics of exclusivity towards a politics of affirmation. He proposes to read Dalit literature in the sphere of Indian culture. In order to bring out the liberatory function of Dalit literature, there is a need to develop “a new aesthetics” for “Indian culture as a whole” (1993/2010: 195). He identifies “the notion of hierarchized binaries” in Indian culture that shaped Indian literary theory. These binary oppositions between the classical and the folk, the religious and the secular, and the upper castes and the lower castes should be dissolved to arrive at the totality of culture, says Nagaraj (1993/2010: 90–91). Gandhian formulation of Indian civilization seems to offer a possibility to understand culture as a whole.

Nagaraj believes that Dalits have made a major contribution to civilizational politics rather than contemporary politics. They have inherited arts, crafts, oral, and performative traditions and enriched Indian civilization. Nagaraj’s nationalist framework is attractive in so far as he is situating Dalit literature in the debates on Indian civilization. ¹ Dalit literature of the spiritual quest school is recognized as being refined and is assigned the status of civilizational culture. In other words, Dalit literature is a heritage of humanity in the ancient Indian past. The valorization of Dalit literary culture as cultural heritage has several implications. The contemporary challenges of Dalit literature in the modern public sphere (namely, to critique Indian literary history as upper caste and Hindu, to write in contemporary, cutting-edge forms of literature, to claim a distinct and separate identity, and so on) are relegated to the distant past. The notion of culture as heritage and the shared life and practices of Indians do not allow the cultural conflict between the untouchables and the upper-caste Hindus to be raised and debated. In fact, the notion of Indian civilization was posited by Gandhi and other nationalists for the purpose of claiming the existence of a cultural community in the distant past undivided by religion, caste, linguistic, and other cultural divisions among Indians. This view of civilization emphasizes continuity of cultural traditions and assimilation of diverse ideas, practices, and changes into the Indian great tradition. Nagaraj’s classification of Dalit literary culture as part of Indian culture obscures the cultural conflict and the literary assertion engendered by Dalit writers. In the name of Indian culture, Nagaraj is arguing for inclusion of Dalit culture as a continuity with Hindu culture. In other words, the significance of Dalit literary intervention in contemporary India is totally disregarded or considered limited. I will have occasion to highlight the contribution of Dalit writers in the last section of this essay.

In the above analysis, “Hindu” is deployed as a broad cultural term, which refers to the syncretic culture or civilization of India. It is assumed that Dalits have inherited Hinduism’s rich and diverse cultural tradition. For that reason, a recovery of these cultural resources by itself would bestow dignity to Dalit communities. In contrast, Dalit literature is modern and contemporary in its outlook and it posits Indian culture as a domain of conflict. It constructs an exclusive identity and invents its own legacy of Christianity and Buddhism. Nagaraj fails to appreciate and analyse the historical and cultural significance of Dalit self-literary assertion. In fact, he undermines the significance of the Dalit critique of the caste system and the construction of Dalit identity by suggesting that Dalit identity is a simple caste identity to claim citizenship and entitlements. In such a caricature, the agendas of the Dalit literary and cultural movements and the perspectives of Dalits are rejected as Western or modern and, therefore, limited. Dalit critiques of Hinduism and Indian society are not paid any attention. Ambedkar (1936/1979), Phule (1873/1991), and Marathi Dalit writers (Dangle, 1992) have criticized Hindu culture for its hierarchy, violence, and insistence on divine retribution, as well as suggesting approaches to recover the anti-caste cultural and intellectual past of the Dalits. Nagaraj’s critique of modern Dalit literature is biased and simplistic as it reduces contemporary Dalit literature to merely a derivative discourse of Western forms of modernity. His framework is not useful for appreciating and analysing the significance of modern Dalit literature and its engagement with modernity — both colonial and Indian national modernity. I wish to bring Dalit critic Baburao Bagul’s approach to Dalit literature in conversation with Nagaraj’s to further substantiate my criticism.

Indian literary culture as Hindu

Marathi Dalit critic and writer Baburao Bagul (1930–2008) argues that the problem of representation of the Dalit figure (“the Ambedkarite hero”) has deep roots in the established culture of India: the Hindu values of fatalism, rebirth, and divine retribution (Bagul, 1992: 285). He reviews the religious (Sanskrit and “saint” literature) as well as the secular writing of Hindu authors. Bagul argues that the religious literature depicted the life of the two ruling varnas: the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. Here Bagul is referring to the social stratification of ancient Indian society. According to classical Hindu texts, the social classes were divided into four varnas: the Brahmins (priests), the Kshatriayas (rulers), the Vaishyas (merchants), and the Shudras (labourers). In this divine order, the untouchables, who were known as Ati-shudras, were not included. With the advent of British rule, the same elite varnas discussed social themes such as the social evils of Hinduism and the lives and problems of Hindu women. In this period, the liberal ideas of both the colonial state and attendant social reform movements provided a congenial environment for the portrayal of the subordinated varnas in literature. Modern Indian literature was appearing in the public sphere following the model of English literature that portrayed the lives of the poor and the weakest. The modern poets and writers depicted the life of Indian women (mostly upper caste) subjugated by the Indian cultural tradition. But these writers, who were committed to social reform and enlightenment, denied the Shudras and the Ati-shudras a place in literature. The Indian national movement also failed to transform dominant Hindu cultural values as it was not allowed “to develop into a struggle for social, political, and economic and cultural reform” (Bagul, 1992: 284). On the contrary, the national movement was changed into “a form of historical, mythological movement and ancestor worship” (Bagul, 1992: 282). In Bagul’s view, Dalit cultural traditions are suppressed and made invisible in the nationalist notion of India as an ancient civilization with its cultural unity located in Hindu mythology, classical Sanskrit literature, sages, and saints. Bagul’s critique of nationalism is based on Ambedkar’s analysis of the Indian national movement. Ambedkar and several other commentators observed that the Indian National Congress accorded primacy to the political programme of achieving Swaraj, or self-rule. The social reform agenda was viewed as causing internal divisions among Indians (Ambedkar, 1945/1991). Bagul reiterates this point. The nationalist elite relegated the Dalit and other social movements to a secondary status by dividing struggles into political and social movements. They suppressed and sidelined the social movements and philosophies of Phule and Ambedkar from the standpoint of an entrenched Indian culture. Therefore, Bagul observes that modern Indian literature was a product of the nationalist ideology and, as such, the subordinated castes did not figure in this literature.

Bagul’s (1992: 289) assessment of modern Indian literary culture as Hindu has several implications. It is not only Hindu in the sense that it is produced by Hindu writers, but also the subjects of this literature are the elite Hindu varnas. The subordinated castes are entirely invisible in this literary culture. Drawing on Ambedkar’s ideas, Bagul suggests that “Dalit Literature is but Human Literature”. This formulation is significant as this elaborates the meaning of Dalit as “human” and counterposes this category of “human” to Hindu (Bagul, 1992: 289). This meaning of Dalit is in sharp contrast to the dominant view of the untouchable, as Bagul puts it, as “someone who is mean, despicable, contemptible and sinful due to his deeds in his past life”; someone who is seen as “poor, humiliated and without history” (1992: 289). In contrast, the Dalit is a self-conscious, autonomous, and assertive individual (the Ambedkarite hero, if you like) who rejects his or her fatalist existence with its demeaning names, occupations, and practices and demands self-respect, equality, and freedom. The new identity — Dalit — offers a positive self-definition and rejects stigmatized, dehumanized, and humiliating identities. To put it differently, Dalit is the new human and therefore, Dalit literature is revolutionary and transformative. It is important to note that the new human is not synonymous with the citizen. The new human is the common man in Buddhism following the ideals of anti-spiritualism, atheism, and rationalism. The contribution of modern Dalit literature is to retrieve the human figure by reconfiguring modernity. In this sense, Dalit literature is anti-establishment and it is capable of shaping a new India.

Bagul suggests that colonial modernity and its normative values gave rise to an awakening of the subaltern castes, creating the right conditions for a critical assessment of Hinduism and the role of caste in Indian society. In this historical context, Dalit literature emerged as a response to the denial of place to the Dalits in Indian literature. In Bagul’s view, Dalit literature is an alternative form of writing within the larger domain of Indian literary history. It is a modern, written, and Ambedkarite tradition and it poses a challenge to modern Indian literary history and culture. In contrast to Nagaraj’s Indian nationalist legacy, Bagul traces the literary traditions of the untouchables back to Buddha and Christ, those crucial symbols of humanism, and also to the ideals of Western Enlightenment. It is precisely because of the conditions created by the colonial intervention, the Western literary tradition, Ambedkar’s liberal thought, and the Dalit struggles, that Dalit writers developed a distinct perspective and discovered the untouchable heroes, themes, and thoughts from the philosophies of Phule and Ambedkar, Bagul suggests (1992: 285).

The Dalit critique

Drawing on Bagul’s seminal critique of Dalit writing, I argue that Dalit writers did not reject modernity but reconfigured it. Nagaraj’s strategy of a binary opposition between Indian Tradition and modernity allows him to advance criticisms of contemporary Dalit literature and its representations. A reading of contemporary Dalit literature reveals that Dalit writers are invested in modernity as a promise and possibility while remaining conscious of its contradictions. It is important to note that these authors critically engage with the project of modernity, its modes of writing and identifications. I will attempt a close analysis of Dalit literature in order to understand its theoretical and political significance. My discussion is structured around those three issues — modernity, realism, and Dalit identity — that Nagaraj identified as key flashpoints in Dalit literary debate. I take my examples from two dossiers of south Indian Dalit literature: No Alphabet in Sight and Steel Nibs Are Sprouting (Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011, 2013). ² These dossiers of Dalit writing are collected and edited selections from four south Indian languages: Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu, contain a wide variety of documents such as poetry, fiction, cultural critique, political speech, intellectual biographies, and critical essays from the ground. These volumes are called “dossiers” so as to draw attention to this diversity of genres and modes of Dalit writing. Extracts from the writings of 86 Dalit writers, including well-known authors such as Bama, Cho. Dharman, Raj Gauthaman, K. A. Gunasekaran, Imayam, N. D. Rajkumar, Sivakami, Sukirtharani, C. Ayyappan, S. Joseph, Sanal Mohan, M. R. Renukumar, Siddalingaiah, Devanoora Mahadeva, Aravind Malagatti, G. Kalayana Rao, Kalekuri Prasad, Gogu Shyamala, and Yendluri Sudhakar, are part of the dossiers. The volumes mark the moment of arrival of Dalit writers, poets, and intellectuals in the public domain who represent a post-Ambedkarite generation. This literary upsurge in the 1990s coincided with the emergence of the Dalit movement and the resurfacing of caste at the national level. ³ In the two dossiers, we find that literature and cultural critique are two major modes of Dalit writing. It has been argued that Dalit writers make untouchable life not just noticeable “but also meaningful, accountable to dalits, and ethically compelling for everyone” (Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 55). As the prominent Dalit writer Imayam observes: “Good literature takes a person to silence. Political writing has a goal, target, literature does not. Literature’s task is not to provide information; it should be to create life”. He further asks: “What have dalit writers given to dalit life?” (qtd. in Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 59). In other words, creative representation should enable life. In fact, some of the contemporary Dalit writers have contributed to reimagining and recreating Dalit life in all its richness and complexity.

Reconfiguring modernity

Dalit writers have a strategic relationship with modernity both as a promise and a predicament. They do not totally reject or accept modernity as it is but negotiate with it in a given situation. A close reading of some Dalit texts reveals how modernity is both a site of transformation and reification of caste identities. To illustrate my point, I offer a reading of S. Joseph’s poem “Identity Card” (2011) and Gogu Shyamala’s short story “Raw Wound” from the dossiers of south Indian Dalit writing.

Joseph is a Malayalam Dalit poet who has published four anthologies of poetry. He is critical of modern Malayalam poetry for its failure to give expression to Dalit experiences. As he puts it: “Traditional poetry achieved its form and metre by forgetting certain experiences and people […] New poetry is discovering those forgotten figures” (qtd. in Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2013: 453). Joseph’s poem “Identity Card” represents this new poetry in Malayalam. The poem unfurls the story of two young lovers and evokes how their intimacy and friendship is broken when the boy’s untouchable caste identity is revealed:

In my student days

a girl came laughing.

Our hands met mixing

Her rice and fish curry.

On a bench we became

A Hindu-Christian family.

I whiled away my time

reading Neruda’s poetry;

and meanwhile I misplaced

my Identity Card.

She said,

Returning my card:

“the account of your stipend

is entered there in red.”

These days I never look at

a boy and a girl lost in themselves.

They will depart after a while.

I won’t be surprised even if they unite.

Their Identity Cards

No markings in red.

(Joseph, 2011: 454−55)

The protagonist assumes that he can be a citizen as well as aspiring to poetry and love. The college-going boy and girl meet and become friends; they share a bench, food, and intimacy. Differences of religion do not matter in this relationship. The misplaced identity card breaks this relationship. The identity card is an official document to verify the caste identity of the student so as to sanction the stipend to the scheduled caste students. ⁴ The boy’s caste is unknown until the misplaced identity card is found by the girl. This moment makes the boy’s caste status public. However, the girl’s caste, which is upper caste, is invisible in these modern locations. Thus undeceived, the girl leaves, the boy learns about his stigmatized identity, while this revelation of identity breaks the relationship. It is the college space that brings the boy and girl together and it is the state-issued identity card that plays the role of fixing the caste identity of the boy. Interestingly, the college also turns out to be a site of self-identification for the boy as a Dalit and thus a site of production of Dalit poetry. The poem presents both the promise of modernity and the contradictions of modernity. Put another way, Dalit literature takes up the task of unmasking the caste identities of the secular upper castes while asserting Dalit identity in the public sphere. This is the project of a reconfiguration of modernity. ⁵

Gogu Shyamala, an activist and Dalit feminist writer, began her research and writing career in the late 1990s. Her short stories in Telugu focus on the strategies of resistance Dalits devise to cope with the problems of caste discrimination and sexual exploitation. Shyamala’s story “Raw Wound” offers a Dalit perspective on the problems of inhabiting both the traditional and modern worlds (Shyamala, 2013). The Dalit family of Balappa is living a life of their own and they desire to get their daughter educated. But the village landlord decides to make the girl child a jogini. The traditional custom of jogini involves a marriage of a young Dalit girl to God. She would be sexually used and exploited by the village patel (head) and priests. This ritual practice of jogini is justified as a custom to ward off the evil spirits for the good of the village. The struggle of the Dalit family against the religious ritual of dedication of the lower-caste girls to the Hindu Gods is the theme of the story. I read this story as a narrative of Dalit struggle that rejects the traditional village life for its brutal caste oppression and finds a place to live a life of dignity in the town.

Balappa is a farmer who lives with his mother Sangamma, wife Anathamma, two sons, and a young daughter named Syamamma. The story is set in Balappa’s village, which is dominated by the upper-caste Reddy landlords. Balappa works on his land and cultivates the jowar crop, while his wife is a daily labourer, and his daughter Syamamma attends school. His two sons are bonded labourers attached to the farm of a landlord. Balappa learns of the sarpanch and other landlords’ decision to declare Syamamma as a jogini of the village. Shocked and upset by this decision, Balappa and his family choose under cover of secrecy to send Syamamma to the social welfare hostel in Tandur, a nearby town. There, the warden assures the family that in case of any trouble she would help file a police case against the landlords as the practice of jogini is banned by the government. The sarpanch Anatha Reddy gets very angry when he learns that Syamamma is admitted to a hostel and his orders are disobeyed. He summons Balappa and beats him up. Balappa falls unconscious on the road, awakening later to find his wife and mother weeping by his side. After some time, village elders, the sarpanch, and the sub-inspector come to the haystack where Balappa is laid up with his injuries. They order Balappa’s family to leave the village, getting them to sign papers transferring property as the family refused to accept the dedication of Syamamma to be a jogini. Balappa gives up his land and house and leaves the village to live a life as a labourer in the town. The family hopes that Syamamma will become an important officer in the government one day.

The story is about a Dalit father who is determined to save his daughter from a life of bondage and sexual subjugation to be imposed by the upper-caste Hindus in the name of customary practice. Both the village and the town are governed by the bureaucracy of the Indian government. But the representatives of modernity: the sarpanch, the police inspector, and the revenue accountant, act together to enforce the banned custom. Instead of enforcing the legal ban on discriminatory and dehumanizing customs, the sarpanch and the police inspector try to forcibly implement the custom of jogini. The sarpanch announces: “Our word is law”, and no one can change one’s destiny (Shyamala, 2013: 721). Balappa refuses to accept this Hindu feudal theory of fatalism and sends his daughter Syamamma to school. The social welfare hostel and the school, both modern institutions in the town, offer a space for Syamamma so that she could break free from a life of caste slavery.

Does the desire for modernity (education, urban life) lure Dalits away from beautiful nature, agricultural fields, and the community life of the village? Why can the Dalits not enjoy the joys and pleasures of village life? The first scene in the story, wherein Balappa is at work ploughing the field, offers us a detailed description of how he prepares his land for cultivation. He is presented as a farmer working hard in his field. Syamamma carries food to her father and happily plays in the field.

The young girl is alert and enjoys nature: the sky and the moon, the frogs, snakes, the Mampuru lotus lake, the fresh aroma of flowers, the green scent of jowar leaves, and the sweet scent of soft moist mud: her journeys from the hostel take her through fields full of jowar plants and melon creepers. These detailed descriptions of the beauty of village life allows us to conclude that Dalit characters in the story are conscious of their intimate relationship with nature and are aware of the pleasures of village life. Balappa wants to live in his village and also educate his daughter in the town. But the village is a space divided by caste hierarchy and controlled by the upper castes such as the village’s Reddys, the Brahmins, and the Komatis. Dalits have no free access to cultural and economic resources and have no right to live as independent individuals. Therefore, this story makes a strong statement that the Dalit desire for a life of dignity and equality is the primary motive for accepting modern culture and its institutions. The view that Dalits emulate Western modern culture and are suffering from cultural amnesia actually trivializes the Dalit struggles for self-respect. A reading of this story as a narrative of atrocity and, therefore, primarily a representation of the agony of a Dalit family is to misread its critique of traditional culture.

Revising social realism

It is often observed that realism is the most important mode for writers in radical literary movements. However, according to Nagaraj, “[r]ealism can only, in our context, reflect and accommodate the rationalist and empirical worldviews of the modern middle class” (1993/2010: 229). Nagaraj holds that realism does not create space for folk and other modes of narration; he therefore positions it as an inappropriate literary mode for Dalit authors, stating that “the lower caste cosmologies do not make a modern novel possible” (Nagaraj, 1993/2010: 230). Recent studies have established that Dalit writers have not accepted realism in its Western form but have instead critically engaged with this mode of writing (Brueck, 2014; Gajarawala, 2013). Toral Gajarawala argues that Dalit literature forms part of the lineage of social realism but that Dalit writers revise realism’s history of representational failures (Gajarawala, 2013). She embarks on a new reading of Premchand, one of the foremost Hindi writers of the early twentieth century, as a case study through which to examine the limits of the realist mode of representation. Premchand, the first President of the Progressive Writers’ Association, depicted the life of the peasants, workers, women, and the lower castes in his fiction and other writing. Dalit writers criticized Premchand’s influential and widely-read fiction in the 1990s, and it is in this context that Gajarawala attempts to reassess Premchand’s representation of Dalit and other marginalized people. Indian writers such as Premchand, she observes, democratized the literary space and portrayed the oppressed and poor, such as peasants, workers, and women. It is the intersection of the social realist mode and the social reform movements that enabled the representation in fiction of lower castes such as the Chamars. Subaltern caste characters are presented as social types along with the zamindars or landowners, money lenders, and other character types. Such representations in the realist novel, Gajarawala argues, consolidate upper-caste identity by depicting lower-caste characters as victims who deserve readers’ sympathy. In Premchand, lower-caste characters are contained as socio-economic aggregates and their exploitation is economic and sexual. The caste identity of this literary Dalit is erased. This erasure of caste as a system worthy of analysis, Gajarawala suggests, is one of the limitations of social realist fiction in Hindi. Dalit writers revised social realism and moved away from “the abstract categories of Labour, Nation, and the Universal, and towards a language of specification, distinction, non-transferability, and exceptionalism” (2013: 191). As Gajarawala (2013: 189) points out, Dalit writers accordingly cultivate a realism that revises the portrayal of characters either as literary types or binary opposites and represents Dalits as vocal and assertive characters located in a specific social context.

Nagaraj’s criticism that the social realist mode allows no space for lower-caste cosmologies and folk tradition is valid. But his observation that Dalit writers write from within the Western mode of realism is open to debate. Gajarawala (2013) analysed Hindi Dalit fiction to demonstrate how Dalit writers revised social realism and invented new modes of articulation. In the dossiers of South Indian Dalit writing (Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011 and 2013), several examples emerge of Dalit texts that critically engage with the realist mode of narration. One such example is Sivakami’s Author’s Notes (2011), a sequel to her own novel The Grip of Change (2006). It is a critical commentary on the realist representation in the novel. Sivakami began her career as a civil servant and took up writing with her first Tamil novel Pazhayani Kazhidalum in 1988, which is translated into English as The Grip of Change. She is an acclaimed Tamil novelist, and her fiction puts forward a critique of mainstream feminism from a Dalit woman’s perspective. In The Grip of Change, Sivakami portrays the life of Kathamuthu, a loved and respected Dalit leader. The novel is a fictional account of the life of the author’s father, Kathamuthu, and the story is told from the point of view of Gowri, a young girl in Kathamuthu’s family. The narrative focuses on the shifts and changes taking place in Kathamuthu’s life. He is a strong leader of the Parayar community and he defends the poor untouchables in the village. He takes on an upper-caste woman as his second wife. In the course of the novel, widowed Dalit woman, Thangam, comes to Kathamuthu for help after being repeatedly raped and exploited by the upper-caste landlord. Kathamuthu supports Thangam in her struggle against the landlord and her in-laws, but appropriates her body and money, forcing her to join his polygamous family. Kathamuthu is portrayed as a womanizer, a patriarchal father, and autocratic husband. He is also a manipulative politician who settles disputes outside court in return for compensation. Through the character of Kathamuthu, the novel portrays the Dalit community as corrupt, immoral, and manipulative. Some critics and Dalit activists criticized Sivakami for presenting a biased view of Dalit leaders and, by extension, the Dalit community as a whole.

Sivakami took the criticism seriously and chose to revisit the village and the novel. Her critical reflections on the mode of narration and politics of representation, entitled Author’s Notes, are published as an appendix to the novel. In this narrative, she confesses that she omitted certain facts about her father’s life. He was a hard worker, advocated manual labour, encouraged women’s education and employment, and helped the poor and needy. He was daring and committed in opposing the upper castes in the area. The author Sivakami self-critically describes her portrayal of Kathamuthu as “an effigy” (Sivakami, 2011: 302). The failure is not a simple distortion of certain facts in Kathamuthu’s life, and nor is it a reflection of Sivakami’s dishonesty; instead, it is a byproduct of the realist mode of narration that attends to empirical details and rational observations without commentary and interpretation. The perception of Kathamuthu as he is known and seen, Sivakami realizes, is nothing but an expression of her “conscious, educated, logical mind” (Sivakami, 2011: 304). In other words, as Sivakami puts it: “Nothing in the novel was untrue. But the novel itself was false” (2011: 303). The writing of Dalit life into fiction poses a complex set of challenges; commentators frequently remark that it is not enough that one is born in a Dalit family to be a Dalit writer. Both the entrenched foundations of realism and an educated subjectivity can be obstacles in describing Dalit life (Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 58). In The Grip of Change, Sivakami unintentionally reproduces upper-caste stereotypes of the corrupt, authoritarian, and unethical Dalit character.

Tamil Dalit writer Azagiya Periyavan extends this critique of realist portrayal of Dalit life in his short story “Stench”. In this story, Pamandi, a young Dalit boy who lives in a hostel, does not like his house and surroundings (Periyavan, 2011). He develops a strong sense of repulsion against the stench in his colony, and nor does he like the touch of his father, rough from working in the tannery. One day the boy has to go to the tannery to collect some money from his father, and the alienated protagonist is shocked by the man’s appearance:

He could not bear to see what was before him; his father, a stinking man, in a whole environment of stench […] He realized in that second that it was he himself who had become a stinking thing. (Periyavan, 2011: 237)

This is the moment when the boy begins to perceive himself as an abject, foul-smelling thing and his entire conception of “stench” changes. The mainstream meaning of “stench” is not simply foul smell. It is a metaphorical “stench” that is attributed to some social groups to classify them as “impure” and untouchable. The boy’s rejection of the given meaning of “stench” via touching his father is the story’s moment of epiphany. This brilliant story of self-reflection is at once a critique of realist descriptions of the Dalit colony and the tannery, and of the educated boy’s perspective. The meaning of the Dalit self is not visible unless one is re-educated. It is as though “one must wade through the stench, bend to touch to be reborn, bend to touch the depths of revulsion, in order to be reborn with a father and a heritage” (Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 57).

Dalit as identification

Nagaraj suggests that Dalit is an identity belonging to a political community comprising untouchable castes. Following strategies of self-minoritization and self-enclosure, Ambedkar consolidated Dalit identity (Nagaraj, 1993/2010: 115). This identity is constructed drawing on selective social experiences (self-pity and anger) for bringing together the numerically large untouchable castes. It is an emulation of the Brahmin identity forged in the colonial period by the strategies of colonial enumeration and caste-based mobilization of communities (1993/2010: 207). Nagaraj summarizes the situation: “The intricate structure of lower castes, with their local specificity and divergent cultural memories, came to be simplified for the purpose of building larger alliance [sic] across cultural stratification, enabling caste sabhas to build larger coalitions” (1993/2010: 95). The rise of caste groups as interest groups is one example of this kind of alliance, Nagaraj opines.

In Nagaraj’s theorization, Dalit is a simplified caste identity used for bargaining welfare entitlements and other concessions from the liberal democratic state. From a Dalit standpoint, my other key critic Bagul (1992) reimagines Dalit as a human figure and elaborates on the meaning of the term. He explores the legacy of Western Enlightenment, as well as invoking the residues of Buddha’s and Christ’s humanism to define the category of Dalit. He criticizes and rejects the Hindu identity that denies humanity and dignity to the untouchables. That is why Dalit is a category of political identification rather than a mere scheduled caste identity. Gopal Guru (1998: 17) observes that Dalit is a pedagogic category grounded in the material and social experiences of the untouchable community. It is constructed in the struggles of the untouchables for human dignity and equality. Clarifying further the political and cultural significance of the category of Dalit, Guru argues:

The category does not exist a priori, either for computing or for electoral arithmetic, but has to be discursively constituted across the social and ideological spaces through constant and sincere negotiation with other vibrant and sensitive categories and their supportive ideological frameworks. (1998: 17)

Moreover, it offers a perspective to view power structures in the domain of culture. He rejects Ashis Nandy’s view that Dalit is a category constructed by the middle class and that it is defined in prescriptive terms.

Dalit is portrayed by Dalit writers as a new human being who is conscious of his/her caste and dehumanized status. Rejecting the ascribed identities, Dalit characters assert their self-worth and dignity. Marathi Dalit literature in the 1960s first presented an assertive, self-conscious, and autonomous Dalit character. The early Ambedkarite hero repudiated the Hindu religious and cultural life that subjugated and stigmatized untouchables as collective slaves. Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke (2008) and other Marathi Dalit autobiographies thematize the struggles of the untouchables and the rise of the Ambedkarite/Dalit. Recent autobiographies like Bama’s Karukku (2000) and Siddalingaiah’s Ooru Keri (2006) document the life of the educated and middle-class untouchable figures who discover their Dalit selves and relate and assert their experiences of untouchability and caste discrimination. Dalit here is a category of community identification to the alienated and urbanized untouchables. In Kannada Dalit writing, Satyanarayana and Tharu point out, “Dalit is an experience, a cultural and philosophical way of life, a lived knowledge of injustice rather than contemporary politics” (2013: 27). Devanoora Mahadeva’s early stories and his short novel Odalala are examples of this trend.

According to Tamil Dalit writer Cho. Dharman, untouchables are depicted as “wooden dolls[s] without life” (qtd. in Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 102). He further observes that “the depiction has been one-dimensional — dalits appear wearing clothes, stinking, easily falling among people given to violence; they are illiterate, coolies without property, submissive, people who struggle only for food and wage” (qtd. in Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 102). This is the view shared by Marxist writers and even some Dalit writers. Dharman wants to portray “the multidimensional dalit, his soul/being/essence” (Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 102). Dalit here is an interpretation and a perspective.

Conclusion

The above analysis of two critics — Nagaraj and Bagul — and my reading of some Dalit texts bring several questions to the fore. Nagaraj proposes a singular notion of culture as a complex of classical, folk, and popular cultures. Drawing on Gandhi’s concept of Indian civilization as syncretic and assimilative, Nagaraj displaces Dalit writing from its contemporary context and locates it as a trend that affirms the civilizational continuity in the Indian tradition. In this framing, Ambedkarite Dalit literature is presented as a literature of self-pity and anger. This view is a crude caricature of contemporary Dalit literature and effectively underplays the conflicts and power relations that play out in the domain of culture. Bagul’s reading of Indian literary history and culture reveals how Dalit life and experiences are made invisible in the Indian tradition. External interventions in the form of colonial rule and Ambedkar’s liberal thought create a new context for the emergence of Dalit literature. Bagul situates this rise of an alternative and oppositional cultural trend in the humanist and democratic socialist tradition of Western Enlightenment thought, and the anti-caste intellectual tradition of Buddha, Phule, and Ambedkar.

A reading of some Dalit texts brings out several dimensions into the open beyond the stereotypical view of Dalit literature. A new Dalit perspective enables Dalit writers to accept the formal promise of modernity and then proceed further to negotiate for a life of dignity in the institutional and cultural domain of modernity. In a similar way, Dalit writers have not totally rejected the realist mode of narration but have improvised and innovated it in order to represent Dalit life in a complex manner. In this improvisation of literary aesthetics and modes of writing, Dalit writers have drawn on their rich heritage of oral, folk, and performance traditions so as to effectively and creatively represent Dalit life. G. Kalyana Rao’s Untouchable Spring (2010) and Cho. Dharman’s Koogai: The Owl (2015) are two recent examples in this trend.

Nagaraj sets up a false opposition between civilizational politics and contemporary politics of Dalit literature. It is only through an appreciation of the significance of contemporary Dalit literature that one can go back and make a serious attempt to recover the Dalits’ cultural contribution. The idea of Dalit as a distinctively modern perspective has been recently reshaped and it enables us to think of the cultural memories of the past as well as the contemporary experiences of the Dalits and the lower castes. Any approach that assumes that there is an easy access to the pre-modern culture without being mediated by modernity would end up producing a nativist cultural and literary history. In this history, the political and aesthetic significance of contemporary Dalit literature is rendered negligible.