Academic literature on the topic 'Dalit authors'

The under-representation of Dalits in Nepali-language literature until the late 20th century— both as the subjects of texts and the authors of texts—is very striking, and a category of Nepali-language writing labelled dalit sahitya only began to emerge after 1990. This paper report draws upon research on this issue conducted in 2021-22. First, it introduces a selection of Nepali-language texts produced by non-Dalits in which Dalit characters and Dalit-related issues have been portrayed. Most of these were published before Dalits began to author such texts themselves; a few are of more recent origin. It then offers a preliminary thematic summary of the Dalit-authored literature that has appeared in more recent years, and a summary of the debate that has arisen about the definition of dalit sahitya and the authoritative representation of Dalit issues in Nepali-language literature.

Interviews with Bangla Dalit Authors is a collection of interviews of Bangla Dalit writers conducted by Jaydeep Sarangi. This review is an attempt to read the book as a repository of personal information about the writers; their collective narratives of Dalits in Bengal; and how social changes, historical events, and cultural movements have influenced the Dalit literary movement in Bengal.

Shyamal Kumar Pramanik, who belongs to Poundra Kshatriya community, is a significant Bengali Dalit poet with a mission of establishing equality and fraternity among the people. His poetry collection The Untouchable & Other Poems, translated by Jaydeep Sarangi and Anurima Chanda into English, demonstrates him as a poet of Dalit consciousness. Without being violent, he raises the Dalit consciousness so that Dalits may come together and unite themselves in order to break the shackles of exploitation and oppression. He wonders how the non-Dalit authors can express the experiences of Dalits. He envisions the fourth world coming out of the darkness. He makes the untouchable Shambok his representative in voicing Dalits who have always been marginalized. He loves nature and makes her his companion and friend for sharing his feelings. He is a poet of hope and future and, so, continues to sing the song of a casteless society despite the feelings of pains, insults and sufferings. His Bengali face reflects the Dalit consciousness in the English mirror, i.e. The Untouchable & Other Poems.

Several powerful constructions of Dalit social and political identity are now circulating in very influential ways within the public sphere in North India, as various groups including both the Bahujan Samaj Party as well as Hindutva organisations compete to assert their influence over how these identities are defined, who they include, and what they mean. In this context, the rise of Hindi Dalit autobiographies as a source of Dalit cultural identity becomes especially important in North India, as they contest traditional conceptions of the Dalit community as ‘untouchables’ and attempt to re-inscribe Dalit identity in positive, self-assertive terms. However, Dalit autobiographies retain certain ambivalences, as the authors struggle to reconcile their low-caste identity with their current urban middle-class status, and more recently, as their claims to represent all members of the Dalit community are challenged by Dalits of the younger generation.

Autobiography is widely admired in the world as a literary genre. Its importance as a means of self-creation, self-examination, and self-regeneration has been identified by critics and creative authors. Autobiography is a Western tradition where people enjoy celebrating them self and are eager to prove their achievements. Indians have adopted this tradition of writing an autobiography from the West. Autobiography can be classified into two categories, life stories that inspire and prove one’s achievements. Secondly, the life stories which not only describes the saga of the individual but also the society as a whole depicts sorrows, subjugation, sufferings, and socioeconomic conditions. Dalit autobiographies belong to the second category. They have portrayed the socio-economic, cultural, and political conditions of Dalit Community under the control and influence of Upper Caste Hindu society. Contemporary Indian Society was divided under the wrong notions of ‘Purity and Pollution’. Dalits were treated as untouchables and polluters to the High Caste Hindus because they were born in the low caste. They were intentionally kept ignorant and denied to take education and asked to live out of town in separate colonies by high caste Hindus to safeguard their control over Dalits. Autobiography came handy to them to demonstrate their age-old suffering, exploitation, and maltreatment. Writers like Shankarrao Kharat, Daya Pawar, Bandu Tupe, P. E. Sonkamble, Shrankumar Limbale, Laxman Mane, Laxman Gaikwad, and Kishor Kale came forward. They penned their experiences in the form of autobiographies. Like male autobiographies, female autobiographers like Baby Kamble, Shantabai Kamble, Urmila Pawar, Kumud Parade, Janabai Girhe, Bama, demonstrated their life stories and experiences of trivial exploitation based on caste, class, and gender.

In Bengali Dalit literature, the Namasudra writers and poets play a crucial role in combating the complete social margsinalization of Dalits, their movements, iconography, experiences, and worldview. According to Manohar Mouli Biswas, “It is a counter cultural movement that has been aiming to undo the age-old caste ridden oppressions against the dalits by representing their lives, deprivations, struggles, histories and promoting their culture and liberation through literature” (Biswas XXV). There have recently been many books written by Dalit Namasudra authors, some of which have been published in English. Using these archives and texts, we may now see the Dalit Namasudras from a different perspective, one that previously would not have been possible through the use of traditional historical archives and writings. Among them mentionable are Manohar Mouli Biswas’s Amar Bhubane Ami Benche Thaki translated as Surviving in My World, Manoranjan Byapari’s Itibritte Chandal Jiban translated as Interrogating My Chandal Life, Dr. Manoranjan Sarkar’s Ekjan Daliter Atmakatha, Jatin Bala’s Sikar Chenra Jiban and so on. This article attempts to rebuild the alternate history of the Namasudras by deconstructing the standard material on the subject using historical and literary analysis.

Dalit life-writings have often been identified as reified spaces of protest against the Brahmanic oppression continuing since centuries in the Indian society. Banished to a space of invisibility, both metaphorical as well as physical margins of the Social Imaginary, Dalits continue to push back boundaries by transforming the ‘marginal’ space into a space of ‘subaltern resistance’. My aim in this paper is to interrogate the methods of collective resistance in the life-writings of Dalit women authors and show how the peripheral spatial geography becomes the central site of resistance. Both Baby Kamble’s The Prisons we Broke (2008), and Bama’s Karukku (1992) belong to entirely different historical periods, and therefore, inevitably differ in their plot-narratives and manner of expression. However, they converge in their emphasis on how the Dalit segregated spaces in their village assume an important role in awakening their collective consciousness first – as members of a community, and second – as women.

Dalit literature seeks to present the struggles and experiences of the oppressed. Bengali Dalit literature has become a powerful tool for social and political action. It provides counter-narratives that talk about their experiences and realities. Bangla Dalit literature depicts the lives of refugees with sensitivity and empathy, emphasizing the struggles and resilience of those displaced from their homes and communities due to political, social and economic factors. The term “refugee” refers to a person who has been forced to flee their country of origin. A large part of the population had to leave their homes and migrate from East Bengal to West Bengal as part of the Partition of Bengal, mainly due to the communal tension. However, most of the refugees who migrated to West Bengal during the Bangladesh Liberation Movement in 1971 were mainly Dalits or other marginalized communities who faced discrimination and oppression in their homeland. Jatin Bala, one of the eminent Dalit writers and one of the refugees, himself reflected the pain and suffering of these Bengali Dalit refugees, on the other hand, Allen Ginsberg, the famous American writer Ginsburg, who visited Bangladesh amid the conflict, he also paints a sad picture of the loss of these Bengali refuges in his long poem “September On Jossor Road”. This study aims to carry out a comparative study of the representations of the two authors about these refugees.

Dalit literature has been influential in the rising awareness for protest or creating literature of social consciousness. The broad domain of Dalit writings includes the depravation and trauma of certain category of people for some socio-cultural, traditional biases. Maybe one of the tenets of it could be the so-called social stratification or formation of social class. Thus, like writings in many languages in India, in Odia, lots of writing account for the evidences and experiences associated with Dalit consciousness. It also envisages feminine perspectives giving the account of the autobiographies and plights and traumatic evidences of Dalit authors underlining the issues of caste, class, and gender in the backdrop of social exclusion. Dalit Literature in Odia has a rich history that can be traced back to the fifteenth century. In Odia literary creations such as Bouddhagāna, and Dohā, Charyāgeetikā, the anecdotes of social discrimination and casteism are noticed. There is potentiality in contemporary Odia poetry in reflecting on various themes of Dalit consciousness. As it is evident, it starts with saint poet Bhimbhoi who is said to be the first Dalit poet of Odishā in the mid-19th century. Along with glorification of humanitarian attributes, he has outlined the plights of the depraved community. The motifs of Ekalavya, Sanatan, Kalia, Ghinua, Jara Shabara; musical instruments such as baja; the untouchables; Sriya Chandaluni in Laxmi Purana; fingertip print are common in reflecting Dalit issues variously. In this context, this paper focuses on the critical dimensions of Dalit poetry in Odia by including some of the well-known authors such as Gopinath Bag, P.K. Mishra, Nilamani Parida, Ashutosh Parida, Jayadrath Suna, Basudev Sunani, Pitambar Tarai, Akhil Nayak, and Hrushikesh Mallik. Such poets have applied the skills varieties of versification to focus comprehensively on the sensitivity of the traumatic issues of oppression; racial discrimination; socio-cultural taboos; loss of indigenous culture; evil effects of urbanization and politics; existential crisis; victimization of the poor and innocents; loss of ecological harmony; nostalgia and effects of displacement.

This article will consider two Hindi-language autobiographies by Dalit women, to explain how we can emphasize the collective, relational, and specifically gendered character of Dalit women’s life writing without simplistically categorizing them as testimonio, “witnessing”. Nor should we over-privilege their gendered specificity, thereby effacing the very real narrative authority, purposefulness, and perspectival control of their authors. Instead, we must be especially attentive to the language of a text and understand how the relationality and collectivity of experience is not accidental or necessarily organic to a woman’s view on her world, but is actively, politically, and consciously constructed in the course of a narrative. Predicated on a reasonable concern over the appropriation of a revolutionary new literary voice, attention to narrative form has been slow in coming to the critical and scholarly analysis of Dalit literature, somewhat paradoxically resulting in the rendering of this literature too as “untouchable”. In exploring what is therefore only a nascent formal criticism of the Dalit autobiographical genre, I believe it is important to express a note of caution against replicating the same kinds of essentializing processes of differentiation (the kind we have seen before in the critical reception of life writing in other cultures and languages) between men’s and women’s Dalit life narratives as ego-driven and individualistic linear progressions to political awakening versus relational, community-based, politically and purposefully diffuse “witnessings”. In this exciting moment in which we have the opportunity to engage with a critically important and rapidly expanding rhetorical movement such as Dalit literature, it is, I believe, a diligent recourse to textual analysis that may yet save us from such facile stereotyping.