Speakable Selves and Unspeakable Identities

Abstract

Unlike the unitary subject of Western enlightenment, the Dalit non-subject has no single operational social self. Limbale’s subjecthood or Autos in The Outcaste is not a sedimented ontological position but rather a process of negotiation between material and social conditions that affect one’s embodied and situated self. Unlike the other Mahar boys, Parshya, Harya or Mallya; the social cartographies of Limbale’s identity positions are splintered. In place of a stable Mahar being, Limbale has multiple and differentiated becomings. These uneven and dissymmetrical genealogical relations are mimicked by the asymmetricality of the narrative which is structurally splintered; The Outcaste is simultaneously an autobiography, a counter-hegemonic historiography and an ethnobiography.