Casting shadows: Dalit assertion in Indian literature

Shalini Ramachandran, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation tracks the emergence of literary narratives by and about Dalit communities in India from the 1950s to the 1990s. Examining the literary texts from a historical materialist perspective, I explore their articulation of self-identity and resistance against the caste system. The materialist methodology enables discussion of the literature's focus on labor and the body, while centrally posing the problematic of emancipation. I begin with a look at a trend in recent postcolonial scholarship that views western, post-Enlightenment, progressive discourses as entirely complicit in the excesses of colonization. I argue that while the devastation caused in India by colonialism is undeniable, the alignment of western political radicalism with the appropriating logic of imperial conquest by some postcolonial theorists, in particular, those from the Subaltern Studies project, may have led to a lack of engagement with anti-caste movements led by Dalits in the colonial period, which were rooted in modern, rights-based, egalitarian conceptions of human citizenship. When Dalit history is acknowledged, binaries of indigenous/western and Same/Other necessarily implode. I propose instead that Dalit transgressions approached both the colonizer and the high Hindu ethos in canny pathways, negotiating cultural spaces that drew from western radical ideologies, while re-crafting alternative religious identities in Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. I also identify what appears to be a wrench between Dalit politics and literary expression. While the political arena seeks a resolute Dalit subjectivity and looks to a hopeful future, the literature often destabilizes the subject through a predominant emphasis on loss. This emphasis could, on the one hand, be seen as a negation of the possibility of progress. On the other hand, however, the literature also continues to present visions of a recuperable future without reverting to simple triumphalism, instead, interrogating the marks of power on “broken” Dalit subjects. Dalit literature has expressed much of the anxiety, desire, and pain of a century of caste struggle, and the creative visions of social justice put forward by writers of the Dalit condition can continue to inspire and shape the consciousness of local and transnational participants, in battles against oppressive and exploitative systems.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Hughes, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Asian literature

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