Dalit Humanism: Marginal Spatial Reality as a Site of Dalit Counterpublic in Bama’s Sangati and Tulsiram’s Murdahiya

Abstract

In India, one of the major counter-discourses constituted to critique the culture of violence, silence and impunity, harboured by the Indian public sphere, is offered by Dalit literary writings. Dalit counterpublic highlights the alternate cultural spaces that subvert and disrupt the dominant structures of repression by valuing the Dalit standpoint. The present article claims that the Dalit counterpublic is subaltern as well as locational; subalternity is based on the marginal position prescribed to Dalit people in the Indian social and cultural structure while location refers to the geopolitical territorial segregation. Bama’s Sangati and Tulsiram’s Murdahiya have been analysed using theoretical perspectives of counterpublic proposed by critics such as Nancy Fraser, Kanika Batra and Michel Warner. The findings suggest that Dalit people have transformed Dalit marginal site into a source of resistance.