Egalitarian Roots of Dalit Aesthetics

Abstract

Aesthetic consciousness for Marx is a specific form of man’s general consciousness. It is a theoretical reflection of the living form of a man’s real social existence in its perfected state. Aesthetic awareness quite naturally entails sensuous perfection. Beauty can only be presented to a man via his senses. Thus, the idea of beauty entails a specific structuring of human sensibility. Unlike Black aesthetics and Feminist aesthetics, Dalit aesthetics has used the idea of beauty in a completely revolutionary manner. In Dr. B. R. Ambedkar 1936 speech Mukti Kon Pathe?, he advocates for the Untouchables to pursue social and spiritual liberation, to cultivate self-respect as the basis of individual identity and to uphold equality and dignity as guiding principles for freedom and liberty within this framework, the allegory and symbolism used in the aesthetics of Dalit reconfigure beauty into a critical lens that foregrounds the realities of caste society. A Dalit writer’s perception of beauty thus becomes a systematic deliberation on a pedagogical and revolutionary tool for critiquing and contesting the caste lifeworld and the canonical aesthetic perception and judgment of beauty.