Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature [Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only] 9780231537568

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration
Introduction
I. Mapping The Hindi Dalit Literary Sphere
1. The Hindi Dalit Counterpublic
2. The Problem of Premchand
3. Hindi Dalit Literary Criticism
II. Reading Hindi Dalit Literature
4. Good Dalits and Bad Brahmins
5. Dialect and Dialogue in the Margins
6. Alienation and Loss in the Dalit Experience of Modernity
7. Re-scripting Rape
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Writin g re sistan ce

Sou th A Si A AcroSS the DiSc iplineS

South ASiA AcroSS the DiSciplineS

ddd EditEd by Muzaffar alaM, robErt GoldMan, and Gauri Viswanathan

dipEsh Chakrabarty, shEldon polloCk,

and sanjay subrahManyaM, foundinG Editors Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by

the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia university press

For a list of books in the series, see page 219.

Writing resistance

y

the rhetorical imagination of hindi dalit literature

Laura R. Brueck

columbia university press

new york

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brueck, Laura.

Writing resistance : the rhetorical imagination of Hindi Dalit literature / Laura R. Brueck. pages cm — (South Asia across the disciplines) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16604-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16605-8 (electronic)

1. Hindi literature—Dalit authors—History and criticism. 2. Hindi literature—20th century— History and criticism. 3. Dalits in literature. 4. Politics in literature. I. Title. PK2038.B79 2014

891.4'309920694—dc23 2013028937

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee cover art: Bharti Dayal

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither

the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For m., H., and l.

ddd

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

A Note on Transliteration xiii

Introduction 1 910

mapping tHe Hindi dalit literary spHere 1. The Hindi Dalit Counterpublic 23 2. The Problem of Premchand 43 3. Hindi Dalit Literary Criticism 61 920

reading Hindi dalit literature

77

4. Good Dalits and Bad Brahmins 79 5. Dialect and Dialogue in the Margins 100 6. Alienation and Loss in the Dalit Experience of Modernity 122 7. Re-scripting Rape 154 Conclusion 178 Notes 181 Bibliography 201 Index 211

21

ACknowledgments

i

was an undergraduate at Smith college when i read Dalit literature for the first time. As I sat in an introductory Indian cultures course on my bucolic college campus, my world was rocked by the explosive poems of Namdeo Dhasal, at that time among the very few examples of modern Dalit writing in any indian language to be translated into english. i have never forgotten the way his words moved me and destabilized my previously received versions of “India.” A couple of years later, in pursuit of my MA in Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Texas, I reached back to this formative moment in my education about the power of literary narrative to change the world, and I sought to uncover such voices in Hindi. That decision has led to more than a dozen years of research, fieldwork, reading, translating, writing, and presenting in the area of Hindi Dalit literature, years that have been the most fulfilling and exciting of my life. I have to thank first and foremost the incredible faculty in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin whose members inspired and shaped not only this project but also my entire approach to and appreciation for Indian literature. This list includes Patrick Olivelle, Edeltraud Harzer, Cynthia Talbot, Joel Brereton, Gail Minault, Herman Van Olphen, and Syed Akbar Hyder. Carla Petievich was not officially a faculty member of UT during my time there, but she was then and continues to be now an important mentor and friend. Martha Selby expertly guided me through my MA and PhD and remains a role model for her sharply intellectual as well as deeply emotive engagement with literature. though rupert Snell arrived at UT only after I left, in the years since he has quickly grown into the role of close friend, fount of knowledge regarding all things Hindi,

9x0 acknowledgments

and trusted critic upon whose support I have often depended. Kathryn Hansen, my PhD advisor, remains as steadfast a champion, critic, and trusted friend as anyone could ask for. For this book, and all of my work past and future, I owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude. My years as a student at UT were also among my most exhilarating thanks to my wonderful crop of friends and colleagues, including Eric Beverley, Mark McClish, Karline McLain, Steven Lindquist, Lisa Owen, Kristen Rudisill, Neil Dalal, Jarrod Whitaker, Robert Goodding, Shannon Finch, Rais Rehman, Michael Bednar, and Julie Hughes. Other friends— Laura Crimaldi, Samantha Rukert, Elizabeth Brusie, Amy Ware, Michael Shea, Alfredo Garcia, Carey Cortese, Nicole Whitaker, Jonathan Lyons, and Justin Marx—also made those years memorable. Gardner Harris’s good humor and dear friendship sustained my soul through years of both intense Sanskrit study and equally intense unwinding, and my entire Texas experience is perhaps more deeply shaped by him than anyone else. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of several institutions and funding organizations that made this project possible. First, the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship supported me through four years of graduate coursework and two summers in India studying Hindi. My time at The American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Hindi Language Institute, then in Udaipur, was particularly helpful not only in teaching Hindi but also in offering me a space to hone my project ideas. A Fulbright Fellowship in 2004–2005 allowed for the bulk of my field research to be accomplished, and a University of Texas Continuing Fellowship allowed me the space to write my dissertation. Subsequent summer and winter research trips to India funded by Hamilton College and the University of Colorado allowed for me to grow this project, keep my information current, and to strengthen my relationships with authors and friends in india. After I left UT, I was extraordinarily lucky to be granted a Freeman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian Studies at Hamilton College and spent two very happy years both honing my teaching skills in the Department of Comparative Literature and beginning the process of transforming my dissertation manuscript into this book. Peter and Nancy Rabinowitz were tremendously supportive to me throughout this time, and I was buoyed by stimulating colleagues in the field of South Asia, particularly Lisa Trivedi and Chaise LaDousa. Other colleagues too provided sustaining friendship and encouragement, including Hye Seung Chung, Emily Rohrbach, and Andy lewis.

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In my years at the University of Colorado, the place where this project truly matured, I was extraordinarily lucky to be supported and challenged by a host of tremendous friends and colleagues. In particular, Deepti Misri, Haytham Bahoora, and Laurialan Reitzammer made Boulder and CU a very happy home. I also benefitted tremendously from the friendship and engaging intellectualism of my South Asia colleagues, including Loriliai Biernacki, Mithi Mukherjee, Dennis McGilvray, Kira Hall, and Peter Knapczyk. I owe a similar debt of gratitude to my colleagues and friends in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, in particular Janice Brown, Matthias and Antje Richter, Keller Kimbrough, Andrew Stuckey, Satoko Shimazaki, and Suyoung Son. As this book enters its final stages, I have enthusiastically joined the newly created Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. I particularly want to thank Rajeev Kinra, Laura Hein, and Paola Zamperini for their warm welcome and support of this work. Other colleagues and friends across the country have stimulated my thinking and provided friendship and intellectual and emotional substance for years. Over time spent together in the plains of Iowa and the mountains of Colorado, Philip Lutgendorf has been an important mentor and friend. I’d also like to thank Christi Merrill, Toral Gajarawala, Ramnarayan Rawat, Beth Rohlman, John Nemec, Bali Sahota, Neil Doshi, and Pavitra Sundar. Their contributions to the field continuously inspire me to better my own, and I cherish our too-infrequent chances to commune. Friends and supporters in India are all too numerous to mention here, but it is safe to say none of this would ever have been possible, or nearly as enjoyable, without all of them. In particular, Ramnika Gupta has generously provided me with a second home in New Delhi, regularly welcoming not only me, but also my family and friends, into her home. And her life and work continue to provide me with inspiration and insight into the importance of literature as a vehicle for liberation. Anita Bharti has always served as my most trusted source of information and a balanced perspective on the dynamic world of writers, activists, and publishers that make up the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, and in the meantime she and her family—Rajiv, Pavel, and Shantum—have grown into dear friends. Kusum Meghwal’s generous gifts of time, encouragement, and material paved the way for the beginning of this project, and Ajay Navaria’s constant friendship and stimulating literary work developed into a lodestar around which my own thinking about the originality and innovations of Hindi Dalit writing coalesced. I owe his family too—Neeta, Kanishk, and

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Jasmine—a huge thank you for their regular contributions to my happy homecomings in Delhi. S. Anand and his fantastic publishing house Navayana have offered me important opportunities to expand this project in new and exciting directions. Along the way, Omprakash Valmiki, Mohandas Naimishray, Surajpal Chauhan, Rajni Tilak, Sudesh Tanwar, Suraj Badtiya, Tej Singh, Jaiprakash Kardam, Sohanpal Sumanakshar, Susheela Thakbhaure, and so many others have given me everything they could—advice, direction, and materials out of their own personal libraries. I could not have done any of this without them. i must also thank my two families here at home for supporting me throughout. My mother and father—Cynthia and Steven Brueck—have, in so many ways, made everything I’ve ever done possible. So too have Ann and Shelton Stromquist, who have opened their home and their lives to support me in ways I still find stunning. My siblings and all of our growing families: Jeff and Rebecca Brueck, Greg Brueck and Barbara Yien, Chris Stromquist and Mariana Lee, and the dearly missed Elizabeth Stromquist have punctuated these years with the joys of family. Finally, by my side for this entire journey—from the moment we met in our introductory Hindi class in graduate school, to our seemingly endless hours of reading, studying, and writing together, to our travels together across the subcontinent and the world, to our many moves and time spent apart in the service of our dual careers, to our shared grief at the loss of loved ones and our shared joy at the arrival of new members of our family—has been my indefatigably supportive and constant companion, my husband Matt Stromquist. This book is for him, and for our two sons, Hugo and Lyle. Every day all three of these men (big and little) selflessly provide me with inspiration, wisdom, and balance—and always put it all in perspective.

A note on trAnsliterAtion

i

n translitEratinG words from Hindi in the book, I have generally followed common diacritical conventions. Exceptions to this are place names, caste names, and personal names; for all of these I have retained their popular spellings in Roman letters without diacritics. Generally, prose passages quoted from Hindi language literary and critical texts are not accompanied by the transliterated passage, except in chapter 5 where my analysis is specifically focused on the Hindi itself.

Writin g re sistan ce

INTRoDuCTIoN

O

n July 31, 2004, members of the Bharatiya Dalit Sahitya Akademi (Indian Dalit Literary Academy, BDSA) publicly burned multiple copies of iconic nationalist-era Hindi author Munshi Premchand’s celebrated novel Rangbhūmi (1924).1 The raucous crowd of nearly one hundred people gathered together in New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar park shouted, cheered, and snapped grinning photos of one another as a small pile of copies of Raṅgbhūmi went up in flames. They saw themselves as a righteous group making a powerful case for the need to fight uppercaste (savarṇ) prejudice in literature and education.2 The provocation for the BDSA to burn Rangbhūmi, they said, came from a recent decision by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to replace Premchand’s novel Nirmalā with Raṅgbhūmi on the syllabus of twelfth-standard students in Delhi government schools.3 According to the BDSA and their supporters at the book burning, Raṅgbhūmi is offensive to Dalits and dangerous to the “soft minds” of young students, who may become biased against Dalits because of the novel’s constant repetition of caste-specific terminology, specifically the repetitive naming of the main character of the novel, Surdas, as “Surdas Chamar.” According to BDSA president Sohanpal Sumanakshar, the BDSA first petitioned NCERT to drop the book from the syllabus, or at least to delete the word “Chamar” from copies of the novel distributed to students.4 Then they lodged a case with the Delhi High Court arguing that the novel violated the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, passed in 1989, that is meant to protect Dalits from violence and public shaming on the basis of their caste.5 According to Sumanakshar, a lack of response to both of these pleas resulted in the book-burning protest.

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The burning of Raṅgbhūmi should be seen as more than a zealous, reactionary response to a lack of administrative attention to the BDSA’s campaign to have the book replaced on a school syllabus, or a minor dispute over the use of a single word taken to extremes. Rather, what I refer to as the “Raṅgbhūmi incident” has a much deeper significance when seen in the context of an ongoing debate among Dalit writers and critics over whether or not Premchand’s literature can be considered Dalit literature, or whether non-Dalit writers can ever genuinely represent the lives and experiences of Dalits.6 It brings to the fore the fundamental dilemma of applying standards of “authenticity” to Dalit identity and experience as well as contested standards of legitimacy for literary representations of a Dalit perspective. It also treads an uncomfortable line between a justifiable demand for the inclusion of Dalit literary voices in a government-sanctioned curriculum and a crude recourse to the very same kind of censorship that has silenced those very Dalit voices for so long. Such a determined and violent banishment of Premchand, long celebrated as a pioneer in the realist representation of Dalits and caste-based injustice in Hindi-urdu and, more broadly, Indian writing, demands a closer look at the political and social character of the contemporary Hindi Dalit literary sphere. Where are its boundaries? Who is included, and who is excluded? Who has the authority to make these decisions, and how are they contested? How do the social categories of gender and class interact with caste in negotiating these boundaries? These are all questions this book addresses. What is perhaps most fascinating about the Raṅgbhūmi incident are the strong reactions and condemnations it has garnered from other Dalit writers, publishers, editors, and critics, as well as the vigorous literary debate it has engendered within the alternative discursive space of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, debate which is taken up in more detail in chapter 2. Important to consider as well is the impact of the discussions, debates, and performances of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere in more mainstream Hindi literary and political spheres. The performative act of burning Raṅgbhūmi provides a clear example of this intersection. on January 29, 2006, the Indian newspaper The Statesman ran an article whose headline read, “NCERT plays it safe with Premchand prose.” Almost a year and a half after the book burning, it appeared that the BDSA’s protest was successful: New Delhi, Jan. 28. The National Council of Education and Research Training has decided to purge its textbooks of derogatory references to Dalits.

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The educational body has decided to remove the word Chamar from Hindi textbooks of class IX and XI. The controversial word used in Premchand’s Rangbhūmi has been replaced by the less offensive “Dalit.” The NCERT has also decided to incorporate chapters from famous Dalit writers in school textbooks. However, interestingly the word Chamar has not been replaced in their writings as has been done in Premchand’s works. In omprakash Valmiki’s “Khanabadhosh,” for instance, a footnote has been provided stating that the word is constitutionally banned and should not be practised in social behaviour. Speaking to The Statesman, NCERT’s head of languages department, Professor Ramjanam Sharma, said the council has made a great effort to incorporate Dalit literature in the syllabus without raking any controversy. ‘We have edited a lot in the writings after witnessing hue and cry over the word Chamar in Raṅgbhūmi. We have edited out the word except in the opening sentence,’ he added. Elaborating on the need to promote Dalit writers in the syllabus of Classes IX and XI, Professor Sharma said efforts are being made to sensitise students towards the marginalised status of backward communities. He said these writers feel only they can truly understand the trauma of belonging to a backward community in a Brahmanical society. Commenting on the editing of these texts, Professor Sharma categorically stated that the use of the word Dalit was not approved by academicians, but they could not shy away from the social reality.7

I present this as an example of the influence the protest action of the BDSA ultimately wielded at the state level, but there is another aspect also worth pointing out. Although the word Chamar was largely edited out of Premchand’s novel, the author points out that this and other Dalit jāti, or caste, terminology is used liberally by Dalit writers, and that in those versions of their writings distributed to students, the terms are footnoted but not removed. This distinction of what kind of author is allowed to “authentically” use caste-specific terminology, that is, the author who embodies a Dalit identity, suggests that the state itself, in this case represented by NCERT, reifies the divide between authentic and inauthentic literary Dalit perspectives. The fraught politics of authorship and authentic representation will be revisited throughout this work. In the wake of the Raṅgbhūmi incident and the evident achievement of its aims, I assert that the burning of the novel and the discussions about identity and authenticity it has engendered in the Hindi Dalit literary sphere should be given significant attention as a cultural performance,

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one which can provide insight into the ways in which this alternative public sphere engages, opposes, and redefines the limits of traditionally elite Hindi literary discourse.8 The incident stands therefore as an attempt, albeit a clumsy one, by Dalits to negotiate with a symbol of a discursive sphere that has always either spoken for them or ignored them completely. The public burning of Raṅgbhūmi in India’s capital city, pointedly enacted on Premchand’s 125th birth anniversary, was an attack by the BDSA on one of India’s most beloved and revered literary heroes. For the BDSA to take on the monumental figure of Premchand in such public, incendiary fashion testifies to the fact that their sense of self-definition and purpose has been constructed at variance with the normative North Indian public imagination. A towering icon in the modern Hindi literary mainstream, Premchand has also come to inhabit special, and more contested, terrain in the Hindi Dalit literary sphere in subsequent years. A close analysis of the debates that have grown out of this radical symbolic act, considered in detail later in this work, allows us to understand the nature of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere. I assert that these debates raise important questions about the politics of collective identity formation among marginalized communities. Throughout part I of this book, “Mapping the Hindi Dalit Literary Sphere,” I argue that the theoretical positioning of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere as a counterpublic can help to contextualize the communicative space in which the debates over Premchand and others have been performed in the last several years. Nancy Fraser has defined counterpublics as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”9 Thus, I think it is misleading to characterize all of Dalit writing—be it poetry, fiction, autobiography, criticism, or journalism—as occupying a singular oppositional idiom. Rather, it is far more accurate and productive to consider the Hindi Dalit literary sphere to be a space for the exchange of different discourses that are all relevant to the contemporary Dalit experience in Indian society. The Hindi Dalit literary sphere is constituted by the existence of discussion about Dalit experiences, aesthetics, politics, consciousness, and authenticity. It is a space for discussion that is unlike more dominant public spheres for the very reason that it privileges above all others the voices of Dalits and entertains topics and issues that are often ignored in more mainstream discursive spaces.

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I do not read the BDSA’s actions as a singular incident of angry protest, but rather as a cultural performance in the context of an ongoing debate within the Hindi Dalit counterpublic over the meaning of an iconic Hindi writer and the ramifications for Dalit writers in accepting or rejecting his works as Dalit literature. The interventions of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere in the analysis of mainstream literature are key to constituting that sphere as a provocative and powerful counterpublic. Thus, by choosing the potent and beloved cultural symbol of Premchand around whom to debate issues of inclusion and exclusion and authority and identity, Dalit writers are defining the parameters of the Dalit counterpublic sphere. Key issues that arise in the renewed debate over the significance of the BDSA’s action that erupted in the Hindi Dalit counterpublic after the book burning include the charge that Premchand’s literature lacks realism, that he privileges class over caste in his social critique (a perspective at odds with Ambedkarite politics), and finally that as a non-Dalit and a follower of Gandhi he is incapable of Dalit authorial authenticity.10 As the first chapters of this book will attest, in between the printed lines of debate and polemic, in the shadows of reasoned discussion, personal attacks, and sometimes outlandish claims, lies the negotiation of the boundaries of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic, as well as answers to questions of inclusion and exclusion that are fundamental to its construction.

The Meaning of DaliT liTeraTure over the last several years, scholarly attention to the subject of Dalit literature in India has increased almost as dramatically as the recent surge in the publication and translation of Dalit literature across India. The first significant example of Dalit writing in English translation appeared in orient Longman’s anthology of the literature of the Dalit Panthers, Poisoned Bread (Dangle 1992), and although for almost a decade afterwards there was no significant publication of Dalit literary texts outside of India, save for the career work of scholars such as Eleanor Zelliot and Gail omvedt, the dearth of wide access to Dalit texts and scholarly attention paid to them has recently turned around. A long period without English translation and sustained media and academic consideration of Dalit texts both literary and critical, as well as the nature of linguistic divides both inside and outside of India, have tended to restrict Dalit literatures in their various languages to a local audience. New English translations of Dalit literature now abound, however, thanks to a surge in interest by academic

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publishing houses in India and abroad as well as the rise of specialty publishing houses such as Navayana, based in Delhi.11 Recent scholarship in the expansive new field of Dalit studies has also made important contributions to our understanding of the role of Dalit activism and public culture in modern Indian history and contemporary society. Yet there remain significant gaps that this book will help to fill. For example, Anupama Rao’s The Caste Question (2009) considers the politicization of Dalit identity, specifically how the transformation of the stigma of untouchability into a “vibrantly contested political category” has shaped the modern political history of Indian democracy. Although her study takes up fundamental questions of the construction of a Dalit public sphere, it is limited to the specific history of Maharashtra and further ignores literature entirely. Writing Resistance will allow for an important diversification of this and other such studies on the Dalit public sphere that privilege Western India by focusing analysis instead on works that circulate in the Hindi belt.12 Even more importantly, I place literature at the center of my exploration of a contemporary North Indian Dalit public sphere, demonstrating that this is a critically important site for understanding modern and contemporary Dalit identity construction. The overwhelming majority of Dalit narratives that have been translated to English are autobiographies or life narratives.13 Similarly, much of the recent scholarship that has dealt with Dalit-authored narratives has privileged the genre of autobiography. Sharmila Rege’s Writing Caste/Writing Gender (2006) suggests that the sociological and activist import of Dalit testimonio lies in the fact that “the intention is not one of literariness but of communicating the situation of a group’s oppression, imprisonment and struggle” (13). This is of course true, and there remains much to be explored in the genre of Dalit autobiography, but for both scholarship and the publishing industry to excessively favor autobiographical narratives over the rich body of fiction (short and long) and poetry that comprises the corpus of Dalit literature is to understand the impact of literary expression on the construction of Dalit identity and consciousness from a particularly narrow perspective. This study proposes instead to illuminate those texts whose very intention is literariness and examine how various literary styles and strategies are employed for creating consciousness. Despite an ever-growing availability of Dalit literature and criticism in original languages and in translation, there has been scant attention paid to the ways in which Dalit writers consciously stylize their narrative form

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to construct social and political meaning. Indeed, from many corners comes an outright denunciation of the close critical analysis of Dalit narratives, regarding such narratives instead as “authentic,” and thus somehow quite literally untouchable documents of subaltern experience. For the most part, existing scholarly commentary on Dalit literature shows a staggering lack of attention to original language sources; others are content to translate mostly autobiographical texts to English and then comment cautiously on their thematic content, ignoring the formal structural and linguistic elements of these and other fictional and poetic genres. The treatment of Dalit narratives as unmediated documents of authentic experience can be seen most clearly in the bias of publishers and their readers for Dalit autobiographies. Though life narratives constitute an important category in Dalit literature, and a significant political claim for ownership of the power of expression, they are by no means the only, or even the majority, of literary texts that Dalit writers produce. It is a field rich with short fiction, novels, poetry, and drama, all of which beg for analysis that goes beyond a salutary celebration of the authenticity of the voice of the oppressed. Departing from the focus on autobiography, this book offers a literary analysis of the aesthetics, politics, and varied discourses of identity that constitute contemporary Hindi Dalit short stories, including the conscious formal decisions that Dalit writers make in the shape of their plots, the style of their characters’ speech, and the language of their literary embellishments. There are some who would urge caution in this endeavor. In her introduction to her English translation of omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography, Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (2003), for example, Arun Prabha Mukherjee argues that “a literary critic, reared in an educational system that taught a canon of literature focused solely on the privileged sections of society, whether of India or the West, must tread cautiously in this new territory, using the benchmarks provided by Dalit literary theory and continuously on guard against those kinds of formalist analyses that privilege form over content” (xxxix). But I argue that Dalit literary theory itself is too often dismissive, perhaps willfully so, of the diversity and complexity of the literary strategies employed by Dalit authors across a range of regional, linguistic, class, and gender identity positions. This arises from a strategic critical campaign, I think, to protect the boundaries of Dalit literature from dissimulation into multiple, individual authorial approaches that, when differentiated and divided, lose their unified political impact. Marathi Dalit writer and critic

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Sharankumar Limbale, for example, offers little scope for analysis of Dalit narratives as purposefully constructed literary texts when he writes in his book, Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, that “the reality of Dalit literature is distinct, and so is the language of this reality. It is the uncouth-impolite language of Dalits. It is the spoken language of Dalits. This language does not recognize cultivated gestures and grammar. Standard language has a class. Dalit writers have rejected the class of this standard language. Dalit writers have rejected [the] validation of standard language by the cultured classes because it is arrogant.”14 While the Dalit critical imperative to thus contain and differentiate Dalit writing from mainstream writing (that has always excluded Dalit voices, even while purporting to represent their reality) is understandable and even laudable, I believe it does a disservice to the continued growth and development of important new Dalit literary voices across various Indian languages. The Hindi literary works under review in this book clearly show that a simplistic interpretation of the “difference” of Dalit writing from more mainstream or elite categories of literature is not at all reflective of the nuanced, complex, and diverse literary reality of contemporary Dalit writing in India. I argue that modern Dalit literature in fact exhibits a nuanced treatment of literary language and an intentional approach to narrative form that not only deserves close critical attention but that also allows for a more careful understanding of the interstices of Dalit activism, “consciousness,” and literary expression. The “resistance” of these texts is thus not in the rejection of those conventions labeled by Limbale as “pretentious,” but rather their strategic and self-conscious adaptation, and it is important that we pay attention to these adaptations if we are to understand the full range of innovative narrative styles of resistance developed in Dalit writing. Writing Resistance provides one of the first close studies of any substantial aspect of the important and ever-growing body of contemporary Hindi language Dalit literature in India. While the Dalit literary movement has had an important socio-political and literary impact in various Indian linguistic regions, there has been little sustained scholarly attempt to situate this writing within modern and contemporary critical frameworks. Existing scholarship on Dalit literature tends to stress this writing’s “difference” from more mainstream Indian writing by emphasizing its characteristics of resistance, anger, and caustic realism, simplistically assuming the univocality of the Dalit literary voice. My approach here emphasizes instead the diverse sociopolitical perspectives and literary

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strategies in a broad and nuanced body of works by a diverse range of contemporary Dalit writers working in Hindi. The time is right for such a study. The regular participation of several Dalit writers at the Jaipur Literature Festival since 2010, including two Hindi authors who figure prominently in this book—omprakash Valmiki and Ajay Navaria—suggests the rapidly rising profile of Dalit literature across India and transnationally. In her report on the discussions of Dalit writing at the prominent annual lit-fest for the English language newsmagazine Tehelka in 2010, journalist Trisha Gupta writes that “newer work by Ajay Navaria and P. Sivakami alongside Valmiki and Gaikwad showed that Dalit writing—while still clinging to the power of rhetoric—is ready, too, to embrace a variety of literary aesthetics.”15 The close readings presented in part II of this book prove that a careful consideration of literary aesthetics is already at the center of contemporary Hindi Dalit literary production, demonstrating how Dalit authors wield diverse aesthetic and stylistic tools in the construction of political consciousness. I focus on the popular genre of the short story for two principal reasons. First, I want to acknowledge both the long history and enduring popularity of the short story in both Dalit literature and modern Hindi literature in general. Second, narratives as tightly configured as short stories offer clear evidence of the ways in which Dalit writers manipulate and create distinct narrative styles. “Dalit literature” is a slippery term that is regularly applied to wildly diverse notions of what constitutes both “Dalit” and “literature.” In their 1973 Dalit Panther Manifesto, the Dalit Panthers famously defined the meaning of Dalit broadly: “Who is a dalit? Members of scheduled castes and tribes, Neo-Buddhists, the working people, the landless and poor peasants, women and all those who are being exploited politically, economically, and in the name of religion.”16 Hindi Dalit writer Kusum Meghval takes a less inclusive and more traditional stance in her book, Hindī upanyāsoṁ meṁ Dalit varg (Dalit Class in Hindi Novels): “The use of ‘Dalit class has been accepted for those traditionally thought of as Shudras in India. Dalit society consists of those castes who exist on a base level and who have been persecuted for centuries.”17 Similarly, the term literature has been applied variously to include Dalit renderings of traditional genres such as poetry, autobiography, short and long fiction, and drama, and it is frequently extended as far as political tracts, histories of Ambedkar, and journalistic reporting of incidents of violence and discrimination against Dalits.18

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In this study, I am most interested in texts created explicitly as literary texts. The Dalit literary sphere is making a significant intervention into what has traditionally been a literary culture reserved for the elite. At the heart of this sphere is a commitment to changing what is considered “literature” and who are considered “authors” in both Dalit and non-Dalit literary worlds. In our conversations, many Dalit authors claim that they write primarily for a Dalit audience and that whatever impact their texts may have in a non-Dalit world is merely a secondary consideration. And yet the texts that I consider within the rubric of Dalit literature are not merely attempts to recover a Dalit voice but also clearly endeavors to incorporate this Dalit voice into the Indian literary canon. This book will not offer a definitive answer to the broad question, “What is Dalit literature?” To do so would be to fall into the same debates over identity and authenticity that continually inhibit more substantive discussions of content and form in Dalit literature. The term authenticity here refers to the question of who is Dalit enough to write “realistic” representations of Dalit experience, and such debates over authenticity comprise the majority of public discussions of Dalit literature. These debates are frequently political, rather than literary, and ultimately unresolvable for they come down to the ideological positioning of the critic, rather than to a close analysis of the literary expression of any particular set of texts. For example, critic Digish Mehta describes Dalit literature as “writing contributed by members of the Dalit class, bearing witness in authentic terms to their experiences of deprivation.”19 Journalist, critic, and editor of the Delhi-based publishing house Navayana, S. Anand defines Dalit literature as “literature produced by Dalits in a conscious, defined, modern sense with an awareness of what it is to be Dalit” (2003, 1), while Marathi Dalit literary critic Sharankumar Limbale classifies Dalit literature as “writing about Dalits by Dalit writers with a Dalit consciousness.”20 Such an emphasis suggests a prescription for a way of thinking and a way of writing that become crystallized in the concept of “Dalit consciousness” (Dalit chetnā). Sharatchandra Muktibodh, in an essay entitled “What is Dalit Literature?” in the foundational anthology of Marathi Dalit Literature edited by Arjun Dangle, Poisoned Bread, also relies on the notion of texts produced by writers with a “Dalit consciousness” to serve as a definition for Dalit literature.21 Significant questions about the meaning of Dalit consciousness therefore emerge. This study considers how a Dalit writer expresses this consciousness in “authentic terms,” as well as

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how we can reconstitute a critical appraisal of literary form to show that attention to form and style is itself a political act. For the majority of Dalit writers, the specific demands of this consciousness are what define Dalit literature as distinct from narratives written from “outside” or “inauthentic” perspectives that claim to represent Dalit subjectivity. Most Dalit writers agree that there is a fundamental difference between the ways Dalit characters often become objectified and aestheticized in the roles of sympathetic objects in non-Dalit writing, and the agentive and transformative roles as subjects they are committed to shaping for themselves in their own literature. In S. Anand’s Touchable Tales, a collection of interviews with writers, publishers, and critics of Dalit literature, Marathi author Narendra Jhadav compares the difference between Dalit literature and the empathetic writing about Dalits by non-Dalits as “the difference between a mother’s love and a wet nurse’s love.”22 More stridently, Tamil Dalit writer Sivkami explains, “I hold that non-Dalit writers emerge as self-styled autocrats passing adverse judgments on Dalit life, or that they use Dalits as toys to tickle a few strange nerves of their readers.”23 In a classic example, the character of Bakha in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (originally published in 1935) is severely limited by his own small intelligence in understanding the full extent of his social marginalization, suggesting that untouchables are incapable of becoming agents of their own emancipation because they cannot intellectually identify the systemic sources of their own oppression, mired as they are in the “experience” of untouchability.24 More than sixty years later, in her international bestseller, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy aestheticizes the untouchable character Velutha, endowing him with a body made “beautiful” (rather than broken) by his labor: “As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him . . . Had given him his strength, his supple grace.”25 This beauty and simplicity (“His white, sudden smile . . . his only luggage”) attracts the high caste Ammu to Velutha, after which his emergent revolutionary politics as a member of the Communist Party in Kerala are domesticated by their transgressive sexual relationship. Described by L. Chris Fox as “a martyrology of the abject,” the novel’s anti-caste politics are expressed through the traumatic horror of witnessing the violent destruction of Velutha’s beautiful body by the beatings of the police.26 Yet this is a politics that denies Velutha agency outside of remaining a martyr, a symbolic locus around which other (nonDalit) agents for social change can focus their empathy.

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Turning to a Hindi example, a clear distinction can be seen between the narrative approaches of Premchand (in his story Dūdh kā Dām, or “The Price of Milk,” originally published in 1934) and Dalit author and critic omprakash Valmiki (in his autobiography, Jūṭhan, 1997).27 Premchand’s story is about a little “sweeper” boy, Mangal, who grows up sickly, as his mother is the wet nurse for the baby of an upper-caste family, and is eventually orphaned around age five. Mangal subsequently grows up and, as Premchand points out, becomes healthy and robust by eating the discarded food scraps (jūṭhan) of this same upper-caste boy who was raised on Mangal’s mother’s milk. Although he is aware of the irony and the injustice that have defined his unfortunate life (“There was no lack of food, but yes, it still made him feel bad when the food was dropped down from above into his clay bowls. Everybody else ate from fine plates, and yet there were only clay bowls for him!”28), Mangal nevertheless submits himself to his fate with the companionship of an abused stray dog that Premchand uses as a heavy-handed allegory for the desperate plight and ultimate helplessness of the untouchables. At the end of the story, though Mangal has vowed to starve rather than eat these scraps, he changes his mind and returns to grovel at the door of his “benefactors.” As Premchand writes, when Mangal once again begs for and receives the jūṭhan, “Mangal looked at [the servant who brought him the scraps] with eyes filled with deep gratitude.”29 Valmiki’s take on jūṭhan in his autobiography of the same name is quite different. For him too it is a searing memory that defined his childhood; his mother did menial labor in an upper-caste household in exchange for some sacks of grain and the family’s leftover scraps. He recalls one incident, however, that is so defining he chooses to make it the name of his autobiography, in sum a story of his own education, politicization, and rise from abjection. There is a wedding in the upper-caste household, and his mother feels insulted by her Brahmin employer when he gives her a basket full of the guests’ dirty leaf plates off of which she is meant to eat their scraps. It is at this moment that she snaps. I quote here from Mukherjee’s translation of Valmiki’s autobiography, That night the mother Goddess Durga entered my mother’s eyes. It was the first time I saw my mother get so angry. She emptied the basket right there. She said to Sukhdev Singh, “Pick it up and put it inside your house. Feed it to the bridegroom’s guests tomorrow morning.” . . . my mother had confronted him like a lioness. Without being afraid.

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After that day Ma never went back to his door. And after this incident she also stopped taking their jūṭhan.30

While Premchand evokes Mangal’s situation as a source of empathy and the recognition of, and possibly outrage at, injustice in his story, Valmiki alternatively sees his mother’s angry denial of her own humiliation as the revolutionary spark that defines (and consequently titles) his life’s journey out of the mental slavery of untouchability. As Shashi Bhushan updahyay explains in an apologia of the treatment of untouchability in Premchand’s works, “The child and the dog have become one, the human and the animal have been united in the great fraternity of discrimination and deprivation.”31 But Debjani Ganguly points out that Valmiki’s autobiography and other Dalit narratives alternatively develop the possibility of “personhood” for Dalit subjects. She writes, “Dalit life narratives in late modern India play a critical role in enabling the untouchable castes to imagine a coherent community of oppressed individuals, honed in the hellfire of caste persecution and emerging as ‘persons’ in their own right in the process.”32 Ganguly points to Valmiki’s Joothan: A Dalit’s Life specifically as an example of a Bildungsroman, remarking on the “dissensual force in its narration of the painful stages of the evolution of an untouchable Chuhra boy to an educated writer, activist and professional in modern India.”33 Premchand’s story also figures prominently in a short story by Delhibased Dalit Ajay Navaria, “uttar kathā” (translated in a recent collection as “Hello Premchand!”).34 Navaria’s story retells the story of young Mangal, referencing and re-writing the fates of several of Premchand’s Dalit characters from his stories that feature them. In this savvy and literarily reflective story-within-a-story, an editor meets the specters of Premchand and Ambedkar and types a story meant as a “responding story” (uttar kathā) to Premchand’s “Price of Milk.” This story does in fiction what so many Dalit authors—including Navaria—do in their critical writings. That is, it intervenes in a modern literary history of upper-caste writing about Dalits that treats them with sympathy but relegates them to positions of compliance. The Premchand look-alike “responds” to a single line quoted from “The Price of Milk”, “Whatever else may change in this world, Bhangis will always remain Bhangis.”35 But in this new story, a Bhangi does not in fact remain so; instead, he is educated, leaves his village, becomes a government official, and returns to his village triumphant and looking for love. This is a story enriched by its insight into the power of Dalit

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writers to change the very literary landscape Dalit characters have typically inhabited. It is the stance of the literary critic, fictionalized. In Navaria’s literal re-visioning of Premchand’s story, the orphan boy Mangal is buoyed by both his mother’s dream that he transcend his supposed fate as a Bhangi and “will only do work that brings him respect,” as well as a community of relatives and teachers and well-wishers who encourage his education, landing him finally in the role of a government official. Telling cameo appearances are made as well by a host of characters from Premchand’s other famous narratives that explicitly address the issue of caste, including Ghisu and Madhav from “The Shroud” (“Kafan”, 1936), Halku from “January Night” (“Pūs kī Rāt”, 1930), Gangi and Jokhu from “The Thakur’s Well” (“Ṭhākur kā Kuāṁ”, 1932), and Ghasiram from “Deliverance” (“Sadgati”, 1931). All of these characters face a completely different treatment in Navaria’s story than they did in Premchand’s stories. unsympathetic upper-caste characters in Premchand’s stories become champions of Dalits in Navaria’s rendition. Dalit characters consigned to death or a hopeless existence in Premchand’s stories are resurrected, educated, and politicized in “Hello, Premchand!” At the end of Navaria’s story, Mangal is on his way back to his village, returning triumphantly as a respected government official to the place where his mother once shoveled shit. The story is set in a peculiar frame in which a young editor meets the specters of both Premchand and Ambedkar who give him these rejoinders (uttar kathā) to the narratives of pity and condescension and fetishization that have dominated literary representations of Dalits from Premchand to Roy. Navaria’s story is a critical appraisal of the treatment of caste in modern Indian literature, a literal re-writing of literary history and rethinking of literary possibility as well as a recasting of the supposed inevitability of caste identities in modern India. In a pointedly self-referential moment, Navaria has young Mangal devour books from the library, including autobiographies of Navaria’s contemporaries: “He read omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan, Surajpal Chauhan’s Tiraskrit and Rupnarayan Sonkar’s Nagphani.”36 In Premchand’s story, Mangal and the stray dog are presented as one and the same, whipped into submission and cast aside. But Navaria’s and other Dalit narratives alternatively develop the possibility of “personhood” for Dalit subjects. And therein lies the difference in most Dalit writing. Charging that non-Dalit writers, however sympathetic, use the Dalit character as an

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object of empathic connection and subsequently locate the impetus for social change outside of that Dalit object, Dalit writers instead seek to invest their characters with subjectivity and the power to resist, rebel, and change. This is Dalit consciousness. And it is this consciousness that this book seeks to highlight, explicate, and interrogate.

ChapTer ouTline Throughout Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature I navigate between the critical and political rhetoric of the Dalit literary sphere and my own close readings of Hindi literary texts. I put into conversation two bodies of imaginative rhetoric that contribute to the function of literature in the construction of contemporary Dalit identities: the stylistic and aesthetic imaginations of individual authors with the rhetorical imagination of a Dalit community voice that strives to define, protect, and promote the singularity of Dalit literature. My aim is twofold, as the organization of the chapters into two parts suggests. In part I, I trace the institutional and discursive contours of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, as well as the debates and literary and political issues that arise among Dalit writers as they work to make a space for their voices in contemporary India. I emphasize the significance of the Dalit literary sphere as a counterpublic space. In part II, I perform close readings of contemporary Hindi Dalit literary prose narratives and focus on the diverse aesthetic and stylistic strategies employed by a range of writers whose class, gender, and geographic backgrounds shape their individualized literary voices. This study is committed to analyzing Dalit literature as literature, while simultaneously seeking to understand the complexities of the sociopolitical and identity-based origins from which it emerges. In part I, “Mapping the Hindi Dalit Literary Sphere,” chapters 1, 2, and 3 situate Hindi Dalit literature within the critical contexts emerging from the Hindi Dalit literary sphere itself, focusing specifically on the debate over Premchand, the institutional structures of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic, and an alternative Hindi Dalit literary history. The last four chapters, making up part II, “Reading Hindi Dalit Literature,” analyze a wide array of individual texts and authorial styles. Here I perform close readings of Hindi Dalit short stories from a variety of perspectives: the manipulation of conventional modes of melodrama and realism, structures of dialogue and the ideological undercurrents of the use of regional

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dialects, the infusion of sentiments of personal crisis and alienation in an otherwise politically emancipatory genre, and the construction of a feminist utopian imagination that intersects with the realist documentation of a dystopian existence. In sum, these focused analyses provide a thorough understanding of the styles of literary and political expression among a diverse and vital body of contemporary Dalit authors. Chapter 1, “The Hindi Dalit Counterpublic,” develops a theoretical context for understanding the role of literary institutions as constituting a counterpublic space for contemporary Dalit identity construction. Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, I profile two of the leading Hindi Dalit literary organizations of the last decade—the Bhāratīya Dalit Sāhitya Akadmī (Indian Dalit Literary Academy) and the Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh (Dalit Writers Forum)—and consider the ways in which the activities of these groups demarcate the boundaries of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic sphere. By way of illustration of many of the theoretical elements of publics and counterpublics established by theorists such as Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, and Michael Warner, I focus on both the private discussions and public literary activities of these two groups, and I analyze public disputes that arise in diverse forums such as Dalit literary conferences and discussion groups (attended and recorded during several extended stints of field research in India between 2001 and 2009). Chapter 2, “Dalit Literary Discourse and the Problem of Premchand” explores the engagement in public literary critical discourse by Delhibased Dalit writers and intellectuals as a way to promote Dalit social and political agendas. For some time now, Dalit writers have worked to insert their voices into the public sphere, not only through extensive literary publication but also by engaging in critical discourse about more mainstream literature, thus using their voices to challenge hegemonic perspectives on various literary institutions and icons. This chapter’s focus returns to the Dalit critical appraisal of the heralded twentieth century author, introduced here, in order to illustrate contemporary debates over the definition of Dalit literature among Dalit writing communities. I analyze both published Hindi texts on Dalit literary history and aesthetics as well as public disputes that arise in contemporary Delhi-based literary journals (Haṁs, Apekṣā, Yuddhrat Ām Ādmi, etc.). These debates underscore how the idea of “Dalit chetnā” (Dalit consciousness) is central to the production and reception of Dalit literature, and they allow me to evaluate the literary impact of a carefully constructed demand for the experiential “authenticity” of Dalit writers in Dalit critical discourse.

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I argue here that the use of published print media (in both non-Dalit and Dalit publications) for the articulation of these fundamental debates over literature and social agendas within the Dalit writing community constitutes a reclamation of the power of representation. The debates over Premchand also allow me to situate contemporary Dalit literary and political agendas in the comparative context of other literary-political movements in the history of Hindi prose writing. Finally, exploring the specific example of a Dalit feminist critique of the debates over Premchand, I consider how the realities of overlapping identities of class, gender, and geography necessarily complicate any simplistic or conclusive framework for a singularly “authentic” Dalit literary perspective. Chapter 3, “Historicizing Hindi Dalit literature,” discusses the construction of a literary historical narrative for Hindi Dalit literature as a strategic initiative by Dalit writers and critics, designed to construct pride of place for Hindi among other regional Dalit literary traditions across India. Hindi Dalit literature, in its contemporary avatar, was established in the early 1980s with the early autobiographies, poetry, and short stories of eminent writers such as omprakash Valmiki and Mohandas Naimishray. Due to this relatively late start, it is also supposed that Dalit literature in Hindi continues to lag behind the more “mature” Dalit literary traditions in Marathi and Tamil. This is often attributed to the lack of an organized Dalit political movement in north India until the late twentieth century, and the absence of influential leaders such as Ambedkar in the West and Periyar in the South.38 As chapter 3 attests, contemporary Hindi Dalit writers give credit to Marathi Dalit literature in particular, as well as the influential centrality of Ambedkar, Phule, and the Dalit Panthers. They are also increasingly engaging, however, in projects of historical and critical reconstruction of a specifically Hindi literary lineage that reaches as far back as the fifteenth century, citing famed North Indian bhakti poets Kabir and Ravidas in particular as the literary and political forebears of the modern Hindi Dalit literary movement. Shifting toward the stylistic analysis of Dalit literature, chapter 4, “Good Dalits and Bad Brahmins,” argues that the bulk of Hindi Dalit literary texts construct a hegemonic narrative style dominated by melodramatic realism. Dalit literature on one hand strives to present realistic representations of the material, social, and emotional conditions of Dalit life in India, and on the other offers a melodramatic interpretation of the Ambedkarite ideological mission to emancipate Dalits from an imposed identity of inferiority. I consider how several authors, including omprakash Valmiki,

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Jaiprakash Kardam, and Mohandas Naimishray, interweave narrative conventions of realism and melodrama. Considering the fact that these authors are among the vanguard of Hindi Dalit writers and critics, I argue that their melodramatic realism sets the stylistic standard for much contemporary Hindi Dalit literature. Chapter 5, “Dialect and Dialogue in the Margins,” argues that Hindi Dalit writers display a heightened awareness of the literary and social impact of manipulating and interweaving various registers of language. I demonstrate this through the close analysis of several examples by omprakash Vamiki, Susheela Thakbhaure, Surajpal Chauhan, and Ajay Navaria. Their stylistic strategies include the in-text glossing of dialectical speech, the selective employment of both dialectical and modern standard Hindi by characters possessing different levels of Dalit chetnā, as well as the selective use of English vocabulary, and therefore demonstrate a keen awareness of the power of heteroglossia. Further, I suggest that formalist analysis in the mode of disentangling layers of linguistic register in these stories is essential to uncovering their meaning and can offer new insight into the nuanced nature of content. In these examples, heteroglossia reveals several different layers of meaning in the narratives. Thus the form of the narrative itself, and the language in which it is constructed, makes clear the author’s ethical stance around such issues as Dalit chetnā and the sometimes uneasy social positioning of the Dalit psyche in a rapidly modernizing society. Chapters 6 and 7, “Alienation and Loss in the Dalit Experience of Modernity” and “Re-scripting Rape,” respectively, explore the narrative spaces in which Dalit chetnā comes into conflict with other class and gender-based identities. In both chapters I highlight individual authors who complicate the more normative narrative modes described previously. In chapter 6 I consider the undercurrents of nostalgia and the specters of loss and alienation that pervade many narratives of Dalit political awakening. I look specifically at several stories by Ajay Navaria, who narrates tales of Dalit characters who have moved to the urban Indian city, the seemingly uncomplicated, at least in political rhetoric, site of modernity and Ambedkarite political consciousness. I argue that Navaria’s stories expose a bereavement that accompanies Dalit political awakening, thus distancing politicized individuals from the comfort of former kinship communities and senses of self. Central to the narrative rendering of this process of psychological leaving-behind is the representation of the

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physical move of characters from rural to urban spaces and special attention is consequently paid to the descriptions of place and the experience of loss. In chapter 7 I consider the challenges Dalit feminist writers raise against the normative masculinist tendencies of the Dalit literary sphere in both its hierarchical organization and its literary creations. I look specifically at the subgenre of rape revenge narratives, exemplified here by the udaipur-based Kusum Meghval, to illustrate a Dalit feminist perspective that questions the widespread employment of the “rape script,” or discursive determinism of sexual violence, as singularly defining the experience of Dalit womanhood. Rather, Dalit feminist writers script utopian possibilities for their characters in stories that are set in a dystopian universe in which masculine caste hierarchies are constructed and maintained through the perpetration of sexual violence against women. ultimately, Writing Resistance asserts the critical necessity of grappling with the diversity of voices and literary-political agendas in the Hindi Dalit literary sphere to fully understand the transformative impact Dalit literature has had on both the institutional organizations and traditional constructs of Indian literature as well as the public fashioning of Dalit counterpublic social and political identities. In sum, the book is a careful study of the Dalit short story in Hindi that addresses the cultural and identity politics of this emerging body of literature through an understanding of the Hindi Dalit literary counterpublic’s constellation of authors, critics, journals, conferences, and literary debates. In addition, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature offers a much-needed careful and close reading of a diverse body of Dalit Hindilanguage prose that foregrounds the wide range of stylistic and aesthetic strategies employed by its authors.

I MappIng the hIndI dalIt lIterary Sphere

9 1 0 The hindi daliT CounTerpubliC

I

n this chapter, I consider the configuration of poetry, novels, short stories, literary criticism, print media, conferences, and organizations in the Hindi Dalit literary sphere as a “counterpublic,” in order to more specifically define the context in which the texts that form the basis of this study are produced. The question therefore arises: to what exactly is the Hindi Dalit literary public “counter”? In suggesting an answer to this question, one that will be carefully considered over the next two chapters, I return for a moment to the burning of Raṅgbhūmi. The Bharatiya Dalit Sahitya Akademi (BDSA) could not have chosen a more beloved literary figure in north India, or one more representative of mainstream Hindi literature’s purported commitment to social realism, to assail in their public performance. Premchand, a short-story writer, novelist, and affiliate of the All India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA) in the heart of the nationalist era, is widely revered as the father of modern Hindi literature. Indian literary historians have elevated nearly all twelve of his novels and his more than two hundred short stories to canonical status, and are hard-pressed, more than seven decades after his death, to find a more deserving focus for their attention. For example, K. P. Jindal suggests in A History of Hindi Literature that “there can be no two opinions that he was the master builder who laid the foundations not only of the Hindi novel but also of the Hindi prose style.”1 Prakash Chandra Gupta makes the impressive claim in the Prem Chand edition of the Sahitya Akademi’s (National Academy of Letters) Makers of Indian Literature series that Premchand’s writings have “been a force that has contributed towards making our life what it is.”2 In short, the BDSA could not have chosen a more iconic representative of India’s modern cultural heritage and national Hindi literary tradition to

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position itself against, and, in so doing, make a powerful public statement about Dalits’ own literary-political identity, one that stands at odds with that of the imagined, unmarked Indian. There are obvious shades too of celebrated Indian statesman and Dalit political leader Bhimrao Ambedkar’s 1927 burning of the Manusmṛti3 that served nearly a century ago as a radical, defining public statement of the counterstance of a new class of politically motivated Dalits who regarded their symbolic rejection of one of the most potent symbols of the Hindu religious tradition to be a powerful assertion of a particular sociocultural identity.4 It is clear that the BDSA desired to evoke Ambedkar’s action and thereby locate their own contemporary protest in the same interpretive frame. This kind of counterstance—the assertion of a distinct sociocultural identity—as well as the introduction of a critical perspective on hitherto unquestioned elements of a national Indian cultural heritage signified by both Hinduism and Premchand, is reflected in Partha Chatterjee’s idea of a “politics of the governed.” Chatterjee argues that there is a fundamental conflict that lies at the heart of politics in most of the world, specifically the opposition between the “universal ideal of civic nationalism” and “the particular demands of cultural identity.”5 His example par excellence is Ambedkar himself, who put real faith in the “utopian homogeneity” of the modern secular Indian nation as the principal architect of its constitution, yet at the same time recognized the demands of “real heterogeneity” in the distinct cultural and political identity of Dalits. In his push for separate electorates for Dalits and for religious conversion as the assertion of a politicized cultural identity, Ambedkar too was constructing a kind of counterpublic identity for Dalits, one that stood within, and yet very much in defiant opposition to, the ideal of an undifferentiated, united Indian citizenry. So too are groups like the BDSA and the Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh (Dalit Writers Forum, DLS) constructing an oppositional identity for the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, and in so doing they are creating a parallel sphere for counterpublic literary activities and publications. Before discussing the specific participation of these organizations in the construction of a counterpublic sphere, a brief discussion of publicsphere scholarship and its application in a South Asian context is appropriate. Jürgen Habermas first elaborated the idea of a “public sphere” in his Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit in 1962, and the concept has gained increasing currency since the book’s translation and publication in English as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). In this influential work, which has since formed the basis for

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more inclusive theories of alternative public spaces and the empowering nature of discourse, Habermas offers an elucidation of the Western bourgeois public sphere that emerged and declined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a growing economy allowed for a new coming together of private citizens in forums that encouraged a rational exchange of information and ideas. These forums, including print media and literary salons, provided a public sphere with a potential for unbiased access and social integration in which a public “read and debated about itself.”6 According to Craig Calhoun’s analysis of Habermas’s theory, “practical reason was institutionalized through norms of reasoned discourse in which arguments, not statuses or traditions, were to be decisive.”7 Habermas’s European public-sphere model has been used by scholars such as Veena Naregal and Francesca Orsini, who have employed it to investigate the circulation of ideas in an Indian context. In her study of colonial western Indian language politics, Naregal finds Habermas’s model helpful in determining how the understanding of “modern reading communities and audiences” as a kind of public sphere “has shown how special uses of language, particularly those valorized as ‘literary’, along with the production and circulation of printed texts, have formed means of advancing ideas of subjectivity and community.”8 Though Habermas’s evidence is drawn from a European context, Naregal asserts that the model of the public sphere “has proved suggestive for the relation between norms of communicative rationality and the distribution of political power in the making of non-Western modernities.”9 Naregal’s application of Habermas’s idea allows her to consider the links among “educational policy, colonial bilingualism and the strategies of native intelligentsia” as existing within a single assertive public framework of identity elaborated by the elite communities of western India in the precolonial and early colonial years of Indian history. Similarly, in her book The Hindi Public Sphere, Orsini uses Habermas’s concept of the public sphere to discuss, in a single model, “the literary, social, and political phenomena as well as activities, institutions, actors, and discourses” that made up the Hindi literary sphere’s interactions with the nationalist movement.10 With respect to the particulars of the Hindi public sphere at the late colonial historical moment, Orsini points to the simultaneous existence of two dominant perspectives. While the “normative” attitude believed that ideas such as the promotion of a Sanskritized “pure” Hindi, a renaissance of the jāti system, and celebration of both the

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pastoral and the Indian woman as the repositories of nationalist ideals were sacrosanct, there were also voices critical of what was understood as a homogenous nationalism by writers, women, and peasant leaders.11 Thus, while inspired by Habermas’s model of the public sphere, Orsini is forced to stretch her application of it to fit the Hindi literary and political sphere of the nationalist era in order to find space for such voices of critique, emphasizing the simultaneous existence of multiple public spheres. Thus, as Orsini’s example illustrates and indeed many of Habermas’s critics have pointed out, his explanation of the European public sphere fails to take into consideration the limited historical access to the realm of shared public discourse by women, nonwhites, and other marginalized social groups. Gerard Hauser proposes a solution of multiple publics within an overarching public sphere, defining a public as “interdependent members of a society who hold different opinions about a mutual problem and who seek to influence its resolution through discourse.”12 Others have expanded the concept of multiple publics even further to include communities that have historically been excluded from the public sphere, but have alternatively created their own “counterpublic” spheres through the circulation of distinctive kinds of public discourse that have been marginalized from the mainstream. In particular, American scholars Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner have developed the alternative category of the counterpublic, defined by its conflicted relationship with the sociocultural structures and products of the hegemonic public sphere. This model of a counterpublic social space as the site for the construction of alternative and oppositional interpretations of culture and identity is the most productive for our understanding of the institutions, actors, and activities of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere. The following discussions will focus on the two leading Dalit literary organizations, the Bharatiya Dalit Sahitya Akademi and the Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh, and consider their constitution and activities within the rubric of the counterpublic.13 Subsequent chapters will pay specific attention to the counterpublic constructions of Dalit literary narratives themselves.

the BhARAtiYA DALit sAhitYA AKADeMi (inDiAn DALit LiteRARY AcADeMY, BDsA) I first visited the offices of the BDSA in the fall of 2004. They were housed in a ramshackle pink concrete building in Tagore Park, a neighborhood in far north Delhi’s Model Town. Outside on the wall of the building in this

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largely residential area hung a weathered but still splashy sign in blue, red, and white, announcing the BDSA’s presence within. Inside were several contiguous offices piled floor to ceiling with copies of the Akademi’s many publications, as well as several filing cabinets housing back issues of their fortnightly newsletter, “Himāyatī” (the Guardian). The newsletter, a four-page broadsheet, included articles about contemporary Dalit issues, editorials, and selections of Dalit literature (mostly poetry). It also included a list of the BDSA’s other publications: a long list of chapbooks and booklets, the price of many of which is under one hundred rupees, in solidarity with their mission to reach “the masses.”14 The founder and then-national president of the BDSA was Sohanpal Sumanakshar, a round, good-humored man with a booming voice, and his office was staffed largely by family members, including his wife and brother-in-law, the elderly and widely respected writer “Āchārya” (“Guide”) Guru Prasad. This was the home of the BDSA’s national offices, and there were around thirty other linked state and regional branches across India. Each branch office would sponsor publications of Dalit literature in the dominant language of their state or region and would also sponsor a conference or regional meeting of writers and activists annually or biannually. The BDSA prided itself on being an extremely public group, devoted to reaching as large an audience as possible, and both their outreach activities and short, inexpensive, and simply written publications are evidence of that goal. Their principal outreach activities were frequent one- or two-day conferences that drew consistently large crowds from region to region. All of the conferences followed the same format: first there would be a ritual garlanding of a large portrait of Ambedkar and the honorific introductions and garlanding of a panel of respected invitees, usually including Sumanakshar and Guru Prasad, one or two Dalit professors from regional Indian universities, and as many present and former Dalit members of state and national government as could be mustered. Then a series of rousing though well-worn speeches about issues relating to the uplifting of the downtrodden castes, such as the importance of education and the singular brilliance of Ambedkar’s social and political philosophy, were delivered by members of the panel. Next, a catered lunch for everyone in attendance was served, and the microphone would then be turned over to the audience, members of which lined up by the dozens to have a chance to perform a reading of their own, announce and distribute their own group’s newsletter or invitation to an upcoming meeting or rally, or just say a few general words against caste-based oppression and

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in support of Dalit equality. Finally, the BDSA handed out their “Ambedkar awards,” generally certificates bearing the name and logo of the BDSA and the name of the awardee as well as a small memento: a shawl, plaque, or small statuette of Ambedkar. The awards were in recognition of contributions to Dalit literature. In the functions I attended, the BDSA awarded an astounding number of these, creating a steady stream of people ascending the stage to accept their awards, which often continued for more than an hour. Each awardee would be professionally photographed shaking Sumanakshar’s hand and accepting his or her award, with the photo available a short time later for purchase when one-hour photo developers set up stalls outside the hall. Throughout the conference, photographers would also roam the audience, snapping candid shots. By mid-morning, there would be tarps covering the ground outside the meeting halls decorated with photos from the ongoing conference. Attendees scoured the displayed photographs for images of themselves, and business was brisk at thirty to forty rupees a photo. Also set up outside would be a number of vendors surrounded by all manner of posters, books, and paraphernalia bearing the image of Ambedkar. In addition to a vast array of Dalit publications—books of stories, poetry, or social science; literary journals; and a huge number of biographical pamphlets of Ambedkar, Phule, Kabir, or the Buddha—there were Ambedkar posters, stickers, snow globes, key chains, and playing cards.15 The audience at each of these conferences was large, ranging from hundreds to thousands of people depending on the location and nature of the conference.16 The audience tended to be made up of local and regional Dalit writers and activists, students, and a large number of people who would congregate simply to listen to the speeches, many of whom were extremely poor, illiterate, and unaccustomed to a progressive social and political setting. As a result, these conferences were extraordinary examples of the collective power of creating a counterpublic discursive space for people who are regularly marginalized from other, wider publics. The emphasis was on maximum participation and creating a collective identity through shared experience. As Gerard Hauser explains, “collective participation in rhetorical processes constitutes individuals as a public.”17 The BDSA conferences were performed such that the flow of rhetoric was not unidirectional, with the audience silently absorbing the words of the invited speakers. Rather, the microphone and the access to authority and expression it suggested eventually became available to everyone, establishing a shared Dalit public identity through common experience.

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The BDSA meetings themselves can therefore be considered microcosmic illustrations of the fundamental components of counterpublics: a selfrecognized community of participants is addressed and, importantly, is itself offered access to the microphone, allowing the participants to share in the circulation of public discourse. Such a coming together of literati and listener, respected guests and general audience, while clearly demarcated in their differentiated positioning on a raised stage and a lowered seating pit, nonetheless privileged a reflexive circulation of discourse. This shared space of expression celebrates the achievements and potential of the normally belittled and embattled Dalit individual, cementing a distinct and persuasive sense of a shared counterpublic identity among all its members. The meetings began formally with the garlanding and speeches of the respected, invited guests who are generally made up of members of the national office of the BDSA, better-known regional writers, and current or former members of state or national government. But the members of the attending public were themselves included, honored, and given a voice through the rituals of gaining access to the microphone during the open forum, dining communally, and being photographed onstage or with friends and family in the audience. The pomp and ceremony associated with these conferences, as well as the presentation of awards, was clearly of great consequence to many attendees; frequently when I visited writers or activists I met at these conferences in their homes, they proudly showed me prominent displays on their walls or in photo albums and display cabinets of years’ worth of photographs and certificates from BDSA events. It should also be noted that the venues—largely city halls and government auditoriums—of the BDSA events were carefully chosen to provide an added aura of political and social significance to the proceedings, and indeed this seemed to instill in the participants a certain rebellious thrill of exercising their counterpublic identity, of publicly proclaiming anti-Brahmin and pro-Dalit sentiment in public spaces that epitomize Brahminical establishment and mainstream Indian civil society in their usual public usages. These were not academic or political conferences in the sense that there was generally no dissension or debate among attendees, and no new literary theories or political strategies were necessarily proposed. Instead, these were gatherings where the audience established a spirit of strength and community listening to stories of Ambedkar and the poetry of resistance, browsing and collecting material marked with the images or language evocative of this community and event, eagerly posing for and snapping photos that

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would document their attendance and participation, and ultimately sharing in a common feeling of strength, agency, and self-worth, rendering the atmosphere jubilant. The audiences were large and faithful, always remaining until the tail end of the day, and the sense of community and shared commitment to a cause was palpable. The public activities of the BDSA thus constitute a communal and counterpublic space. According to Nancy Fraser, in her important essay, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” history records that members of subordinated social groups—women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians—have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics. I propose to call these subaltern counterpublics in order to signal that they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.18

Fraser’s goal in this essay is to elaborate a system of multiple publics, a system she sees as providing more participatory access to democratic social and political systems in stratified societies than the notion of a single, all-encompassing, and therefore homogenizing, public. Describing the nature of subaltern counterpublics, she writes, The point is that, in stratified societies, subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. On the one hand they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions that their emancipatory potential resides. This dialectic enables subaltern counterpublics partially to offset, although not wholly to eradicate, the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies.19

It is in this sense that we may be able to theoretically conceive of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere as a counterpublic, though we may dispense in this case with the term “subaltern.” It is true that the term resonates in the history and scholarly analysis of Indian society in particular, and the nature of a Dalit counterpublic is that it is made up of people marginalized from the mainstream public. Yet, the goal of both groups under

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discussion here is to break away from the constraints of the “subaltern” identity that has traditionally been used to define them and redefine themselves in alternative terms by developing and circulating alternative cultural and political discourses. The Hindi Dalit literary counterpublic—defined previously as the combination of printed and circulated literary texts, literary and activist institutions, media outlets, writers, critics, and readers of Dalit literature, as well as the shared spaces of public performance in the form of literary conferences, readings, and organizational meetings—provides a shared space where in theory any Dalit has right of access and may freely express his or her commonalities and differences. Thus various constituents of the Dalit counterpublic sphere create a space where disparate and materially disadvantaged communities of Dalits can regroup and fashion a public medium for spreading awareness, educating, and inciting an imagined singular Dalit public identity, a united social and political front in the struggle for equality and emancipation. The BDSA’s conferences performed several important functions in the construction and maintenance of one kind of Dalit counterpublic. They acted as a sort of refreshment of resolve (what Fraser refers to as a “space of withdrawal and regroupment”) for community members, many of whom work in related activist organizations or publish small newsletters. They also consistently attracted new members, making them feel included in the counterpublic community by offering them access to the discursive sphere. As often as they could, the BDSA invited political dignitaries to their meetings (at one conference I attended in New Delhi in 2004, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit made a brief appearance), not only lending weight to the social and political import of Dalit literature in the eyes of the audience but also frequently garnering mainstream media attention and thereby furthering the name recognition of the BDSA in the wider public. These conferences, then, served as community-building and identity-forging engagements that prepared the groundwork for more “agitational” activities, such as the burning of Raṅgbhūmi with which this book began, that functioned as direct public performative attacks on the hegemony of the mainstream social and cultural sphere. As Fraser explains, it is in the “dialectic between these two functions that the emancipatory potential resides.” The BDSA, through its populist approach, inexpensive and widely circulated publications, and well-attended conferences, pursued the dual tasks of bringing social and political awareness to a broad Dalit audience and channeling that awareness into public

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performances that challenged the complacent dominance of the public sphere from which they have traditionally been excluded.

the DALit LeKhAK sAṄGh (DALit WRiteRs FoRuM, DLs) While Habermas saw the public sphere as a space where rational-critical arguments existed without the influence of their proponents, the Hindi Dalit counterpublic opposes the dominant Hindi literary public because Dalit voices have not traditionally been represented within the dominant Hindi public sphere. The reason for establishing a Hindi Dalit counterpublic through the creation, dissemination, and analysis of alternative Dalit literary texts is to create a space where Dalit voices discuss and debate, free from the hegemonic practices of silencing that originate in the universalist nationalism of a dominant public sphere that refuses to recognize the distinct identities and perspectives of Dalits (and, one could argue, other groups as well, such as Muslims and women). Historically, Dalits have been kept out of the mainstream Indian social and political spheres, even though they make up the most “mainstream” community in India, comprising, depending on the source of the count, between 12 and 25 percent of the nation’s population.20 Though in recent decades Dalits have benefited from a system of reservations in the public sector, they still make up a disproportionate percentage of the nation’s poor, illiterate, and severely disadvantaged population.21 Essential to establishing the authority of the literary and social discourse that circulates in the Hindi Dalit literary sphere is its attribution to an “authentically Dalit” speaker or writer. Rather than being a space in which members are unmarked by their sociocultural identity, it is a sphere almost entirely composed of members who exist outside the wider Hindi public because of this very identity, fixed in their caste affiliation, and in fact itself remains a relatively closed space to those not marked as Dalit. There are a few extremely active non-Dalit members of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, such as Ramnika Gupta, editor of the quarterly magazine featuring Dalit and Adivasi (tribal) literature, Yuddhrat Ām Ādmi, and founder of the Ramnika Foundation, also dedicated to supporting and publishing literature of Dalits and Adivasis (Tribals).22 Haṁs editor Rajendra Yadav also regularly promoted the work of Dalit writers in his eminently respected Hindi monthly, yet the level and nature of both his and Gupta’s presence and participation has often been highly contested. They

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have been welcomed widely as supporters of Dalit literature, but when it has appeared that they are playing too big a role in shaping Dalit literature and criticism, or if attention to them withdraws attention from Dalit writers, tensions have immediately arisen. For example, Tej Singh, editor of Apekṣā (formerly labeled as the magazine of the Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh), left the DLS after a disagreement over hosting a function honoring Rajendra Yadav on his seventy-fifth birthday. This led to an ideological debate about the nature and mission of the DLS. Singh explained in an interview that he welcomes input from non-Dalit writers and critics in his magazine and in public discussion, but that he sees it as antithetical to the mission of the Dalit literary movement to spend resources promoting a non-Dalit writer, publisher, editor, or critic. To again invoke Chatterjee’s “politics of the governed,” the Hindi Dalit literary sphere is aware of its own “real heterogeneity,” or “the particular demands of cultural identity.” This means that embodying an identity that is “authentically Dalit” is essential for access to authoritative discourse and represents a counter-stance to the “unjust participatory privileges” of a mainstream public sphere that regularly excludes Dalits. This continued refusal to allow Dalit voices to engage in public mass communication, despite their increasing economic and political power, has been observed by proponents of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic. As Dalit journalist Chandra Bhan Prasad explains colorfully, “Ask a liberal newspaper editor to choose between allowing a Dalit writer to write on his opinion page or be shot dead and it is quite possible that for a fraction of a second, he might consider the latter option. A liberal captain of Indian industry, a postmodern Bollywood filmmaker and a subaltern academic don might just turn out to be like the editor in their own ways, with a few exceptions.”23 In the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, Dalits see the privilege of authoritative discourse as belonging solely to Dalits, fiercely protecting their alternative counterpublic against dilution from non-Dalits and from the threat against it as a space of identity formation and agitation. This protection of community borders does not mean, however, that there is no intersection or calculated exchange, with mainstream literary and social institutions. Based in Delhi, the Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh is the intellectual center for Hindi Dalit literature in North India. The organization operates on a much smaller scale than the BDSA, centering its activities around monthly, small-scale meetings of its members (typically twenty to thirty people, far fewer than in BDSA meetings), who engage in vigorous debate over pre-selected and pre-distributed Dalit literary texts. They meet in less

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ostentatious, but equally elite, spaces than the BDSA, including the conference rooms of the Sahitya Akademi and the Indian Social Institute (ISI) in Delhi. The DLS has taken advantage of online networking as well, hosting a website and Facebook page. Finally, individual members of the DLS also participate in non-Dalit-specific literary activities, often representing a “Dalit perspective.” Examples include the participation of general secretary Anita Bharti in a reading and critical discussion of the Hindi poet Manglesh Dabral in Delhi in 2007 and the presentations of Ajay Navaria and Omprakash Valmiki at the 2010 and 2012 Jaipur Literature Festival. The DLS also frequently sponsors more formal, academic conferences organized to honor a single figure who has contributed to the production and dissemination of Dalit literature or the release of a new text of Dalit literature or journalism. The DLS has a particularly close association with India’s Sahitya Akademi, also located in Delhi. Some of Hindi’s better-known and critically acclaimed Dalit writers, many of whom are regularly participating members of the DLS, have been awarded literary honors by the Sahitya Akademi. The two organizations have cosponsored book launches and literary roundtables. The Sahitya Akademi’s monthly publications, Indian Literature and Samkālin Bhāratīya Sāhitya (Contemporary Indian Literature), published in English and Hindi, have featured Dalit literature in Hindi or in translation from other Indian languages into Hindi or English.24 K. Satchidanandan, Hindi poet and secretary of the Sahitya Akademi from 1996 to 2006, has claimed a growing commitment of the Akademi in recent decades to the “democratization of Indian literature,” suggesting an increased interest and investment in the translation and publication of the works of Dalit, women, tribal, and regional writers.25 The DLS was founded in the late nineties by Dalit activist-writers Jaiprakash Kardam, Shatrughan Kumar, Kusum Viyogi, and Rajni Tilak. At its inception, their stated aim was to increase the awareness of Dalit literature across North India, to create jan-chetnā (mass consciousness), and to deliver Dalit literature into every home and village.26 The group evolved into a sophisticated community of activists, writers, critics, and intellectuals who have created a forum in which Dalit literature is read, analyzed, criticized, and debated, in order to further develop the genre. According to former president Dr. Vimal Thorat, “The Dalit Lekhak Sangh is trying to fulfill the responsibility of deciding what direction Dalit writing is taking, and developing that consciousness across India.”27

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But it is debatable whether the activities of the DLS helped bring an awareness of Dalit literature to “the masses,” or whether the group more aptly created a specialized forum for Dalit intellectuals to debate the nuanced issues of literary representation, identity, and aesthetics. Debates and discussions of what constitutes “authentic” Dalit literature are nowhere more animated than among the members of the DLS. Debates focus on the question of representing “reality.” Some suggest that, for Dalits, there is a single collective reality of external oppression and internal resistive strength that must be represented in Dalit literature so as to explicitly tie it to the social movement. Others argue for a multiplicity of Dalit experiences and voices and call for a widening of Dalit literature to account for multiple realities, even questioning internal hierarchies and patriarchies within Dalit society itself.28 The DLS has affiliated itself with Ambedkarite and Buddhist activist groups in other cities across North India, and members regularly traveled to conferences throughout Hindi-speaking regions to increase awareness of Dalit literature in Hindi. However, the literary conversations and debates that formed the basis of the future development of Dalit literature took place largely within more insular groups of Delhi-based Dalit authors and intellectuals. The DLS held meetings and sponsored conferences that definine and promote Dalit literature, such as the controversial function for Rajendra Yadav’s birthday. Yadav was an important post-Independence Hindi fiction writer, and, since 1986, editor of the Hindi literary monthly Haṁs (a journal inaugurated by Premchand in 1930). Yadav was always an important supporter of Dalit literature in Hindi, publishing Dalit stories and poems, including a 2004 special issue of Haṁs solely dedicated to Dalit authors.29 He explains that when he began publishing Haṁs, he focused on progressive, left-oriented literature but gradually came to realize that the most radical and powerful literature was coming from women and Dalits.30 He regarded Dalit literature as the future of vernacular Indian literature, the vehicle for voices that can no longer be suppressed, and which no doubt will come to dominate the Hindi literary scene. As testament to this, Dalit writer and DLS member Ajay Navaria was the guest editor for the 2009 summer special issue of Haṁs, an issue dedicated to young writers and new perspectives in Hindi literature.31 Yadav made a symbolic and significant choice to appoint such a prolific writer and vociferous advocate of Dalit literature to edit an issue not solely about Dalit literature, but about new trends and developments in Hindi writing more broadly.

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At the conference in Yadav’s honor, several writers, both Dalit and nonDalit, spoke about the importance of Haṁs as a mainstream literary vehicle in the fight against literary elitism and savarṇ (upper-caste) literary exclusivity. Vimal Thorat claimed a continuum between the work of Haṁs and the DLS, suggesting that while Haṁs laid the groundwork for challenging the limits of “traditional” literature, the DLS is continuing that project by creating and promoting work that privileges the Dalit perspective. Yadav in turn praised the DLS for creating a forum to increase communication among Dalit writers and attempting to bring them together. It is clear that the relationship between the DLS and Yadav was mutually beneficial; he provided them with mainstream credibility and a popular, widely read forum for publication, while they provided him with cuttingedge, contemporary writing that contributes to Yadav’s commitment to publishing progressive literature. The preceding examples suggest that the DLS uses the institutional authority of the national, government-sponsored Sahitya Akademi, as well as the platform of the long-standing, popular literary magazine Haṁs to claim its separate space as a counterpublic and to assert its social and literary identity. Such activities are indicative of a willingness to operate less as a discordant entity opposed to the norms of the dominant social and literary public, but rather as an integrated, enriching addition to the rhetorical space of the dominant public. The DLS is aware of its subalterneity in the face of the dominant Hindi discursive sphere, and it has committed to erasing the hierarchical distinction—not by an aggressive countercampaign, but by working to assert and insert into this established sphere a new recognition and respect for alternative Dalit discourse. Like the literary-activist conferences of the BDSA, other activities of the DLS illustrate Fraser’s “spaces of withdrawal and regroupment,” or the discursive practices of identity formation and consensus building. Regular kahānī-pāṭhs (story readings) feature two different authors who read their work aloud to an audience, followed by commentary by a panel of other Dalit writers, activists, and critics. (The stories were distributed ahead of time by mail so that participants could read them in advance.) The literary debate was both critical and constructive, centering largely around the faithfulness of the stories to “Ambedkarite philosophy,” a concept invoked as a benchmark of quality in Dalit literature,32 as well as clarity of language and use of innovative metaphors or literary images. In the discussions I witnessed, the audience included writers and intellectuals, many of whom are Dalit, but not all. According to Navaria, the group’s

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discussions about literature focused on issues of style, content, and the representation of recurring social problems. Major questions for the evaluation of new Dalit writing include: What is the emotional impact of the story? Does it incite the reader to action or struggle? How close is the language of the story to that of the readership it claims to represent or speak to? Is the story also relevant and accessible to non-Dalits? Does the narrative reach a level that is more complex than simple description? Navaria, informed by his own position as a university lecturer, is aware of the need for a body of Dalit literature that is relevant for teaching at higher levels of education. Further, Vimal Thorat has compiled literary materials on a syllabus for the first ever postgraduate degree concentration in Dalit studies, offered at Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in Delhi.33 There is a growing impetus to develop a scholarly canon of Dalit literature in India, and the DLS is a central figure in that project.34 Although the DLS has been committed to establishing the Dalit literary field in higher education, as well as in more elite circles of Hindi literature through regular publication in magazines like Haṁs, much of the literary debate continues to focus on how the literature speaks to “the masses,” and how well it serves the broader social movement. At a reading in late July 2004, an interesting debate emerged among DLS members over the story “Badbū” (“Stench”) by Dalit writer Surajpal Chauhan.35 The story involves a family of Bhangis, or sweepers, living in a small town outside Delhi. The simple narrative follows a young woman, educated through the ninth class, who is married into this sweeper family and, soon after her wedding, finds herself accompanying her mother-inlaw on her daily excursions to clean latrines, carrying human waste in a basket on top of her head. The story depicts how a bright young girl, at first horrified by the prospect of taking part in this work, is slowly conditioned to accept it. Chauhan’s aim, he explained, was to show that this kind of work still happens, as well as to show the depths to which a bright young mind can sink when the rhetoric of social backwardness and inequality is deeply engrained. What seemed like a straightforward, moving depiction of people forced to carry out inhumane work drew criticism from group members. The most controversial point in the story occurs when an upper-caste housewife notices the new girl cleaning her latrine and begins to question her. When she discovers that the girl has had some education, the upper-caste woman admonishes the mother-in-law for dragging her new daughter-inlaw into this filthy work and suggests that the girl might have some other

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opportunities. The mother-in-law replies simply that this is her family’s work, and the girl is expected to lend a hand now that she has married their son. This drew fire from some other writers, who suggested that it was not “realistic” to think that the Brahmins who employ these sweepers would think more progressively than the Dalit characters, indeed, that it was “against Ambedkarite philosophy” and harmful to the movement to suggest that Brahmins want to change Dalit society and Dalits do not. More specifically, another Dalit writer criticized Chauhan for misrepresenting this community, explaining that she was familiar with this particular Bhangi neighborhood and that, although once this kind of work was prevalent among them, the community has since refused to carry out the transportation of human excreta. This writer charged that it was deeply harmful to not clearly ground the story in historical time, thus suggesting that this was still presently happening, and thereby robbing a community of its hard-fought social progress and political consciousness. Others wanted Chauhan to somehow remind his readers that the opposite of this story is also often true, that Dalit families sometimes make great sacrifices so that their children, including their daughters, are educated and able to pursue legitimate jobs. These critiques underscore the importance of representing reality in Dalit literature. In his well-received critical text Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, Sharankumar Limbale explains that the foundation of the Dalit literary aesthetic is that it is “life-affirming and realistic.”36 This exigency was made clear in the charges from some audience members that Chauhan’s story propagates a negative community image and suggests progressivism on the part of a Brahmin character but obstinacy on the part of a Dalit. Still, other members defended Chauhan’s story and argued for the right of Dalit authors to represent all kinds of different realities, even those that might not paint Dalit characters in their best light. Indeed, in many of my discussions with Dalit writers, there were shades of an internal critique, of a growing awareness of problems and inconsistencies—including jāti hierarchy and patriarchal supremacy— within the Dalit community itself that need to be addressed. Yet these issues are considered by many in the Hindi Dalit counterpublic to be a danger to the construction of a collective Dalit public identity by introducing divisiveness. Others, however, argue that Dalit literature can only be stronger by being more inclusive. Respected literary activist Ramnika Gupta, a major proponent and publisher of Dalit literature, said in this meeting that, although it is indeed the responsibility of Dalit writers to

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offer hope and the possibility of progressive change, Chauhan’s story represents one truth in a society that harbors many different truths. And citing a distressing lack of women Dalit writers, she also urged Dalit women who dislike how they are being represented in literature to themselves contribute to the growing body of Dalit writing. Indeed, on the topic of gender, the DLS regarded itself—the makeup of its leadership and its membership—as leading by example within the larger Dalit counterpublic. A focus for some group members is the question of equal gender representation, as Dalit women writers are vastly outnumbered by men writers. Indeed, many Dalit women activists and intellectuals criticize Dalit activist leadership for perpetuating patriarchal norms. Dr. Vimal Thorat said of her election as the group’s president in 2003, “. . . For the Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh to take this step, to hand over the responsibility of the presidency to a woman, is a very big leap of faith. This is a symbol of that point of view under which the DLS was founded, that the writers’ movement is promoting. It is a symbol of the principle of equality. It seems to me that this is very influential. This in itself is a very big symbol of progressivism.”37 Increasingly, female members of the DLS are fostering a feminist community of voices within the Hindi Dalit literary sphere. Many Dalit women writers feel keenly that their voices are marginalized within the counterpublic discourse, and they are frequently made to feel under attack by male writers who construe feminist expression as aggression toward Dalit men and as a divisive influence on the counterpublic identity.38 Nevertheless, committed Dalit women writers are creating a distinct space within the counterpublic for Dalit women’s discourse. On March 13, 2005, I attended a meeting led by Thorat, Rajni Tilak, and Anita Bharti to honor the 108th birthday of Savitribai Phule, wife of early twentieth-century Marathi Dalit social activist Jotirao Phule and a woman widely regarded to be the first Dalit woman teacher. At this meeting of about thirty women, many were Dalit students from Delhi regional colleges, students invited especially by Thorat. Discussion focused on the importance of Dalit women writing about their own lives and how it is every educated Dalit woman’s responsibility to encourage feminist representation and awareness in the fields of Dalit literature and activism. The Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh has been successful in supporting the development of Dalit literature in Hindi, and it has addressed issues of caste and gender in the pages of mainstream magazines and public meetings held in elite academic institutions such as the Sahitya Akademi and the Indian

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Social Institute in Delhi. Thus, although the DLS maintained a focused and distinctive discursive space all its own and therefore acted, without a doubt, as its own counterpublic, it is also connecting with the Dalit literary counterpublic and the wider Hindi public sphere. Unlike the BDSA, whose social and political stance has been defiant, the DLS has tailored both its activities and its rhetoric toward integration with a larger, discursive, non-Dalit community. Certainly, the close affiliation of the DLS with Haṁs and Rajendra Yadav, its efforts to create a stronger presence of Dalit literature in Indian academics, and the increasing participation of member-authors such as Valmiki and Navaria in international forums such as the Jaipur Literature Festival point to a desire for Dalit writing to reach the Hindi and Indian literary mainstreams. Literature, by definition, privileges a literate audience, although, like the BDSA, the DLS tried not to limit its reach to those who subscribe to progressive literary journals. At a conference in September 2004 sponsored by the Ambedkar Buddha Mission in Varanasi in honor of South Indian anti-Brahmanism activist and political leader Periyar’s birthday, several members of the DLS recited their poetry to a packed, rapt audience of listeners, some of whom appeared to be encountering Dalit literature for the first time. The sound system was faulty, and the echo in the hall made their voices almost unintelligible, so the audience called for them to perform their poetry, to abandon the microphone and join the audience and shout. It was a powerful reminder of the bonds between mostly urban, educated Dalit writers and their primary audience, their own community. These discussions bring home the notion that the Hindi Dalit counterpublic includes diverse organizations with differing missions, perspectives, and strategies. Yet they are united by an allegiance to the ideology of Ambedkar and creating an active Dalit public sphere that demands recognition and respect from the dominant mainstream public.

concLusion The counterpublic model for understanding the Hindi Dalit literary sphere encompasses all of the debate and contradictions that exist simultaneously within it, and it avoids the simplistic and misleading characterization of itself as a single chorus of social resistance. Central to this model is the idea that a public “is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.”39 Rather than characterize all Dalit writing—poetry, fiction, autobiography, criticism, or journalism—as a singular mode of

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oppositional discourse, it is far more accurate and productive to consider the Hindi Dalit literary sphere as a space for encountering and exchanging diverse discourses. Each discourse is relevant to the contemporary Dalit experience in Indian society and is missing from the discourse of the dominant public. The Hindi Dalit literary sphere is comprised of debate and discussion about Dalit experiences, aesthetics, politics, identity, and so on. It is not merely a homogenized cry for equality and social justice. It includes the voices of Dalit feminists who decry the “double” or even “triple” oppression of Dalit women40 in caste society and within the patriarchal structures of their own communities and homes, and it includes the arguments of people like provocative Dalit journalist Chandra Bhan Prasad, who eschews the normative socialist ideal of the Dalit counterpublic and argues instead for capitalist development and the creation of a Dalit bourgeoisie.41 It is a space for discourse that privileges, above all others, the voices of Dalits. The Dalit counterpublic is the forum for many debates, including the heated debate over the place of Premchand in Dalit literary history that will be addressed in the next chapter. Finally, the varied imaginations of the world that the counterpublic both represents and orients itself towards are necessary to its organization. Warner explains that a counterpublic operates as a self-organized entity, and that a public exists as a kind of self-recognized community of participants who are addressed through public discourse. Such selfrecognition through discursive address is evident in BDSA conferences, as well as in the emphasis on reality and authentic representations of Dalit communities in DLS literary discussions. It is also evident in the kind of Dalit narrative that calls upon a generalized Dalit public to stand up, represent themselves, and join the fight for social equality. Take, for example, Rajni Tilak’s poem “They want to divide us”: They want to divide us In the false perplexity of subcastes Into Balmiki, Raigar, Chamar, Khatik, Dhanuk, Kanjar, and Adivasi. Manu says hate the lower castes, Consider them lower than even the second and third, Then their status will be fixed And casteism will flourish. Don’t go along with their prescription. Their purpose is to set us against each other.

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The formidable tree of Brahmanism, Rooted in inequality, Should not flower and bear fruit. We have to fight against inequality, To create language, expand knowledge; Only then will we make a casteless society.42

In this poem, Tilak employs what literary scholar Barbara Harlow has identified as a key strategy for texts of social and political resistance, which emphasizes “the social and political transformation from a genealogy of filiation based on ties of kinship, ethnicity, race or religion to an affiliative secular order.”43 Tilak urges her audience not to be divided by the copious subcaste identities imposed by the upper castes on the lower, but rather to subscribe to a broader, collective Dalit identity by creating language and expanding knowledge for the ultimate goal of a casteless society. It should also be noted that, for many Dalits, the term Dalit itself is not a mere replacement for untouchable, ex-untouchable, harijan, or scheduled caste (SC). Rather, Dalit designates a subset of these wider categories who are politically aware, motivated, and participant in the Dalit struggle, and who actively identify themselves with the counterpublic.44 As the following chapter makes clear, to be identified as Dalit in this counterpublic is to be aligned with a certain political consciousness, a consciousness that finds expression in the literature that is the focus of this book. To answer, therefore, the question posed at the beginning of this discussion—what is the Dalit public sphere counter to?—the focus is on the creative impulse of Dalit literature to establish a Dalit public identity from a Dalit perspective, to resist the various identities of exploited victim, reviled criminal, silenced majority, and illiterate innocent that have been forced upon them by caste hierarchies. Members of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic resist being silenced. This is clear not only in the institutional groupings and activities discussed here, but also in the pursuit of literary criticism, history, and aesthetics that the rest of the chapters in the book explore. In the same way that Tilak exhorts her readers to “create language, expand knowledge,” Dalit writers and activists are themselves engaged, within the space of their own counterpublic sphere, in a struggle for power and authority over their own representation.

9 2 0 The Problem of Premchand

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his chapter returns to the specter of Munshi Premchand in the Hindi Dalit counterpublic sphere and considers the ways in which members of the groups discussed in chapter 1 have engaged in public criticism of Premchand’s works representing Dalit characters. Foremost among these has been his famous short story “Kafan” (“The Shroud,” 1936). The Dalit debate over this story illlustrates two fundamental aspects of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic. First, it serves as a case in point of the kind of radical re-reading of mainstream Dalit literary criticism that constitutes the political “difference” of the Dalit literary perspective. Second, the particularly contentious topic of “Kafan” among Dalit writers also serves to highlight many of the fissures within the Dalit counterpublic sphere, most prominently along gender lines, and demonstrates that there is no single Dalit point of view. What is significant about the ongoing debates over Premchand and his treatment of Dalit issues and characters is that they reveal the construction and negotiation of multiple counterpublic identities within a single space. The debates over Premchand and “Kafan” use the iconic author and his writing as a jumping-off point to negotiate disparate sub-identities and agendas within the Dalit counterpublic sphere that fracture along multiple fault lines, particularly that of gender. Though “Kafan” is widely appreciated in the Indian literary mainstream as a particularly sensitive portrayal of the societal degradation of Dalits, contemporary Dalit critics rethink the story’s significance through the lens of Dalit chetnā. The growing articulation of a Dalit feminist rhetorical identity is also refracted in continued debates over “Kafan,” as are the responsibilities all Dalit writers

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shoulder in representing the “reality” of Dalit life and imagining the utopian possibilities of a transformed social order. “Kafan” is one of several Premchand stories that sympathetically considers Dalit social degradation in rural Indian society, an innovation for modern Indian literature in the early decades of the twentieth century. Such stories by Premchand, none quite so controversial, include “Sadgati,” “Ghāsvāli,” “Dūdh kā Dām” (discussed in the Introduction), and “Ṭhākur kā Kuāṁ.”1 “Kafan” is about two Dalit characters, Ghisu and Madhav, a father and son, both from the Chamar caste. When the story opens, Ghisu and Madhav are sitting outside their small hut eating roasted potatoes and trying to ignore the screams of Madhav’s wife inside who is dying in childbirth. Neither will go inside to see her, out of a certain amount of shame, and each also fears that the other will guzzle down more than his fair share of potatoes. Finally, bellies full, they lie down to sleep in front of the dying fire. Premchand explains that the two are known as the laziest people in the village, that in their pursuit of doing as little work as possible, they live on the edge of starvation. Premchand writes, A society in which those who labored night and day were not in much better shape than these two; a society in which compared to the peasants, those who knew how to exploit the peasants’ weaknesses were much better off—in such a society, the birth of this kind of mentality was no cause for surprise. We’ll say that compared to the peasants, Ghisu was more insightful; and instead of joining the mindless group of peasants, he had joined the group of clever, scheming tricksters. Though indeed, he wasn’t skillful in following the rules and customs of the tricksters. Thus while other members of his group became chiefs and headmen of villages, at him the whole village wagged its finger. But still, he did have the consolation that if he was in bad shape, at least he wasn’t forced to do the backbreaking labor of the peasants, and others didn’t take improper advantage of his simplicity and voicelessness.2

When Madhav’s wife Budhiya and stillborn child are found dead in the morning, Ghisu and Madhav set out begging for the money to pay for the wood and shroud required for her cremation. They manage to collect five rupees and arrange the wood for the cremation, but balk at spending the rest of their money on a shroud that will only be burned up with the body. Instead, they spend the money on liquor and fried snacks, and

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as they become more and more drunk, they alternately praise Madhav’s wife for her gift of abundance after death and bemoan her difficult and joyless life. The story ends with father and son drinking themselves into oblivion, abandoning the pretense of providing for the final rites of Budhiya’s corpse. It is impossible to overstate the prominence of Premchand in north Indian literary and cultural imagination. Significantly, he was the first noteworthy, modern Hindi writer to represent low caste and low-class characters in his writings. He is thus heralded not only for the influence of his realist style on modern Hindi and Urdu prose writing but also for the social conscience evident in many of his literary works. According to Indian literary historian Sisir Kumar Das, “Premchand is the greatest artist of the suffering of untouchables, not only because of his great anxiety for the century-long oppression of the Harijans, but for his uncanny sense of realism with which he presents the characters belonging to the oppressed group, free from all sentimentality and pious idealism.”3 Francesca Orsini suggests in a collection of Premchand’s writings in English translation, “His strong social conscience and radical politics, which brought him closer and closer to socialism, were rooted in an utterly secular and inclusive view of the Indian nation, which makes him a particularly valuable and rare role model these days.”4 Some more cautiously suggest, however, that Premchand’s attitude toward Dalits was steeped in Gandhian rhetoric, decrying the contemporary deterioration of social relations between castes rather than challenging the caste system itself. Further, while Premchand did address the plight of Dalits in his fiction in his career, it was from a sympathetic, rather than revolutionary, perspective.5 Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, in his extensive study of the representation of Dalits in Premchand’s writings, extols Premchand’s “idealism” in presenting Dalit characters who are more honest and upstanding than his upper-caste characters. But Upadhyay also points out that Premchand wrote from a Hindu reformist and socialist-Marxist point of view, ignoring lower caste protest movements and having himself little direct experience with Dalits.6 He looks at “Kafan,” one of the last stories Premchand published, as an aberration from his usual critiques of caste, reading the complete dehumanization of the main characters in the story as a particularly pointed critique of society’s disposal of them. He writes, “[They] . . . exist completely outside society except for the purpose of bare survival. Besides this, they do not have any need for society, as the latter does not have any need for them. They are fully outcast.”7

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Dalit writers, however, take exception to the nuanced social critique in “Kafan.” In Premchand’s brand of realism, sometimes a corrupt system breeds corrupt victims, as in this story, largely regarded in mainstream Hindi literary histories as one of his best because of the canniness of his social critique. Geetanjali Pandey writes, for example, “‘Kafan’ has Premchand at his realistic and tragic best. He brings out with sure and subtle touches the alienation and dehumanization that institutionalized injustice and poverty can produce.”8

a lack of Dalit chetnā Although Premchand, as one of the few important Hindi authors of the twentieth century to actually address caste and untouchability in his writings, has always been under the critical gaze of the Dalit counterpublic, the BDSA’s burning of his novel Raṅgbhūmi renewed many of the old Premchand debates and made them urgent once again. The book burning, in all its attention-grabbing intent, made the counterpublic debates about Premchand visible in the mainstream public sphere, and many Dalit writers found themselves at pains to contribute to the counterpublic’s positioning vis-a-vis the literary icon. In the months after the book burning, Dalit writers and literary critics hashed out the significance of their critical stance towards Premchand and consequently the standards by which they differentiate between Dalit and non-Dalit literature. Many Dalit writers condemned Premchand’s depiction of the two Chamar characters in “Kafan” as such heartless and lazy drunks, paying little attention to the critique of institutionalized inequality that produces such characters, a critique that is clear in Premchand’s story. For example, BDSA president Sumanakshar comments in the prominent Delhi-based Hindi Dalit literary journal Apekṣā, In six lakh villages in the country today you can go into any Dalit settlement and not find a single man with such a lack of sympathy. On the contrary the members of their families show more love and compassion to one another than upper caste families. True love in mutual relations only really occurs among Dalits so why would Premchand make such a characterization of them in “Kafan”? Only so that he could win the praises of the upper caste Brahmins and have them call his work “literature.” Premchand indeed won the praises of the Brahmins and was bestowed with the rank of emperor for his literature which displays Dalits as loveless, soulless, base characters.9

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This kind of critique—suggesting that all Dalits by nature are inherently more humanist and compassionate than members of the upper castes— seems at first easy to dismiss as purely ideological, neither literary nor realistic. Indeed, this kind of blatant stereotyping is sometimes typical of subaltern political discourses, an obvious, and perhaps overdone, corrective to long histories of demeaning rhetoric directed toward marginal communities that has strengthened and protected the hierarchical status quo. Barbara Harlow has highlighted such aggrandizement of the benevolent nature of oppressed communities by their leaders in Resistance Literature. Here she quotes Maxime Rodinson from his book People Without a Country: the Kurds and Kurdistan: Ideology always goes for the simplest solutions. It does not argue that an oppressed people is to be defended because it is oppressed and to the exact extent to which it is oppressed. On the contrary, the oppressed are sanctified and every aspect of their actions, their culture, their past, present and future behavior is presented as admirable. Direct or indirect narcissism takes over and the fact that the oppressed are oppressed becomes less important than the admirable way they are themselves. The slightest criticism is seen as criminal sacrilege. In particular, it becomes quite inconceivable that the oppressed might themselves be oppressing others. In an ideological conception, such an admission would simply imply that the object of admiration was flawed and hence in some sense deserving of past or present oppression.10

Kancha Ilaiah, Telugu Dalit activist and intellectual, often provides categorical descriptions of the differences between Dalit and “Hindu” societies that appear grounded in a similarly simplified ideology. For example, he writes about Dalits in his influential Why I am not a Hindu, “In these societies, hegemonic relations in the forms that are visible among the Hindus are absent. . . . Among the Hindus the man-woman relationship is conditioned by manipulation and deceptivity [sic]. Dalitbahujan relationships on the other hand are based on openness.”11 Author Meera Nanda, in a recent review of Ilaiah’s latest book, Post-Hindu India, expresses frustration with this kind of categorical statement, “The wild generalisations that abound in this and Why I am not a Hindu could have easily been avoided had Ilaiah bothered to check his raw feelings against the available sociological and anthropological data. For all his insistence that Dalit-Bahujans and Adivasis are the custodians of scientific temper,

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Ilaiah himself does not exhibit a great deal of social scientific methodology in his writings.”12 But when we put Sumanakshar’s seemingly similar critique into the context of an emerging Dalit critical discourse, his claims begin to take on more weight. Sumanakshar charges Premchand with creating negative Dalit characters to win the praise of an elite Brahmin readership who would exult in finding confirmation of their opinion of Dalits as slovenly, inhuman creatures. For Sumanakshar, such debased characters are not “realistic,” and his notion of realism is inextricable from the exigencies of honor and forthrightness embodied in the concept of Dalit chetnā. His notion of realism is deeply entwined with an idealistic perspective of Dalit society as ultimately humane and compassionate, and Sumanakshar believes that any “realistic” Dalit character would be representative of that ideal. He regards Premchand’s depiction of Ghisu and Madhav as devious and selfish characters, and therefore as false and inauthentic representatives of a Dalit community under vicious attack by a non-Dalit writer interested in catering to the casteist ideology of the dominant public. Sumanakshar and others weave their ideological critique into a novel discourse of aesthetic critique. “Authentic” realism is defined in Dalit readings of Premchand by the critical lens of Dalit chetnā. The first line of Sharankumar Limbale’s Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature reads, “By Dalit literature I mean writing about Dalits by Dalit writers with a Dalit consciousness.” He goes on to define Dalit consciousness: “The Dalit consciousness in Dalit literature is the revolutionary mentality connected with struggle. Ambedkarite thought is the inspiration for this consciousness. Dalit consciousness makes slaves conscious of their slavery. Dalit consciousness is an important seed for Dalit literature, it is separate and distinct from the consciousness of other writers. Dalit literature is demarcated as unique because of this consciousness.”13 Omprakash Valmiki writes of Dalit consciousness in his book, Dalit Sāhitya kā Saundaryashāstra (Aesthetics of Dalit Literature), “Dalit chetnā is deeply concerned with the question, ‘Who am I? What is my identity?’ The strength of character of Dalit authors comes from these questions.”14 Dalit chetnā is based on the liberation ideology of Ambedkar, expressed in a text in which a Dalit character is fully cognizant of the religious and political origins of his exploited social status, and rather than succumbing to acceptance, he is enlivened by a desire to struggle for freedom, not just for himself, but for his whole community.15 This spirit of impassioned struggle for the collective good is regarded by Dalit writers as an ideal message. It is a loyal

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expression of the Ambedkarite message of the human dignity of Dalits. It is Dalit experience rendered realistically, but for many Dalit writers, then, the question of whether the Dalit experience has been depicted realistically is also dependent upon how honorably the Dalit character is portrayed. According to some, a lack of Dalit chetnā can come from confusion between caste and class-related oppression. Omprakash Valmiki (1950– 2013), one of the most celebrated contemporary Hindi Dalit writers, also finds fault with Premchand’s characterization of the Dalit men in “Kafan,” suggesting in his article “Premchand: Sandarbh Dalit Vimarsh” (“Premchand: Context of the Dalit Debate”) that the author wrongly conflates Dalits with farmers and peasants who face economic exploitation but who do not suffer from specific problems of caste inequality. Valmiki writes, On one hand in his works he writes about the goal of changing one’s heart, on the other hand he also reprimands Dalits for drinking alcohol and eating the meat of dead animals. The characters of Ghisu and Madhav in his story “Kafan” are Chamars, but the story does not raise any issue that is related to the problems of Chamars or Dalits. There is only a detailed depiction of their idleness and heartlessness. Even leftist critics believe this story of Premchand’s to be his best and most artistic. Many critics say that Ghisu and Madhav are representative of the agricultural class that is known as the lumpen proletariat.16

The charge here—that Premchand ignores the caste-related abuses faced by Dalits in a Marxist-leftist outlook on Indian society—is not uncommon among Dalit writers and critics. Valmiki argues further, “Not just Premchand, but several Hindi writers, thinkers, and critics put all farmers, laborers, and Dalits in the same box when they think about them. But all these people do not have the same problems; caste is purely a religious and social issue, one that influences every other aspect of life. In Premchand’s works, this is a point of confusion. He sees this from a stance of idealism and reformism.”17 The reformism that Valmiki denigrates here is the process of “sanskritization,” suggested by Premchand’s exhortations (as read by Valmiki) to Dalits to stop consuming alcohol and meat. This idea of social reform, common in the nationalist era but rejected by Ambedkar, places the responsibility of the abjectness of Dalits squarely at their own feet as a result of their own “dirty” habits and further suggests that by emulating Brahminical caste practices they could raise

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themselves out of destitution. Like Sumanakshar, Valmiki sees an unfair attack on all of Dalit society in the representation of the characters of Ghisu and Madhav. Unlike Sumanakshar, however, Valmiki suggests this is due to Premchand’s misguided belief in the primacy of poverty over untouchability as the reason for Ghisu and Madhav’s depravity. In these critiques it becomes clear that the boundaries of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic are located squarely in the interpretive framework of caste, and Dalit critics are careful to mark their ideological difference from Marxist thinkers. Caste and its attendant problems, are, in their thinking, entirely separate from economic inequality, which is a symptom of social oppression rather than its cause. Premchand is relegated to the margins of the counterpublic space by figures such as Valmiki, then, for failing to recognize the primacy of caste over class in the Dalit worldview. Similarly, the point comes up again and again in Dalit counterpublic discourse that, in matters of social reform, Premchand was a follower of Gandhi, not Ambedkar. This is significant for Dalit writers who claim that Dalit consciousness was inspired solely by Ambedkar and who view Gandhi as a traitor to Dalits in the name of national unity. The disagreement between Ambedkar and Gandhi over separate electorates for Dalits, Gandhi’s fast in opposition, and the ultimate resolution in the form of the Pune Pact arise regularly as examples of Premchand’s infidelity to Dalits, as he wrote at the time in support of Gandhi.18 Valmiki writes, When Gandhi did his fast unto the death over the question of separate electorates in Yarvada Jail, Premchand wrote continuously on this subject. But he too saw these problems with exactly the same perspective as Gandhi-ji, he too shared in the same opinion with every Hindu author, politician, and thinker. He too exhorted Dalits to put faith in nationalism (rāṣṭrīya-dharm), despite the hellish lives they lived, attacks they suffered, and inferior lives full of insult they were forced to face.19

Mohandas Naimishray, another of Hindi Dalit literature’s most widely respected and translated authors, adds, “Was Premchand a storyteller with a Dalit consciousness? The concept of Dalit consciousness is so well-defined that it is not possible to attribute it to Premchand. He was a Kayasth by birth and Dalits cannot be blind to this fact. . . . During Ambedkar’s Mahar movement when the Manusmṛti was burned, Premchand kept silent and this is sufficient basis to say that he was not a Dalit writer.”20 For Valmiki and Naimishray, Premchand’s political affiliations and public

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expression outside of literature are intrinsic to his ability to understand and convey a sense of Dalit consciousness. For Valmiki, it is the problem of Premchand’s vociferous support of Gandhi in the matter of nationalist politics that precludes him from being considered a representative of Dalit interests in literature. For Naimishray, it is the very nature of his caste identity and lack of affiliation with Ambedkar’s infamous counterpublic performance of burning the Manusmṛti, the obvious inspiration for the more recent BDSA performance, that makes Premchand incapable of expressing Dalit consciousness in any of his works. True to the form of counterpublic discourse, however, there is another side to the literary and ideological debate over Premchand, one that suggests Hindi Dalit writers need to rethink the ways they evaluate literature. Anita Bharti, Dalit feminist writer and activist and secretary of the DLS, critiques the reactionary responses of members of the Dalit community, such as the BDSA, who refuse to acknowledge Premchand as a forebear of Dalit literature. She writes in defense of Premchand as a singular luminary among other Hindi writers, Why do Dalit writers oppose Premchand? On one hand they believe that besides “Kafan” his stories “Ṭhākur kā Kuāṁ,” “Pus kī Rāt,” “Sadgati,” and “Ghāsvālī” to be great Dalit stories, but on the other hand, on the subject of “Kafan” they label him with epithets like “anti-Dalit” and “non-Dalit”. If we were to make a comparison between Premchand’s Dalit characters and the Dalit characters of other Hindi writers, then we can decidedly conclude that Premchand’s characters are much more prominent, argumentative, fearless, rebellious, and willing to clash with Brahminism.21

She further suggests that some Dalit writers also have depicted Dalit characters who are less than sympathetic, but that these writers have not faced the same kind of criticism as Premchand because they are Dalit. Bharti censures Dalit writers who reserve their criticism for non-Dalit writers: “Doubtless it is because Dalit writers are also casteist; they all sit in their own circles and consider themselves to be better than anyone else.”22 Her chief claim is that Dalit women are defamed by Dalit male writers in public discourse in a similar way as these two Chamar characters by Premchand, and yet no one considers this to be hypocritical. Bharti’s comments suggest here the existence of feminist critique within this literary-political community, adding yet another layer to the growing complexity of shared counterpublic discourse.

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Other writers, some non-Dalit but writing from the platform of the Dalit counterpublic, have warned against defining Dalit literary reception along caste lines to the mission of promoting Dalit literature in the broader public sphere. Literary critic Mohammad Azhar Dherivala, in the Dalit journal Apekṣā, suggests that an expansion of the definition of Dalit consciousness could in fact uncover supportive representations of Dalits in Indian literature going back long before Ambedkar. By dividing contemporary authors, writers, and poets into “Dalit writers” and “non-Dalit writers,” we are not only divisive but also appear to have an agenda. If these arbitrary divisions continue, then a specific meaning of “Dalit consciousness” will be accepted as tied to a specific class. The danger arises that the questions stemming from “Dalit consciousness” will remain suppressed and authors will fear depicting these kinds of incidents. Another concern arising from this kind of division is that “Dalit literature” and “savarṇ literature” may be arbitrarily separated. In so doing, we inflict upon literature a hierarchical division. In trying to impose their standards or “agendas” on Premchand, [Dalit writers] force him into the guise of a “non-Dalit writer,” and exclude his work from this wider definition of “Dalit.”23

Dherivala’s plea for Dalit writers to rethink Dalit consciousness beyond those who are Dalit by birth represents the liberal, inclusive side of an ongoing, deep-seated debate in the Hindi Dalit counterpublic. Can only Dalits exhibit Dalit consciousness? Should a specific caste identity be required to voice the narrative of caste-related suffering? These are fundamental questions about who has the ultimate authority to speak, not only as an individual but also as a representative of the community. Several Dalit writers recognize this need for debating and rethinking these questions and for the contemporaneous re-reading of texts in order to continuously reconstruct the counterpublic space so carefully carved out by Hindi Dalit writers and readers. Jaiprakash Kardam, eminent Hindi Dalit literary critic, author, and editor of the journal Dalit Sāhitya, writes, “To raise questions or to record difference of opinion not only is a man’s democratic right, but is also a signifier of intellectual progressivism. No man or opinion is immune to questioning. Even if someone is to raise questions about Premchand, this should be viewed as a productive thing. Raising questions about something is not the same as insulting it.”24 And Anita Bharti, although staunchly against the burning of Raṅgbhūmi as a careless,

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reactionary, media-grabbing event, and as a critic who has written many times in defense of Premchand as a Dalit writer, also resolutely defends the right to criticize Premchand and other mainstream writers in Dalit counterpublic discourse. She maintains, however, that these criticisms should be thoughtful rather than reactionary. Today Premchand is a political topic. If a Dalit writer wants to discuss Premchand’s perspective on Dalits (dalit pakṣ), then what is wrong with that? Can’t a non-Dalit writer raise questions about Dalit literature, its subject matter, its philosophy, and its aesthetic standard? How is this different—both the thought and the paper on which it is written are mine. Several non-Dalit writers who are blindly reverential (andhabhakt) to Premchand condemn any “Premchand detractor” (“Premchand virodhī”). It seems to them that being against Premchand is somehow the Dalits’ first priority.25

Thus the “problem” of Premchand has long been a subject of discussion in the Hindi Dalit literary counterpublic. When the BDSA, on July 31, 2004, burned Premchand’s Rangbhūmi in an open square in the heart of New Delhi, these issues were brought into greater focus in the print media of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic in the years that followed. An event that the mainstream media briefly seized upon and quickly rejected as a protest by a marginal community has sustained an overwhelming presence in Hindi Dalit counterpublic discourse. In an article published in the March 2005 special issue of Apekṣā, an issue entirely dedicated to Premchand and the debate over Raṅgbhūmi, critic Ish Ganganiya summarizes the different interests implicated in this debate. There has been no shroud (kafan) for the saga of Premchand since July 31, 2004 when Raṅgbhūmi’s funeral pyre burned. As a result, in the halls of Dalits and non-Dalits, as though between the pen-soldiers that have drawn their swords,26 a sequence of demonstrations of power have begun, by means of discussions on literary stages, meetings, and letters and magazines. There are no signs that this back and forth will be finished in the near future. The simple reason for this is that the producers of Ambedkarite (Dalit) literature, want to establish their own culture and protect the social, economic, and cultural benefits of downtrodden, backward society. They are therefore firmly resolved and compelled to perform a re-reading of traditional literature and history. . . .”27

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In this passage, Ganganiya characterizes the debates over Premchand, and other mainstream, non-Dalit figures of Indian literature and history who have voiced the experiences of Dalits, as a kind of subaltern project of re-reading and re-writing literature and history from below. Perhaps part of the struggle of those who are charged with the rhetorical call to shape the ideological identity of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic has to do with how, on one hand, they are faced with an author whose inclusion in the Dalit literary canon could be beneficial to the “mainstream” acceptance of Dalit literature, and how, on the other hand, they are faced with an author whose depictions of Dalit characters, based on the exigencies of the genre of Dalit literature as social justice literature, does not align with the movement’s politics. This emerges therefore as a struggle between Dalit writers as Hindi authors or Dalit writers as social activists, or even between Dalit writers as individual artists or communal mouthpieces of a movement. The struggle between individual expression and community representation is becoming increasingly endemic to the discursive constitution of the Dalit counterpublic sphere.

the problem of premchanD, reDux Premchand’s story “Kafan” once again came to the forefront of Dalit counterpublic debates with the 2006 publication of well-known Hindi Dalit writer and critic Dharamveer’s controversial and ironically titled book, Premchand: Sāmant kā Munshī (Premchand: Feudal Lord or Teacher?). At the launch party for Dharamveer’s book, several Dalit women in the audience stood up in the midst of the author’s address and hurled shoes at him for what they saw as his misogynist perspective in both this book and previous works. The event shook the Hindi Dalit literary world in Delhi and has contributed to recent reorganizations of Dalit literary groups there. In the ensuing public discussions around both this event and the substance of Dharamveer’s analysis in the book, the debate over “Kafan” took on a gendered dimension that highlights a second set of counterpublic discourses surrounding sexual violence and the constitution of Dalit women’s literary identities. These discussions critiqued “Dalit consciousness” as a rhetorical construction of collective identity formation. Specifically, these conversations invoked a “Dalit feminist standpoint” (to borrow a term from Sharmila Rege) that hinges on the understanding of gendered violence as principally constitutive of the experience of Dalit womanhood. The collusion of these two discursive constructs suggests that neither is

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wholly representative of caste or gendered identity and experience, yet together they can reduce Dalit women to a hyper-symbolic state of victimhood.28 Significantly, several years after the initial debates regarding Premchand that emerged in the Dalit counterpublic from the BDSA burning incident, “Kafan” has remained at the center of ongoing negotiations of identity and community formation in the Hindi Dalit counterpublic sphere, demonstrating that the process of constructing the political and social foundations of diverse Dalit collectivities is a continual process. In his book, Dharamveer makes the following surprising interpretive claim about “Kafan”: The whole story would become newly clear if Premchand would have written in the final line of the story this reality of Dalit life that Buddhiya was pregnant with the zamīndār’s child. That he had raped Buddhiya in the field. Then, those words would shed light on the story like a lamp and we would understand everything. That even while Ghisu and Madhav wished to be able to do more, in fact they could only resist by refusing to call the child their own. Who will admit that this is the real pain of Dalits? A Dalit or a non-Dalit? This is the reality of Dalit exploitation and oppression that so often their offspring are not actually their own. Compared to this kind of exploitation, the economic exploitation of Dalits seems so small!29

Throughout the rest of his book, Dharamveer makes the argument that the true root of Dalit suffering in modern caste society is not poverty or inequality, or a lack of education and opportunity, but rather the sexual abuse and exploitation of Dalit women (yaun-aparādhiyāṁ, “sex crimes”). The intervention of such an interpretative claim into Premchand’s story strikes an ominous tone. Dharamveer seems to suggest here that if Buddhiya were in fact raped by an upper-caste zamīndār, the callous act of allowing her to die would actually have been an understandable and perhaps even laudable act of socio-political resistance by the characters Ghisu and Madhav. Following this line of reasoning, Dharamveer coolly asks, “What would be better—allowing Buddhiya and her child to die, or raising another’s child while calling it your own?”30 Dharamveer’s interpretation of the story, and his extension of that interpretation into a commentary on the intersection of caste and gender in the construction of oppressive social hierarchies, in some ways echoes the feminist claim that the key “difference” in Dalit women’s experience and identity from both that of Dalit men and that of other women is the

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constant threat of sexual violence. In these discussions, violence has emerged as the lynchpin around which both the experience and enforcement of gendered and caste identities revolve. For example, Kannabiran and Kannabiran argue that caste and gender cannot be disassociated as “twin mediators of oppression,” the logic of sexual violence being central to each. Citing numerous high profile cases of sexual assault against Dalit women by upper-caste men, they point to the “mediation of inter-caste relations through a redefinition of gendered spaces,” or in other words, the ways in which upper-caste men appropriate Dalit women’s bodies as a way to emasculate and control Dalit men. If the “‘manhood’ of a caste is defined both by the degree of control men exercise over women and the degree of passivity of women in the caste,” then, logically, “the structure of relations in caste society castrates [the Dalit man] through the expropriation of his women.” An attack on a Dalit woman is an attack on her entire community, “an assertion of power over all women [and men] in her caste.”31 According to Ruth Manorama, founder and president of the National Federation of Dalit Women, Certain kinds of violence are traditionally reserved for Dalit women: extreme filthy verbal abuse and sexual epithets, naked parading, dismemberment, pulling out of teeth, tongue, and nails, and violence including murder after proclaiming witchcraft, are only experienced by Dalit women. Dalit women are threatened by rape as part of a collective violence by the higher castes.32

Ideas of collective violence, customary access, and expropriation of women’s bodies are what undergird the logic of what is described in chapter 7 as the “Dalit rape script.” It is around the societally enforced logic of this rape script that the Dalit feminist standpoint is constructed. Yet while the understanding of sexual violence as constitutive of Dalit women’s subjectivities has emerged as common currency in scholarly and activist agendas, the appropriation of such an argument by a male Dalit critic like Dharamveer and his reading of “Kafan” through such an interpretive lens has caused consternation within the Hindi Dalit literary sphere. Several Dalit feminist responses to Dharamveer’s argument, published in Strī Naitiktā kā Tālibānīkaraṇ (The Talibanisation of Feminist Ethics), a 2007 special issue of the Delhi-based Dalit and Adivasi literary magazine Yuddhrat Ām Ādmi (“The Struggling Common Man,” pub. Ramnika Foundation),

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suggest the necessity of reconsidering the notion that the singular differentiating experience of Dalit women’s lives is sexual violence, or the threat of sexual violence. The critique of Dharamveer’s proposed rescripting of Premchand’s story and its ramifications for the identity formation of women in Dalit society demonstrates the ways in which a new wave of Dalit feminist discourse is working to alter the terms of the social script, one which determines (as Dharamveer has done) that sexual violence against Dalit women is determinative and constitutive of oppressive caste hierarchies. The fundamental argument of the feminist contributors to this volume is that despite the reality of Dalit women’s victimization by the social scripts of caste, gender, and sexual violence, Dalit literature needs to serve as a medium whereby the dignity of Dalit women is restored. Therefore, Dalit women writers such as Anita Bharti, Kusum Meghwal, Pushpa Vivek and others raise significant questions about the “obsession” of many Dalit writers with narratives of the rape and sexual exploitation of Dalit women. They argue that the narrative representation by Dalit women of their own lives is “much more expansive. It’s about their education, labor, organization of community rights etc . . . sexual exploitation is not the only problem facing Dalit women.”33 Finally, what happens when, as in the case of Dharamveer, the discursive constructions of Dalit consciousness and the articulation of the “difference” of Dalit women colludes to rob Dalit women of agency outside of that of allegorical victim of caste oppression? According to Anita Bharti, How many Dalit writers do we have in front of us now who provide dignity to Dalit women and give importance to their lives? There are certainly exceptions, but we can count them with our fingers. Usually, in trying to pointlessly become an “icon” of Dalit literature, they just call [Dalit women] names like Buddhiyā, devdāsī, rakhail. Those who graciously don’t do this, slap those who do on their backs.34

Such a critique also suggests the frustration among many Dalit women writers with the condescending reactions toward their own political and literary aspirations. In an open letter to Dharamveer in this same volume, Pushpa Vivek asserts, “Today’s women are educated and have come to understand their rights. Whenever a Dalit woman tries to exercise her own authority over those rights, then our own male Dalit authors ridicule her and throw stumbling blocks in her path, because

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they cannot stomach the idea of advancing women to the equal status of men.”35 She cites Dharamveer’s condemnation of Anita Bharti. In his book, Dharamveer writes, I find it even worse when some Dalit woman protects a non-Dalit man, whether it’s Anita Bharti or someone else. Anita Bharti praises an adulterous man like Premchand. . . . Does Anita Bharti want to end up like Buddhiya? I don’t think the poor woman was at fault but there is a major problem with Bharti’s thinking. When the Dalit woman was sexually assaulted, the home was violated. Then the zamīndār’s seed took hold in the belly of the Chamar. . . .36

According to Dharamveer, the Dalit problem is not tied to poverty or inequality, but to the sexual misappropriation of Dalit women: “The issue is not limited to poverty—the issue is not poverty at all—it’s the enslavement of the sexuality of Dalit women.”37 According to Vimal Thorat, whose editorial opens the volume, the “new version” of “Kafan” that Dharamveer came up with to restore the honor of Ghisu and Madhav (in giving them a righteous reason for letting young Buddhiya languish and finally die) does so only at the expense of Buddhiya herself.38 She argues that this kind of automatic reliance on the abuse and stigmatization of women results from a misogynist perspective (based on a reverence of the infamous classical text, the Manusmṛti, that condemns both Dalits and women to abject existences). In a sarcastic piece (she regularly refers to Dharamveer as “Dharmguru”) in which she condemns Dharamveer and other male writers who support him for themselves ironically adopting a brahmanical attitude toward Dalit women, she suggests that the bigotry toward sexually abused women that results in this sort of interpretation is no different than the bigotry manifested towards both women and Dalits in Manu’s ancient treatise. Bharti too recognizes the real life experience of gendered violence that marks Dalit womanhood, “Even today Dalit women are pronounced witches or demonesses and killed with sticks and stones. They have sticks thrust in their vaginas as punishment.”39 But she and others also read Dharamveer’s analysis as enacting a similar kind of virtual attack against  women, fetishizing and exploiting this violence to aggrandize themselves and limit the imaginative possibilities of Dalit women’s literary roles. The rancor of their various critiques aside, these feminist critics charge that Dharamveer’s manipulation of the rape script in his

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attempt to critique and re-script Premchand’s story from the critical position of Dalit chetnā reifies Dalit women’s bodies as merely marginal, hyper-symbolic sites where allegories of caste oppression are performed. Dalit feminist literary critics thus demonstrate the inability of either of these communities to fully represent their identities and life experiences and advocate for the wresting back of their personhood from its passive exploitation in power struggles between men.

conclusion The construction of discourse, both celebratory and critical, around cultural symbols is a practice that intimately engages the representative symbol and its constitutive public in a reflexive process of construction and re-construction. In the forward to the English translation of Amrit Rai’s biography of Munshi Premchand, Alok Rai discusses the dialectical relationship between an author and “the social order in which he achieves resonance and cultural centrality.”40 In this dialectical relationship texts determine contexts and vice versa, therefore “. . . if the social order, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways, ‘determines’ the truly creative author, it is a measure of that ‘creativity’ that a social order, particularly in its less available and relatively recessive aspects, becomes knowable through the works of such authors.” He asserts further, “. . . one may ‘read’ the social order through the texts of an author, particularly one who reaches cultural centrality.”41 It is important here to consider the reflexivity between social context, or in this case a social movement, and its authors. There are high stakes for members of the Dalit counterpublic in defining a relationship with Premchand, in embracing him or rejecting him as a Dalit author, because the whole of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere will then in some sense be known, understood, and assessed by its stance toward his texts within the more dominant mainstream public sphere. There is some danger in adopting him as a Dalit writer in the hope that his status will confer respectability on the lineage of Dalit literature. If, as we will see, the mode of his representation of Dalit characters does not fit the nascent ideology of the Hindi Dalit literary aesthetic, one which is still finding its feet in the first decades of an organized Hindi Dalit literary sphere, his adoption could be counterproductive. And yet there is danger too in rejecting Premchand, in asserting exclusive authority over Dalit representation to authors who can claim a Dalit identity from birth. In this case, Dalit writers may be charged with isolating and radicalizing

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their literary sphere, limiting others’ access to it and thereby reducing its integrative and transformative possibilities. In the two cases discussed in this chapter, Premchand emerges as a singularly powerful cultural symbol that participants in the Dalit counterpublic sphere can use to advance various social and political agendas that support the construction of communal and individual counterpublic identities. A critique of Premchand is at the core of both a reconstitution of the Dalit public sphere as a counterpublic, and in developing the power to effectively enter the mainstream literary sphere. This has been achieved by a set of moves in recent years, both literary and nonliterary, such as the BDSA’s book burning, the criticism of Premchand from various ideological vantage points, and the invocation of Ambedkarite ideology in the practice of literary criticism. The debates over Premchand’s “Kafan” demonstrate in a broader context the ongoing processes of renegotiation of identity and representation in the literary spheres of the Dalit counterpublic. This brief analysis of the rhetoric of the media networks of the Dalit counterpublic sphere reminds us that caste, class, and gendered identities are regularly repositioned by advocates for the competing interests of diverse social collectivities. It is also these very debates that sustain the health and viability of the Dalit counterpublic sphere as a discursive space at the forefront of the growth of ever-changing conceptions of Dalit chetnā.

9 3 0 Hindi dalit literary CritiCism

S

cholarly focus on Dalit literature emphasizes the writers’ struggle to “speak from below” and to protest the marginal existence and blanket of silence foisted upon them for centuries. Yet in taking a closer look at the debates of Dalit literary critics, the ways Dalits exert control over their own representation in the texts of the literary mainstream becomes clear. This chapter emphasizes the re-imagination of Hindi literary history from a Dalit perspective. It is in Dalit literary critical texts that the boundaries of the growing genre of Dalit literature are both constructed and carefully guarded and questions of identity and authenticity of experience and voice are discussed. Hindi Dalit literary criticism has two major goals. First, in conceptualizing the concept of Dalit chetnā as a critical perspective and literary category, some Hindi Dalit critics are both re-imagining it and re-claiming authority over its boundaries. Second, critics are constructing a sort of critical loom upon which to weave several strands from 500 years of north Indian literary history in a search for the origins of Dalit consciousness in pre-Ambedkarite literature, thereby producing the thick fabric of a traditional canon of Dalit chetnā. Asserting a new Hindi Dalit literary history is a conscious effort to establish a centuries-long lineage of Dalit chetnā in north Indian literature, inserting Dalits into a shared cultural history from which they have traditionally been excluded. Further, they are building what Barbara Harlow calls an “affiliative secular order,” reconstructing an intellectual history of social resistance over the more commonly assumed non-history of centuries of silent subservience based on the unquestioning assumption of a lowly caste identity from above. A focus on Hindi Dalit literary criticism is also helpful for understanding

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the ways in which regional Dalit literary traditions are determining and protecting their own socio-political identities—not only as opposed to the standards of the mainstream Indian literary sphere but also as distinct from other regional language Dalit literary traditions.1 First, this chapter looks at Dalit chetnā in Dalit critical literature. The employment of Dalit chetnā in critical literature demands, to borrow the concept from Gayatri Spivak, a “strategic essentialization” of the ideology of Dalit identity and strategies of representation. Second, this chapter analyzes the efforts of Hindi Dalit critics to write a new Hindi Dalit literary history. It is important to consider both the central role that Dalit chetnā plays in that project as well as the significance of constructing such a historical narrative in the context of mainstream Indian literary history.

Dalit chetnā in Dalit literary criticism In her important book, Resistance Literature (1987), Barbara Harlow codifies the shared aesthetic and ideological foundations of resistance literatures of various sociopolitical liberation movements around the world through her readings of poetic and narrative texts. Throughout, she emphasizes political imperative as the driving force behind resistance literature, and the characteristic that distinguishes it from other literatures. According to Harlow, “Resistance literature calls attention to itself, and to literature in general, as a political and politicized activity. The literature of resistance sees itself furthermore as immediately and directly involved in a struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural production.”2 Dalit literature is the creative expression of a social liberation movement, a struggle not for independence from physical occupation but rather a struggle for freedom from the tyranny of caste-based discrimination. As was demonstrated in the previous chapter’s discussion of the Dalit debates over Premchand, Dalit writers regard themselves as inserting their previously silenced voices into the hegemonic canon of Indian literary history, creating a body of new literature guided by theoretical and aesthetic principles and turning their own critical gaze on canonical Indian literary texts. Harlow’s analytical framework proves helpful in reading Dalit critical literature. She conveys three fundamental concerns for resistance texts: “access to history for those who have been historically denied an active role in the arena of world politics; the problem of contested terrain, whether cultural, geographical, or political; and the social and political

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transformation from a genealogy of filiation based on ties of kinship, ethnicity, race or religion to an affiliative secular order.”3 For Dalits, literature offers access not only to history but also to a world of individual and community progress and the means to construct a shared identity. First, Dalits must deconstruct the identity, crystallized over centuries, of the powerless, the lowly, the untouchable, and then replace it with a new kind of self-expression that will transform not only the way they see themselves but also the way society sees them. The terrain they are contesting is that of representation itself, an area that is at once cultural, material, and political. The origin of modern Dalit literature in India is considered as recent as the mid-1970s (from the formation of the Marathi activist-poet organization, the Dalit Panthers). Since then, it has rapidly expanded from a poetic form into a catalog of short stories, novels, dramas, and autobiographies. It has only been within the last several years that a rich body of literary criticism has begun to accompany the literature in the pages of Dalit literary magazines and journals and in the introductions to anthologies of Dalit poetry and short stories. In most cases, this criticism is produced by writers of Dalit literature. This is the case with the three authors under consideration here: Sharankumar Limbale, Omprakash Valmiki, and Mohandas Naimishray. All three writers, Limbale in Marathi and Valmiki and Naimishray in Hindi, have also authored well-received autobiographies and various other collections of stories, essays, and in the case of Naimishray, a novel. All three writers are universally wellregarded in their respective literary spheres and exert significant influence in the process of shaping present and future directions of Dalit writing. In 2004, Alok Mukherjee translated Limbale’s treatise on Dalit literary aesthetics, Dalit Sāhityāche Saundāryashāstra, titled in the English translation Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature: Histories, Controversies, and Considerations (Orient Longman, 2004). The influence of this treatise has spread across Dalit writing communities in India since its translation, and as it is generally seen as the authority on Dalit literary aesthetics, it is worth considering here. The other book-length treatises on the history and aesthetics of Dalit literature in Hindi analyzed in some depth here are Omprakash Valmiki’s Dalit Sāhitya kā Saundāryashāstra (Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, 2001) and Mohandas Naimishray’s Hindī Meṁ Dalit Lekhan (Dalit Writing in Hindi).4 These critical studies evaluate contemporary Hindi Dalit literature, defending its value as a transformative medium against nameless

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savarṇ (non-Dalit, upper-caste) critics while also creating a generic theoretical framework by which to define and manage the genre’s expanding boundaries. Like Harlow’s principal assertion about resistance literature, that is, that it is driven primarily by political concerns, these critical texts also emphasize the singular political imperative behind Dalit literature. Valmiki asserts that Dalit literature is a “literature of action,” pitted against society’s feudalistic mentality, emphasizing instead a basic commitment to human values.5 Limbale goes so far as to suggest that Dalit literature is univocal by nature. He writes, “The experiences narrated in Dalit literature are very similar. Untouchables’ experiences of untouchability are identical.”6 And while Harlow makes the point that resistance literature demands an “access to history” for its constituency, Valmiki stresses the value of recording contemporary Dalit experience in literature in the hope that such narrated experience will ultimately provide an alternative and self-generated “Dalit history” for future generations. Valmiki bemoans the lack of contemporary Dalit understanding of their own history, blaming the monopolization of mainstream rhetoric, both historical and literary, on the Brahminical castes: No matter how particular a Dalit author’s circumstances, or the features of his experience, they still have social and historical value. It is important to put them down in words for the sake of coming generations. What were the thoughts and feelings of those Dalits who were oppressed and exploited for thousands of years? . . . We don’t have any way of recovering this information. . . . Literature, which was ruled over by feudalism and brahminism, offers us only those perspectives.7

In an effort to recover what Valmiki regards as a lost Dalit history, Mohandas Naimishray has attempted to reclaim those few Dalit voices that have managed to make their way into more mainstream literary and cultural circulation. Beginning with fifteenth-century north Indian bhakti poets like Ravidas and Kabir and continuing through the nationalist period with published poetry and pamphlet literature by authors such as Hira Dom and Swami Acchutanand, Naimishray establishes a loosely connected history of Dalit writers stretching back more than 500 years before the transformative politics of Ambedkar gave birth to modern anti-caste Dalit social and political ideology. The implications of constructing such a lengthy literary history will be considered more carefully in the second half of this chapter.

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As we have already seen, the key concept around which Limbale, Valmiki, and Naimishray and indeed many other Dalit critics rally is the idea of Dalit chetnā. In the works of many Dalit critics, there is an argument for a singular “consciousness” that informs the production of Dalit literature and serves as a gauge for the authenticity of any given work. Dalit chetnā is articulated in the expressive and interpretive practices of both writing and reading. Dalit chetnā has emerged in recent years in a large body of Dalit literary criticism as a theoretical tool for setting the boundaries of the growing genre, as well as for launching a distinctly Dalit critique of celebrated works of Hindi literature. Dalit chetnā is a fundamental component of an emerging theory of Dalit aesthetics (saundaryashāstra) that writers and critics in the Dalit literary sphere are working hard to codify. Twentieth-century Dalit political leader and architect of the Indian constitution Bhimrao Ramji (B. R., often affectionately called “Babasaheb”) Ambedkar persists as the primary symbol of freedom in Dalit political, social, and literary imaginations. According to Valmiki, “Dalit consciousness obtains its primary energy from Dr. Ambedkar’s life and vision. All Dalit writers are united with respect to this truth.”8 He lists several points of Dalit chetnā that reflect Ambedkarite ideology, including a rejection of the caste system and Hindu law and an embracing of rationalism and social equality. About literature specifically he lists, “disagreeing with the definition of ‘great poetry’ by Ram Chandra Shukla” and “being against traditional aesthetics.”9 Valmiki’s perspective offers a hint of the deconstructive nature of Dalit chetnā as a tool for critical analysis. What is perhaps most interesting about such a formulation is how the concept is being developed as a strategy for Dalit critical analysis, a kind of “test” by which Dalit critics can judge the “dalitness” of any work of literature, whether written by a Dalit or a non-Dalit. Though the definition of Dalit consciousness is not in any way fixed, or its tenets universally agreed upon, Dalit writers rely on the idea of Dalit chetnā as the ideal for all Dalit literature, and texts that purport to represent Dalit experience or identity are evaluated by how closely they adhere to this ideal. It is a concept that permeates readings of existing works of Dalit literature, and in such readings it is extremely important not just that a Dalit character is present but also how “authentic” the portrayal of the Dalit character is and how “realistic” the narrative is. It is a principle of Dalit consciousness that writings are made authentic only through the real-life experience of Dalit identity. For example, Valmiki emphasizes the importance of writing “the truth as one

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has experienced it, depicted just as it was seen and felt” for “pretension is impossible in a literal rendering.”10 As was illustrated in chapter 2, Hindi Dalit writers and readers are increasingly using Dalit chetnā as a critical lens to analyze mainstream works of literature that claim to represent them, works that have widely been heralded as progressive in Hindi literary circles. Dalit writers and critics offer their own analyses of these works of literature, reconsidering their social and political stance in a position relative to Dalit chetnā. This analysis reasserts autonomy over the Dalits’ own representation and simultaneously prevents the boundaries of their own literary identity from disappearing, or being diffused and ultimately appropriated by agents of the dominant cultural sphere. The theoretical idea of Dalit chetnā thereby becomes an authoritative tool in the institutionalization of Dalit literature as its own textual genre, and it gives authority to Dalit literary critics to determine which authors and which texts may be included within the boundaries of the genre.

“essentializing” conciousness As rigid guidelines are created in the critical literature over how Dalit chetnā can be considered a determining factor not only of the critical success of a work of Dalit literature but also of whether or not a work of literature can lay claim to the category of “Dalit” at all, we may consider that arbiters of the Dalit literary sphere are constructing a critical framework based on the rhetorical practice of what Gayatri Spivak has called “strategic essentialism.”11 Dalit chetnā is a rendering of strategic essentialism for the political purpose of intervening into the mainstream literary-cultural sphere and claiming a small space for Dalits, in which they have the power to determine, by means of this essentialist concept, what authors and what texts may also share that space. This is a powerful tool in the battle for self-representation and the authority of Dalits over their own literary and political voices. Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “strategic essentialism,” articulated in her analysis of the Subaltern Studies collective’s reconstruction of a subaltern consciousness from colonial historical records, allows us to understand the function of the calculated socio-political project behind the construction of authenticity and Dalit chetnā as critical

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categories in the Dalit literary sphere.12 An understanding of the power of strategic essentialism in the context of claiming space in the public sphere is essential for situating the socio-political project of Dalit literary criticism. In her important essay, Spivak analyzes the self-stated goal of the Subaltern Studies collective to recover the “consciousness” of the colonialera Indian subaltern subject through a “reading against the grain” of official and historical documents of the British Empire in India.13 According to Spivak, the subalternists are trying to uncover the (singular) “consciousness” of the (plural) subaltern, thereby looking for and ultimately establishing through their research a positivist subaltern consciousness. This kind of universal consciousness of the subaltern can be observed but, in fact, is insufficient to represent a complex and varied group of classes, castes, genders, languages, and locations. However, she argues that this singular consciousness is a necessary fiction, since the plurality of individual consciousnesses among diverse subalterns can never be reconstructed from their fragmentary appearances in records of insurgency in the documentation of the British Empire. The overall project of the Subaltern Studies collective is political, then: to intervene in the practices of history and historiography and to introduce the subaltern into the discourse of history. Dalit writers, critics, and to a certain degree, scholars of Dalit literature have been doing something similar. There is so much focus on Dalit writers “finding their own voice” and establishing Dalit literature as a literary genre, as a vehicle of political and social change, and finally as an object of academic study that there has been a consistent practice of, I would argue, simplifying and stereotyping the textual practices of Dalit literature in an effort to establish a public voice and gain political ground. For example, in an interview with Arundhati Roy in which journalist and Navayana editor S. Anand challenges her authority to authentically represent a Dalit character in her novel The God of Small Things (1998), he argues, “I hope you agree that non-dalits cannot claim to produce ‘dalit literature’. . . . this is an issue of a long-suppressed community finding its own voice.”14 This challenge suggests how such socially constructed categories as “Dalit” get transposed (strategically) onto actual identities in the contemporary Dalit literary sphere. In limiting the category of “Dalit literature” to authors born into one of the Dalit castes, the stagnation that the caste system has imposed on social identities for centuries

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is powerfully reappropriated by Dalit writers. Spivak illustrates a similar empowerment of the category of class among subaltern societies: ‘Class’ is not, after all, an inalienable description of a human reality. Classconsciousness on the descriptive level is itself a strategic and artificial rallying awareness, which, on the transformative level, seeks to destroy the mechanics which come to construct the outlines of the very class of which a collective consciousness has been situationally developed.15

Spivak’s analysis recalls Harlow’s earlier assertion of resistance literature’s establishment of an affiliative identity for its constituents. Like the Marxist category of class, the category of “Dalit” is a category created to unite a diffuse population of oppressed castes under a single descriptor meant to denote both the system of oppression under which they struggle, as well as the insurgent spirit and self-awareness to overcome that oppression.16 Suggesting the transformative possibilities inherent in the term, Mukherjee writes, “‘Dalit’ is a political identity, as opposed to a caste name. It expresses Dalits’ knowledge of themselves as oppressed people and signifies their resolve to demand liberation through a revolutionary transformation of the system that oppresses them.”17 Rather than a label bestowed from above, such as the demeaning “untouchable,” the administrative “scheduled caste,” or Gandhi’s condescending “harijan,”18 “Dalit” is an expansive, positivist ideology of identity that was created within the community “from below” and subsequently has permeated the public sphere so as to become the unofficial, and politically correct, standard. This singular chetnā, the consciousness that permeates the meaning of the term “Dalit,” is thus tied to an exclusive politics of identity. Ranajit Guha explains that, among subaltern societies, any member of the community who does not choose to “continue in such subalterneity” is seen as an enemy of the collective. “The task of the ‘consciousness’ of class or collectivity within a social field of exploitation and domination is thus necessarily self-alienating.”19 So too in Dalit society, anyone who does not espouse the normative demands of exhibiting a carefully defined Dalit chetnā is excluded from the public persona of the Dalit literary sphere. The bitterly ironic “Dalit Brahmin,” for example, is a common epithet for Dalits who try to distance themselves from their caste identity, or who put more emphasis on personal material success than on community improvement, perhaps inhabiting a middle class or elite class position.20 These Dalits are looked at with derision by many politically active and community-oriented Dalits. Arjun Dangle, one of the founders of the

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Dalit Panthers, writes about some members of the Dalit community who reacted negatively to the emergence of Dalit literature: . . . some educated people from amongst the Dalits too viewed Dalit literature very negatively. They wanted to forget their past, could not face the harsh social realities surrounding them and were filled with an inferiority complex. They took all the benefits of the concessions resulting from Dr. Ambedkar’s movement, but the movement made no impact on them. They believed that with their individual prosperity society had also prospered. These ‘Dalit Brahmins’ felt (and feel even today) that Dalit literature was something dirty which had tarnished the image of their society. They wanted to speak, write, and live like Brahmins and missed no opportunity to ridicule Dalit literature.21

Dangle’s description of the “Dalit Brahmin” who seeks to distance himself from the political progress and cultural expression of his caste community drips with disdain. Dangle’s Dalit Brahmin is educated, yet beset by an inferiority complex. He is opportunistic, unmoved by the communal spirit of freedom and struggle of the Dalit movement. Dangle continues, “When one examines the views of these ‘Dalit Brahmins’ who equate the depiction of the pitiable conditions of the Dalits with their derogation . . . one gets an idea not only of their middle class attitude but also of their mental impotence.”22 This passage suggests how little room there is for criticism and debate over the nature of Dalit literature and narrative representation of Dalit life and experience in Dalit literary circles. Dissenters are viewed as enemies, as a threat to the collective consciousness, and are isolated with epithets like “Dalit Brahmin.” The strategic essentialism in defining a concept of Dalit chetnā is, perhaps, a preliminary, conscious, and calculated initiative to establish a public space for Dalit literature that, once established, will hopefully allow the boundaries of that space to be opened to embrace many more diverse understandings of the Dalit experience.

Writing the history of hinDi Dalit literature The second major goal of Hindi Dalit literary criticism is to construct a specifically Hindi Dalit literary history, one that restores the kind of ideological and political heft to Hindi Dalit literature that Dalit works in languages such as Marathi and Tamil enjoy. A close look at Hindi Dalit literary histories makes clear the importance placed on constructing a pride of place for Hindi among other regional language Dalit literary traditions across India.

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Hindi Dalit literature, in its contemporary avatar, is generally understood to have been inaugurated in the early 1980s with the early autobiographies, poetry, and short stories of eminent writers such as Omprakash Valmiki and Mohandas Naimishray.23 Although only a decade behind the publication of Golpiṭhā (1973), the radical collection of Marathi poetry by Namdeo Dhasal, one of the founders of the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra, that epitomized the subversive potential of Dalit writing, many still assume that Dalit literature in Hindi continues to lag behind the more “mature” traditions of social resistance in both Western and Southern India.24 This is in large part due, critics say, to the lack of an organized Dalit political movement in north India until the late twentieth century, and the absence of influential leaders such as Ambedkar in the West and Periyar in the South. While contemporary Hindi Dalit writers credit Marathi Dalit literature in particular, as well as the influential centrality of Ambedkar, Phule, and the Dalit Panthers, they are increasingly engaging in projects of historical and critical reconstruction of a specifically north Indian, Hindi literary lineage that reaches as far back as the fifteenth century. Foremost in this project is Mohandas Naimishray, and much of his Hindī meṁ Dalit Lekhan is dedicated to the construction of a Hindi Dalit literary history, with separate chapters dedicated to Dalit literature before and after Independence. Fifteenth-century bhakti poets Kabir and Ravidas represent the most important cache for distinguishing north Indian Dalit literary history from that of other regions.25 Similarly to the resurgence of Buddhism in India led by the post-Ambedkar neo-Buddhist movement, the contemporary Dalit reclamation of Ravidas, a member of the Chamar caste, has led to a renewed symbolic celebration and physical installation of his likeness in shrines and Dalit political centers across north India.26 And Kabir was, according to Ambedkar, one of his primary influences in the development of his ideology of social equality, along with the Buddha and Phule.27 Claiming these bhakti poets as part of a north Indian literary heritage, as well as recognizing their influence on Ambedkar, is significant for Hindi Dalit writers. Mohandas Naimishray, in his forthcoming Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, refers to an argument made by some Dalit writers that Hindi language society is actually “two steps ahead” of other states because these bhakti poets were produced in the north Indian linguistic sphere.28 Recent writings by Dalit critics testify to the project of reclaiming the spirit of these bhakti poets as their own. Kanwal Bharti and Dharamveer, two prominent Hindi Dalit literary critics, have complained about the co-option of Kabir by the brahmanical elite who have turned his legacy into one of

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“mysticism” (rahasyavād).29 And according to Hindi author Namwar Singh, though Kabir may not have written anything like what we now consider Dalit literature, the heart of the Dalits yet resonates in his voice.30 Many scholars also argue that the north Indian bhakti heritage may have actually fostered a particular ideological mindset among north Indian Dalits that is distinct from that of other regions. Chroniclers of Dalit pamphlet literature Badri Narayan and A.R. Misra suggest that the bhakti poets created an ideological basis for the development of the north Indian Dalit consciousness. While the Dalit literary lineage of western India is based on the development of constitutionalism and other western notions of equality promoted by Ambedkar, Dalit society in the Hindi belt of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar “derived its ideological roots from other sources, especially from the literature of the bhakti movement, to create an alternative ontologic paradigm of liberation.”31 Tej Singh suggests that Kabir and Ravidas are the founding poets of a Dalit renaissance (punarjāgraṇ) that is also inclusive of the contributions of icons such as Swami Achhutanand, Phule, and Ambedkar.32 Swami Achhutanand (1879–1933) is the most prominent pre-Independence north Indian Dalit literary icon. Critics and scholars of Hindi Dalit literature are establishing his historical centrality alongside the figures of Phule and Ambedkar, who hail from Maharashtra. Achhutanand assumed his name—derived from the Hindi word for untouchable (achhūt)—as a young man when he abandoned the Arya Samaj in 1912. Acchutanand was a Chamar from Uttar Pradesh who became the leader of the north Indian Ādi-Hindū movement in the 1920s and 1930s.33 According to historian Christophe Jaffrelot, after denouncing the Arya Samaj for their Hindu protectionism and the Congress party for their nationalist resistance of British occupation and influence, Achhutanand developed and propagated an Ādi-Hindū ideology (meaning “original Hindu,” suggesting the lower castes are descendents of inhabitants of the Indus Valley who predate the Aryans) of common origins and a united political struggle of Dalits, Shudras, and tribals (Adivasis).34 He promoted his philosophy through the establishment of the Ādi-Hindū Society, and he made important forays into print and publishing with the founding of the newspaper Achhūt, and later Ādi-Hindū, as well as the monthly journal Uṣā. According to Narayan and Misra, “Through these papers Achhutanand not only conveyed the philosophy of liberation from social castigation, but also established the significance of the print media in Dalit mobilization and identity formation.”35 Naimishray also emphasizes the importance of print, using poetry, songs, speeches, and journalism to promote Dalit liberation and create a

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growing “consciousness of publishing” among Hindi-speaking Dalit communities36 (47, 50). The example of Achhutanand illustrates that questions of influence are significant in Hindi Dalit literary histories. Many Dalit literary historians and critics therefore embed alternative readings of literary influence in their historical narratives, creating a position of primacy for north India. For example, Naimishray goes so far as to suggest that Ambedkar’s momentous public performance of burning the Manusmṛti at the Mahad demonstration in 1927 was influenced by one of Achhutanand’s poems. Swami-ji criticized the Manusmṛti in a poem entitled “Being burned by the Manusmṛti” in 1925, and Baba Saheb Ambedkar burned it on December 25, 1927.37 Perhaps Ambedkar was influenced by Swami-ji when he burned the Manusmṛti. In “Being burned by the Manusmriti” he says, The Manusmriti burns us night and day It does not allow us to get up, it only throws us down.38

This suggestion, however tenuous, that Achhutanand’s poetry influenced one of Ambedkar’s most famous and politically radical public performances, is a powerful testament to the importance in contemporary Hindi literary history writing of attempts to acknowledge the role of local and regional historical and literary figures by whose works the unique Hindi Dalit consciousness was raised.39 Naimishray asserts that such a re-examination of the significant role of Achhutanand in early twentieth-century Dalit political and literary society might suggest that he may, through the efforts of recovery and re-writing, even be lifted to the same stature as Ambedkar, at least with respect to his influence in the Hindi belt. If there were to be a fact-based rewriting of Dalit history, then maybe Swami Achhutanand’s role in the context of north India would not be seen as less than Ambedkar’s. Also, the extremely important role of accumulated local consciousness on small stages in the colonial period transforms Dalits into a united community with the power of writing.40

Tej Singh, discussing the important figures of the early Dalit literary sphere in north India, explains that Ambedkar and Achhutanand had parallel missions in politics and literature, respectively.

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On one hand Ambedkar moved social reform movements forward in a certain direction on a political level, while on the other hand Swami Achhutanand began to reveal the basic character of these social reform movements on the level of literature.41

Regardless of the central influence of Achhutanand in north India in using print to spread his Ādi-Hindū philosophy through political speeches, poetry, and drama, Achhutanand is rarely referred to as a “Dalit writer.” The reason is inherent in the question of Dalit chetnā as discussed earlier in this chapter. A contemporary understanding of Dalit chetnā is necessarily grounded in the Ambedkarite principles of political liberation, renunciation of Hindu identity, and caste eradication from Hindu society. While both the bhakti poet-saints and Achhutanand were revolutionary in their social protest, none of their work envisions a disintegration of caste altogether. Jaffrelot explains that Achhutanand’s critique of caste was “problematic” because he expressed himself in the same ideological manner as the bhakti poet-saints, searching for social equality within a religious framework rather than a secular one.42 Naimishray is somewhat more expansive in his characterization of Achhutanand, asserting that he was the father of Dalit literature who provided courage, strength, and vigor to its early writers, fulfilling an unrivalled role in the development of modern Dalit literature. The question of naming also extends to another early twentieth-century writer, Hira Dom, whose poem “Acchūt kī Shikāyat” (“An Untouchable’s Complaint”) was published in a special “Untouchable” issue of Mahabir Prasad Dwivedi’s legendary magazine Saraswatī in September 1916. This poem is widely recognized as the first work of Dalit literature in Hindi.43 Naimishray asserts that “scholars” (adhyetā) of colonial-era Dalit society have determined that this is the “first poem of Dalit chetnā”.44 Narayan and Misra explain that this poem represented “the first description of alienation and subordination in written form of Dalit society, governed, as it was, by Brahminical society. It was an epoch-making event for it marked the first glimmerings of the arrival of the written medium for the propagation of the weals and woes of the Dalit community in a changed form.”45

But there is some debate in Dalit literary circles about whether or not Dom, like Achhutanand, should actually be considered a “Dalit writer.”

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Like Achhutanand, Hira Dom’s genealogical credentials are secure: he was born into an untouchable community among whose traditional occupations included working in cremation grounds. But Naimishray traces a debate about the nature of the Dalit literary lineage, centering around the common practice of referring to Hira Dom as the first Dalit poet. He cites contemporary Dalit writer Kanwal Bharti, who questions the four-hundred-year gap in most Hindi Dalit literary histories that herald the bhakti poets for their spiritual and social revolution within the Hindu religious sphere, and Hira Dom, whose work, he argues, is in the same ideological vein.46 In these pages, Bharti asserts that the establishment of modern Dalit consciousness comes only from the work of Ambedkar, and we should not confuse this post-Ambedkar, enlightened social and political consciousness with literature that belongs to the older tradition of bhakti. But as we have seen already, many contributors to the Hindi Dalit literary tradition would be reluctant to give up Hindi literature’s claim to a modern north Indian Dalit consciousness dating back almost one hundred years. Naimishray is conciliatory—although he refers to Hira Dom as the “first poet with a Dalit chetnā,” he also allows that the humanistic literature between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries that addresses social justice and “the common man” (ām ādmī) is not considered Dalit literature in the modern sense. And yet he questions the wisdom of this convention of naming within the Hindi Dalit literary sphere. Furthermore, he emphasizes that although modern Dalit chetnā cannot have been present in literature before Ambedkar, the Bhojpuri/ Hindi literary tradition encompasses many writers who have furthered this consciousness.47 The most significant Dalit writer and activist working in north India from the 1930s on was Biharilal Harit. Born into a Jatav (Chamar) community near Delhi in Shahdara, Harit reportedly completed only a few years at a Baptist mission school. He honed his poetic writing skills through his exposure to the folk songs and poetry of the north Indian Jatav community.48 Active in Dalit literary and political movements from the early thirties until his death in 1999, and the author of forty major works of poetry, some of which remain unpublished but have been uncovered by a few Delhi-based contemporary Dalit writers,49 Harit adopted the title of “Jankavi” (people’s poet) for his attention to the problems of the working class and laborers in his poetry, as well as his extensive use of rural idiom and folk forms of song and verse, including bhajan, khayāl, pad, dohā, and chaupāī. Naimishray lists Harit’s poetry anthology, Achhūtoṃ

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kā Paigambar (Messenger of the Untouchables, 1946), as the first published collection of Dalit poems. A special volume of Apekṣā (vol. 9, October–December 2004) is devoted to Harit’s legacy. In his introductory essay to this volume, editor Tej Singh traces the milestones of the north Indian Dalit “renaissance” (punarjāgraṇ) since the bhakti period. He asserts that the decade of the 1930s was especially significant because that is when Harit established himself as a jankavi. According to Singh, He is a people’s poet ( jankavi) who is joined with the exploited and oppressed poor people, who believes their miseries to be his own, who expresses the ambitions, desires, and sympathies of the people in the language of the people, and who, adopting popular speech, speaks his own words in a simple and straightforward style.50

Singh’s definition of a jankavi is similar to the earlier discussion of the facets of modern Dalit chetnā, including authenticity of experience and a rejection of elite literary language. Dalit literary critic Ish Ganganiya explains that Harit’s work represents the crucial bridge between the lineage of bhakti-inspired poets and writers, and modern Ambedkarite Dalit consciousness. He argues that Harit’s attitude and style was that of the saint-poets of the bhakti tradition, but his contemporary social philosophy was based on the Ambedkarite model.51 This interpretation makes him a key writer in the Hindi Dalit literary canon, not only because his writings represent a contemporary understanding of Dalit consciousness and authenticity but also because he is the link connecting contemporary Hindi Dalit writing to a centuries-long north Indian Bhojpuri/Hindi literary tradition.

conclusion Arbiters of the Dalit literary sphere see the act of embodying an identity that is authentically, and thus essentially, “Dalit” as critical to gaining access to a hegemonic public sphere that regularly excludes Dalits from the exchange of ideas. In the Hindi Dalit counterpublic, Dalits make authoritative discourse their own, defending it from dilution by nonDalits, or Dalits who lack an authentic Dalit chetnā. Dalit chetnā today is a thoroughly modern critical concept in the mode of deconstruction. It is an expression of denial, a theoretical tool that

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contributes to the destabilization of traditional notions of social hierarchy and cultural authenticity. Dalit chetnā is elemental in opposing the cultural inheritance of the upper castes, the notion that culture is a hereditary right for them, and one that is denied to Dalits. The concept of Dalit chetnā is purposely deconstructive, allowing Dalit writers and intellectuals to clear the way for a new understanding of Dalit identity. According to Valmiki, Dalit chetnā does not just make an account of or give a report on the anguish, misery, pain, and exploitation of Dalits, or draw a tear-streaked and sensitive portrait of Dalit agony; rather it is that which is absent from mainstream consciousness, the simple and straightforward perspective that breaks the spell of the shadowy cultural, historical, and social roles for Dalits. That is Dalit chetnā. ‘Dalit’ means deprived of human rights, those who have been denied them on a social level. Their consciousness is Dalit chetnā.52

But this notion of Dalit consciousness is also essentialist, positing a singular idea of how Dalits should think and write and how they should cultivate political and personal awareness. It does not represent the alternative concerns of Dalit women, for example, who struggle within the confines of patriarchy as well as caste, nor does it represent the identity and consciousness of those materially advantaged, middle and uppermiddle class Dalits whom Dalit journalist Chandra Bhan Prasad calls the “Dalit bourgeoisie.”53 On the contrary, Dalit chetnā and its theoretical application form the normative model, infiltrating the pages of Hindi literary magazines as well as the public meetings of Dalit writers in Delhi. If we are therefore to think of this singular representation as a strategic effort to create a unique and powerful presence of Dalit voices in mainstream literary and socio-political discourse, then we must recognize the critical significance of the emergence of such a theoretical concept within the Hindi Dalit literary sphere.

II ReadIng HIndI dalIt lIteRatuRe

9 4 0 Good dalits and Bad Brahmins

Through your literary creations cleanse the prescribed values of life and culture. Do not limit your objectives. Remove the darkness in villages by the light of your pen. Do not forget that in our country the world of the Dalits and the ignored classes is vast. Get to know intimately their pain and sorrow, and try through your literature to bring progress to their lives. True humanity resides there.

T

—Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Souvenir

his is Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s call to Dalit writers to use literature as a form of social activism to underscore the humanistic capacities of creative narrative (2004, 50). Recently, across linguistic communities, Dalits in India have put this call to action into practice with striking success. Dalits have developed literary forums in several languages that emphasize the power of narrative to inspire social transformation. Scholarly attention to emerging bodies of Dalit literature in dominant Indian literary languages such as Marathi, Tamil, and especially Hindi has so far focused largely on the sociopolitical significance of Dalit writing, celebrating somewhat uncritically the emergence of the “authentic” voice of subaltern experience.1 Little emphasis, however, has been given to the strategic aestheticization of that experience in the construction of Dalit literary narratives, or to the varying textures of Dalit literature penned by individual authors. Rather, Dalit literature is most often heralded as a unified body of protest literature or as a literature of resistance, with a focus on the author’s efforts to expose various aspects of the “truth” of Dalit life. However, as the following chapters attest, the revolutionary potential of Dalit literature is as much aesthetic as it is political.

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The texts gathered under the thematic umbrella of Dalit literature in Hindi and other Indian languages are not an undifferentiated mass of univocal narratives. Rather, they represent mature and nuanced manipulations of language, narrative structure, content, and imagery that rely heavily on creative ambitions and construct carefully wrought worlds of meaning. Although this emergence of Dalit literary and political voices has rightly begun to be recognized, it is now critical that we analyze in greater depth how Dalit writers make meaning in their texts. Consequently, we also need to consider how these narrative strategies serve the emancipatory goals of the Dalit movement. In part I of this book I argued that contemporary Dalit literary discourse in India is constituted by both the publication of diverse forms of literature (including autobiography, short and long fiction, poetry, and drama) and critical networks of public debate. These networks are made up of Dalit literary and activist organizations, publishing houses that regularly print Dalit-authored texts, literary journals and magazines, and public meetings at book launches, literary conferences, and award ceremonies.2 The counterpublic model is instructive in its positioning of the Dalit literary sphere as one that occupies a parallel and oppositional space to the Indian literary mainstream. The Dalit counterpublic sphere both creates a shared space for the reflexive circulation of discourse that has been marginalized from the mainstream public sphere and also challenges that mainstream to recognize this competing discourse. Here, in part II, the purpose is to interrogate the various aesthetic strategies of contemporary Dalit short fiction. In this chapter, I examine the literary strategies that shape contemporary Dalit fictional prose in Hindi by examining in depth two Hindi short stories by two prolific and notable Dalit writers, Omprakash Valmiki and Jaiprakash Kardam, in an effort to understand the dominant narrative mode of this contemporary body of prose literature. Through a close reading of Valmiki’s “Pachchīs Chaukā Ḍeṛh Sau” (“25 Fours Are 150,” 2000) and Kardam’s “Lāṭhī” (“The Staff,” 2005), I argue that more analytical attention to diverse Dalit literary strategies can significantly contribute to existing conversations about the growth of Dalit literature across linguistic and geographical regions in India. This will also identify new narrative styles in a sphere of subaltern social protest and literary innovation. Additionally, close attention to the stylistic strategies of Hindi Dalit narratives contributes to an understanding of the diversity of modern and contemporary Hindi literature as a whole.

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Much of the focus of existing academic analysis of Dalit literature has been on its social and political content, specifically its themes of oppression and exploitation. The emphasis on the resistive ambitions of Dalit literature is accurate, but it does not by itself adequately explain the literary innovations of a vast body of Dalit literature and overlooks the ways in which many Dalit writers manipulate diverse narrative strategies to delineate their own identities, both public and private, increasingly on their own terms.3 Few scholars have put forward any systematic aesthetic or structural analysis, and what does exist is largely relegated to observations of its “vulgar” language and “angry” narrative tone.4 This attitude is a holdover from the rhetoric of the early Marathi writing of the Dalit Panthers. Yet to remain stuck in an analytical framework of difference while reading newer Dalit literary prose in languages like Hindi, far removed from the early virulence of the Panthers’ poetry, is to willfully ignore the ways contemporary Dalit writers engage a particular politics of style in the construction of Dalit chetnā. Considerations of formal narrative strategies in Dalit literature are few, but they exist in diverse analytical articles and scholarly translations. For example, in the introduction to her translation of Joseph Macwan’s autobiography, The Stepchild (Angaliyat), Rita Kothari suggests that in a move toward greater “authenticity” in their texts, Gujarati Dalit writers have increasingly employed dialects.5 Further, Digish Mehta has characterized Dalit literature as a “literature of the oppressed” for the dominance of its “oppressor versus oppressed plot pattern.”6 Arun Prabha Mukherjee offers a few of the most specific observations of the narrative strategies of Hindi Dalit authors, but she stops short of a methodical analysis. In an article in The Toronto Review, Mukherjee seconds Mehta’s characterization of the polarization of oppressor and oppressed as the predominant narrative structure in Dalit literature, offering a sociological interpretation of who oppresses and who is oppressed. She writes, “Dalit literature has emerged as an oppositional voice, puncturing holes in the grand narratives of India’s heroic struggle against colonialism and its transformation into the ‘world’s largest democracy.’ Dalit literature divides Indians into two camps: those born as high-caste Hindus who control all avenues to wealth and privilege and those born as lower castes and outcastes, Shudras and Atishudras, who are oppressed by the upper castes.”7 And in her analysis of Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiographical style she observes a layering of description, from both a child’s perspective of experiential immediacy and an adult’s

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theoretical gloss, and further notes that “Valmiki presents the traumatic moments of his encounter with his persecutors as dramatized scenes, as cinematic moments”8 (Mukherjee 2003, xl). Finally, she also insists on the primacy of realism in Valmiki’s text, “Valmiki, like many other Dalit writers, demands the status of truth for his writing . . . [he] dismisses imagination as make-believe, insisting that he writes about the ‘suffered real.’”9 Indeed, all of these observations become evident when one reads more than a few Dalit works, and together they form an intriguing glimpse into a customized Dalit aesthetics. But they do not present a complete picture. A close look at the short stories of both Omprakash Valmiki and Jaiprakash Kardam illustrates significant trends in contemporary Hindi Dalit literary practice. Both authors straddle the creative and critical arenas of the Dalit literary sphere, acting as shapers of the emerging Dalit literary aesthetic in their respective roles as literary critic and journal editor, while also remaining respected and frequently translated and anthologized creative authors. Among the most prolific and esteemed contemporary Dalits writing in Hindi, Valmiki has authored several short story collections. He has also written extensively as a critic and theorist of Dalit literature, publishing an influential book on the aesthetics of Dalit literature (2001). The English translation of Valmiki’s autobiography, Joothan (2003), introduced him to the English-speaking world as a representative voice of Dalit literary expression in Hindi. Jaiprakash Kardam is also critically involved in the development of contemporary Dalit networks of literary discourse, largely through editing his annual anthology (since 1997) of Dalit literature and critical writing from various authors, called Dalit Sāhitya (Dalit Literature). Kardam is also the author of several sociological treatises on caste and race in India, as well as several novels and short story collections, including Talāsh (The Search, 2005), from which “Lāṭhī” is drawn. An analysis of both Dalit literature and literary criticism emerging from the Hindi Dalit counterpublic sphere reveals a particular narrative perspective resulting from a strategic project of self-theorization; as I suggested in part I, Dalit intellectuals have developed the essentialist concept of Dalit chetnā (‘Dalit consciousness’) in an effort to contain and define the political, social, and aesthetic attributes of Dalit literature, thereby establishing a tangible Dalit public identity. In the developing aesthetics of Dalit literature, Dalit chetnā has evolved from general political awareness and self-respect to a specific theoretical definition of a revolutionary mentality that perpetuates and now expands Ambedkarite

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ideology.10 Ambedkar’s writings are voluminous and his political ideology far too extensive and subtle to do any justice to it here. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight those fundamental ideas that have made him such an enduring icon for Dalits and that have become common narrative themes in recent literature. One of the most radical acts Ambedkar ever undertook was his apostasy from Hinduism and conversion to Buddhism in the months before his death in 1956. While overtly Buddhist philosophy makes scant appearance in Dalit literature outside the invocation of the Buddha as an icon of rational enlightenment and a name coterminous with Ambedkar in Dalit poetry, Dalit writers have embraced Ambedkar’s rejection of Hinduism. Specifically, the target in both Ambedkar’s expository writing and the creative texts of more contemporary Dalit writers is Brahminism, defined by the absolute separation and hierarchy of castes and the complete social and political exclusion of the Untouchables. Early in his career, Ambedkar sought the annihilation of caste by advocating for both intermarriage and integrated dining and later sought to destroy the foundation of the caste system—Hinduism—altogether.11 Ambedkar engaged critically with Marxism throughout his career and firmly believed in economic marginalization as a key factor in social and political oppression. He emphasized above all else the importance of reason, dismissing any personal or communal recourse to a reverence for the supernatural. Historian Valerian Rodrigues suggests that Ambedkar believed that a significant hurdle to abolishing the practice of untouchability was a fundamental lack of understanding of its material reality. “He felt that it was difficult for outsiders to understand the phenomena of untouchability and explored modes of presenting the same. Once explained, he thought human sympathy would be forthcoming toward alleviating the plight of the ‘Untouchables’ . . .”12 Dalit authors, no longer content to be represented by others, have turned a critical eye to mainstream literature that claims to speak from a Dalit perspective. No longer wanting to be limited to being looked upon as objects of sympathy, revulsion, or desire, Dalit writers have embraced the call of Ambedkar to not only intimately reveal the ‘pain and sorrow’ of Dalit lives but also, more significantly, to “bring progress.” This progress is wrought, I argue, through a transformation of Dalit literary characters from objects of oppression to agents of social change. Underscoring the mechanics of this transformation is the critical idea of Dalit consciousness and an innovation in literary aesthetics. In Hindi writing, both Dalit consciousness and Ambedkar’s desire for the spread of understanding are

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most strenuously exercised in narrative form by the dismantling of normative ideas of privilege by recasting the usual Dalit “victims” as heroes. The aim of this chapter is thus to demonstrate that contemporary Dalit writers have privileged the dualistic, formal approach of “melodramatic realism” in their efforts to represent to themselves and to the world the “true” experience of living as an Untouchable, as well as to manifest their commitment to ending caste oppression through awareness and education.

Fighting Back: good dalits and Bad Brahmins The bulk of Hindi Dalit literary texts, those texts that are widely celebrated as “authentic” representations of Dalit experience among Dalit literary critics, of which the following stories are well-known examples, skillfully interweave narrative conventions of both realism and melodrama in the service of constructing Dalit chetnā. The question of authenticity is, as we have already seen, a fraught subject that dominates critical responses to writing within Dalit literary circles in India. It refers to the subject position of the author of a Dalit text, and whether or not that author’s life experience provides him with adequate tools to represent the Dalit perspective “realistically.” Dalit literature on one hand strives to offer realistic representations of the material, social, and emotional conditions of Dalit life in India. On the other, it offers a melodramatic interpretation of the Ambedkarite ideology of emancipating Dalits from an imposed identity of inferiority. This duality of purpose is the operative reason behind the dynamic structural combination of realism and melodrama in Dalit narratives. In her study of Marathi Dalit texts, Ramachandran rightly observes, “Dalit literature plays a significant role in . . . shaping identity. Its social realist narrative strategies describe a severe outer reality that goads the moral imagination of readers, demanding ameliorative action.”13 In Hindi Dalit writing, it is the combined forces of social realist and melodramatic conventions in Dalit literature that strive to demand such an engaged, “ameliorative” response from readers. The moral imagination of readers is stimulated by realistic representations of the deplorable material conditions and culture of social injustice that curtails the lives of many Dalits. Readers are also stirred by the starkly drawn moral dramas that these short narratives represent, preventing even the slightest ambiguity of analysis and reader response. In the majority of Dalit short stories, the Dalit character embodies absolute, morally pure psychic integrity and is

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embattled by a world filled with elaborately drawn upper-caste villains. The ensuing melodramatic struggles, set in a location and situation based on the aesthetic standards of social realism, demand that readers’ sympathies align unquestionably with the side of the Dalit, the side of the “good,” and hence the “good Dalit.” Both realism and melodrama as verbal and visual narrative forms have long played central roles in South Asian cultural production. Premchand and other members of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) were vanguards in the development of a realist literary aesthetic, and their continued influence on contemporary Indian literature is profound.14 Gopal suggests that among the members of the PWA Sa’adat Hasan Manto in particular saw realism as “an influential speech act inasmuch as it will change the fundamental sensibilities by boldly making reference to the actually existing.”15 This suggests a strategy for shining “the light of day upon the filth and grime that the rest of society refuses to see.”16 Therefore, like other socially committed writers before them, Dalit writers and critics have emphasized realism as the dominant narrative structure for depicting the “truth” of the social, material, and emotional circumstances of Dalit life.17 Late nineteenth-century Parsi theater and the subsequent development of twentieth-century popular Indian cinema, on the other hand, favored many of the conventions of melodrama developed on the nineteenth-century French stage and normalized such conventions for a mass audience across India.18 It is no surprise, therefore, that Dalit writers have assimilated aspects of both realism and melodrama—aesthetic conventions in dominant circulation in Indian literature and film—in the development of their own narrative style. What is worth investigating is how both expressive strategies often manifest, interwoven, in a single text. Further, since Dalit literature is not a body of texts written for aesthetic pleasure, but rather vehemently regards itself as part of a larger movement of sociopolitical resistance, it is worth considering the ways in which these narrative strategies develop Dalit chetnā. In his seminal volume on realism in literature, Auerbach suggests that the great achievement of realism is the “serious treatment of everyday reality [and] the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of ‘subject matter.’”19 Dalit writer Ajay Navaria colorfully compares the realist aesthetic of Dalit literature to the necessity of lancing a cyst on the body of Hindu society. While the substance that the cyst releases may be unpleasant, its cathartic release is said to be necessary for the healing of the social body.20 Melodrama also has a stake in the modern

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construction of an ethical society through its emphasis on the triumph of good over evil, despite being commonly disdained as “popular” and unrefined. Moral polarization is the fundamental organizing principle of melodramatic narratives, a principle expressed in hyperbolic situations and dialogue, moments of astonishment and ethical realization, and the exteriorization of psychic structures in stock characters.21 There is comfort in the repetition and guarantee of melodrama, a narrative form that Brooks calls “a moral universe made available,” a democratic art form that presents to itself the fundamental values of a civilization, outside of the realm of myth or religion.22 The moral universe that Dalit writers present in their literature is based on Ambedkar’s ideal of a casteless society. This is not to say that there is no caste in Dalit narratives. On the contrary, myriad evils of caste oppression provide the narrative threads that are woven together to create a story. As the following examples will demonstrate, the melodramatic practice of pitting absolute signifiers of good and evil against one another is the predominant storytelling mode in Dalit literature. The narrative logic of these stories revolves around the conflict between the moral pole of the bad, inhabited by the upper-caste proponents of caste inequality (“Bad Brahmins”), and the moral pole of the good, inhabited by the victimized, and always innocent, Dalit characters (“Good Dalits”). This moral opposition is continuously reinforced: in plot, dialogue, and description. The following discussion serves to demonstrate the function of realism in these stories and the ways in which it serves to underscore the melodramatic core. Realism appears as a means of recovering Dalit subjectivity and the visibility of Dalit lives in literature, while melodrama provides a powerful pedagogical focus to the narrative.

“ 25 Fours are 150 ” Valmiki’s short story considers several Ambedkarite themes common to Dalit fiction, including the urban-rural divide, where the city is the site of opportunity and progress, while the social hierarchies of the village stagnate and fester. The story is also an intergenerational narrative, a contemporary and touching look at the transformation of a family’s fortune when the younger generation is formally educated, and the veil of ignorance is lifted. The story is told from the perspective of Sudeep, a young Dalit who is returning to his village to share his accomplishment with his mother and

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father after receiving his first paycheck from a new job in the city. As the story begins, Sudeep is riding a bus to his village and meditating on how far he has come from village life. He thinks of his early years at the village school, remembering how his illiterate father had to plead for his son’s entry, groveling at the feet of the school’s upper-caste administrators. The plot soon arrives at its narrative focus, a critical event in Sudeep’s second year of school while learning the multiplication tables. Sudeep recalls practicing the equations aloud when his father, who, we are told, could not count past twenty, sits down to listen, swelling with pride at his son’s growing knowledge. But when Sudeep reaches “25 fours are 100,” his father interrupts him to tell him he is mistaken. Years before, when Sudeep’s mother had suddenly fallen ill, the uppercaste village head (chaudhrī) had loaned Sudeep’s father 100 rupees to pay for medication. Four months later, the chaudhrī tells Sudeep’s father that he is charging interest of 25 rupees a month on the 100 rupees borrowed. Recognizing that he can cheat the poor, uneducated Dalit, he insists that four months’ worth of 25 rupees interest comes to 150 rupees.23 Proud of his ability to instruct his son, the father becomes irritated when Sudeep tries to show his father that the sum is printed in his schoolbook as 100: There may be some mistakes in your book . . . otherwise would chaudhrī be lying? Chaudhrī is a much more important man than the one who wrote your book. He has so many of these fat books . . . tell your teacher to teach you right.24

Here lies the central conflict of the story, the moment that cleaves a wide split between father and son, locating them on opposing sides of modernity and tradition, skepticism and misplaced faith. While Sudeep continues his efforts to convince his father of the authority of his textbook, the father takes recourse to his own idea of authority, one firmly entrenched in the philosophy and understanding of caste hierarchy that invests the chaudhrī with greater knowledge, power, and authority—in effect, value—based on his “high” birth. The next day, when Sudeep incorrectly recites his tables in class, his teacher slaps and ridicules him, calling him a “stupid sweeper.” Sudeep leaves the class in tears, overwhelmed by this conflict with authority: If Master Sahib was right, then why was father telling him wrongly? If Father was right, then was Master Sahib making a mistake? Father said

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that chaudhrī -ji was a great man, that he would not lie. Waves were beginning to crash in his heart.25

This matter of ‘“25 fours are 150” plagues Sudeep for years. Not the sum itself, but rather its greater significance, the knowledge that his father had been duped by his upper-caste overlord. The recognition of his father’s weakness throws Sudeep into a crisis of identity. As an adult, however, sitting in the bus on the way home, Sudeep is emboldened by his new job and salary to finally prove to his father that he was wrong, that he was cheated by the chaudhrī, indeed ultimately that he has been a victim of caste-based exploitation throughout his entire lifetime. When he returns to his parents’ home, Sudeep separates the rupees he has earned into piles of 25 each and asks his father to count them. After several attempts, the excruciatingly slow realization of his exploitation manifests itself in the form of physical pain in the father’s chest. The story ends with the father’s relinquishment (with an angry oath) of his lifelong reverence for the upper-caste chaudhrī. This is the decisive moment of his assumption of Dalit consciousness, taught to him by his son, who achieved his own awareness through the arduous routes of education and punishment, urbanization and modernity. Valmiki constructs his narrative around what Morris calls the “metonymic principle of contiguity,” tracking narrative movements along a logical, continuous, realistic ordering of activity, in a “cinematic” style.26 He builds a narrative parallelism between Sudeep’s physical journey, back to his village on a bus, and his mental journey, back through his memory to the central event of his childhood. Both of these journeys, physical and mental, emphasize the greatest journey of his life, the psychological removal of ignorance and dependence of which this whole story is a metonymic rendering. Throughout, the story continually emphasizes this parallelism in the narrative, making the structural strategies explicit for the reader. For example, Valmiki writes: He had not been able to bridge the deep gorge of time and circumstance between his studies and his job. Whatever there was in that chasm that gave him some solace, it still couldn’t diminish his pain. His pain would only be eradicated in sharing these few moments of happiness with [his mother and father]. He had made a long journey to get to this moment, the kind of journey on which there is no difference between day and night, reverence and abuse.27

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Sudeep’s physical journey on a bus back to his village to share the joy of his first paycheck with his parents is in one sense the final leg of a much longer, more emotional life journey. In the first half of the story, descriptions of the physical conditions of the bus ride punctuate, and often prompt, Sudeep’s reverie into his past, maintaining a realistic effect. After a long meditation on his painful childhood memories, Valmiki offers this tangible description of the atmosphere on the bus: The bus was hitching, crawling like a snake. Smoke from bīḍīs and cigarettes had started to swirl around the nearby passengers, as though everyone were trying to destroy their worries in the clouds of smoke. Sudeep cracked a window open. A light rustling of fresh air entered the cabin.28

Then, just as the fresh air from the window cuts through the obfuscating clouds of smoke, Sudeep remembers the seminal event of his childhood, the matter of multiplication that penetrated the darkness of caste hierarchy and oppressive ignorance. There is both figurative and empirical value to this description that underscores the revelation to come and offers a material basis to the narrative, a sense of establishing the “here and now” that contributes to the effect of the real. The employment of several melodramatic devices in Valmiki’s narrative maximizes the symbolic impact of the story, dramatizing the essential ethical struggle at its core. The story itself centers around the fairly mundane issue of a simple multiplication equation. However, constant melodramatic flourishes throughout the course of the narrative raise the significance of “25 fours are 150” from the specific context of the characters of son and father to a powerful symbol of the susceptibility of uneducated, impoverished Dalits to exploitation by manipulative upper castes. As Peter Brooks explains, social melodramas are concerned with the “dual engagement with the representation of man’s social existence, the way he lives in the ordinary, and with the moral drama implicated by and in his existence.”29 Valmiki’s story asserts that the “ordinary” lives of rural Dalit laborers, steeped in traditionalism and ignorance, can only be overcome with difficulty by modern education and through rejection of customary caste hierarchies. The climax of the story is not Sudeep’s father’s realization that his math was wrong, but rather that his lifelong reverence for the chaudhrī, based in an internalized ideology of his own inferiority, was without foundation. The opening paragraphs of Valmiki’s story immediately illustrate the melodramatic tone underlying the story.

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Holding the rupees of his first salary in his hand, Sudeep noticed for the first time a spot of light in the deep darkness and he was filled with hope. He was filled with a happiness that he had been able to achieve only after making his own way through countless thorny bushes. Squeezing them in his palm, the rupees emitted their heat through his every pore. This was the first time he had seen so many rupees all together. He wanted to live in the present. But the past would not stop hounding him. Every moment inside him the present and the ghosts of the past were in a constant tug-of-war. Apparitions deceived him at every step. Somehow he had still managed to save himself. For this reason even getting this average job was, for him, a major achievement.30

The rupees in Sudeep’s hand serve as a hyperbolic sign, a conventional object metaphorically exaggerated to the extreme. These rupees are imbued with the symbolic capacity of emitting heat throughout Sudeep’s body. It therefore becomes immediately clear that they represent something much larger than money, or even the milestone of drawing a first salary. Rather, these rupees are “a spot of light in the deep darkness” and, as highlighted in the second paragraph of the preceding quote, proof that Sudeep has “managed to save himself ” from all kinds of obstacles, “thorny bushes,” “apparitions,” and “ghosts of the past.” This is a prime example of the hyperbolic description common to many Dalit fictional and nonfictional narratives.31 Its employment in these first two paragraphs immediately establishes Sudeep as an embattled individual, a hopeful and hardworking innocent who has triumphed against the odds and who is humbly proud of his achievements, even if it is only an “average job.” In the third paragraph, however, the author’s grandiose tone abruptly shifts, and we are again plunged into the quotidian details of a realistic narrative: In a new job it is very difficult to get a few days vacation. It had not been easy for him to get these few days off. He had worked overtime on his normal off-days, Sundays, to get these two days’ leave. He had wanted to share the joy of his first salary with his mother and father.32

The ordinariness of these details is striking and initially appears incongruous with the extravagant descriptions of Sudeep’s lifelong struggle for salvation in the first two paragraphs. Yet the third paragraph, too, serves the overarching melodramatic mode of the narrative. The fact that

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Sudeep’s desire to share the momentous event of receiving his first salary with his mother and father is so strong that he went to great lengths to secure days off to return to his village is testament to the goodness of his character. The good son’s filial piety draws him back to his village, the purity of his ambition revealed in his desire to give his earnings to his parents. Indeed, throughout this story, as in the overwhelming majority of Dalit narratives, the central Dalit character is morally upright. However embattled and victimized by the exploitative forces of caste and poverty, the Dalit character represents one unambiguous pole in the battle between good and evil, with innocence as the most potent quality of moral virtue. Film scholar Rosie Thomas suggests that Hindi cinematic melodramas are also constructed around opposing moral poles in conflict with one another, concretely and symbolically embodied by the archetypal figures of the Mother (self-sacrificing, loving, devout) and the Villain (self-serving, duplicitous, brutal).33 In the context of Dalit literature, this observation could be amended to suggest instead that the melodramatic conflicts between the opposing moral poles of innocence/virtue and treachery/ evil are embodied in carefully constructed archetypes of the “Good Dalit” and the “Bad Brahmin,” in which the Dalit is drawn without exception as a blameless figure and the Brahmin or other upper-caste person is characterized as ruthless and exploitative. Valmiki sticks closely to the normative melodramatic Dalit literary practice of investing his Dalit characters with unqualified goodness while representing upper-caste characters as lacking any redeeming qualities whatsoever. There is no space for moral ambiguity. Frequently, Dalit characters have been depicted as physically weak or in poses of supplication, while their polar opposites, upper-caste “villains,” are drawn in the aesthetic of the grotesque. For example, as Valmiki shows, a bus conductor rebukes a Dalit passenger whose bags are taking up space in the aisle, first having “taken stock of his appearance,” which is described as “meek and slight” (dublī-patlī-sī) and with a “waning voice” (dhīme svar).34 The conductor, however, is just the opposite: “His pot-bellied body was restlessly trying to tear his tight clothes and release itself. He had a face like a wild ( janglī) pig and red, pān-stained teeth . . . Sudeep imagined that a wild pig had in fact pushed himself into the crowd on the bus.”35 The stark contrast between the pitiable passenger and the monstrous conductor reminds Sudeep of his own father and the many times he had seen him reduced to a state of desperate supplication before a callous

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authority figure. This reflection of his father’s weakness elicits physical revulsion in Sudeep. Valmiki depicts this, too, in hyperbolic imagery: “Whenever Sudeep saw someone grovel, he would remember the image of his own father, and he would shudder violently, as though someone were sawing on his body.”36 In this case, the image Sudeep remembers is his father’s appeal to get him enrolled in school: “Sudeep was never able to forget his father’s pose. He stood bent, his hands folded together in supplication,” while the Master responded to this self-effacement coolly, “flicking ashes off the glowing butt of his bīḍī.’”37 The contrast is drawn again when Sudeep replays in his mind the moment when he recites the sum of twenty-five times four incorrectly at school and his teacher accosts him with insults: “And he would also think about Father’s face so full of faith and Master Shivnarayan Mishra’s angry, red face as he shouted abuses at Sudeep.”38 Through such physical descriptions and the careful attention to the balancing of an opposing malevolent character against each representation of a victimized innocent Dalit, the melodramatic, binary moral universe of the narrative is consciously constructed. This moral universe conforms to the Ambedkarite model. It is based on the principle of equality, where it is understood that caste divisions are not preordained, nor based on inherent human value, but are instead the product of the malevolent manipulation of men who desire to seize social and political power. Sudeep has returned to his village in this story to prove the existence of that universe to his father. The denouement of the story, the final revelation of the magnitude of his deception by Sudeep’s father, constitutes the “moment of astonishment” in which the presentation of evidence provides for final recognition and a restoration of the primacy of the moral universe, creating “an exciting and spectacular drama of persecuted innocence and virtue triumphant.”39 Of course, one may argue that the realization that twenty-five fours are not in fact 150 hardly provides for “spectacular drama.” I would attribute the choice of this symbol to a reverence for realism. Still, the revelation of manifold meanings condensed within that single symbol does result in a profound shift of perspective for Sudeep’s father, and, as the author might hope, the reader.

“the staFF” Kardam’s very brief short story, “The Staff” (“Lāṭhī”), focuses on water rights and irrigation in a community of villages.40 Its narrative scope is

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narrow, concerned with the events of just one night. Its significance, however, is much more broadly conceived. It is a story about a rural culture of intimidation, in which Dalits are routinely barred from equal access to shared resources. It dramatizes the tensions that can rise within a community over how to address the matter of its exploitation, specifically whether to combat such institutionalized mistreatment with violent resistance or to passively accept its lot. There are several rich descriptions of the geography and caste politics of the specific community that lend the story authenticity. At moments it resembles a newspaper or census report of the local community, but Kardam also makes liberal use of various melodramatic strategies to heighten the narrative’s drama. Harisingh is a Dalit of the Ahir subcaste in the village of Harsanv in Uttar Pradesh. Harsanv and several nearby villages share a governmentregulated irrigation system for their fields. Access to the water is divided into twice-weekly “turns” of a period of several hours for each field, and the water is distributed among a series of canals. On the night he expects his share of the water, Harisingh has gone to his field at 11 p.m. The owner of the neighbouring field, Badni, an upper-caste Jat from a neighboring village, is not ready to finish and cajoles Harisingh into going home. Harisingh protests “beseechingly” (anurodh ke svar meṁ) that it is his turn for the water, but to no avail. When he bends down to place an obstacle in the canal to redirect the water to his field, Badni hits Harisingh hard across the back with his lāṭhī and sends him sprawling on the ground. Badni shouts: “Get outta here if you care about your life . . . or else I’ll dig your grave right here, you bastard!” and continues to beat the man with his lāṭhī until Harisingh manages to drag himself to his feet and return home.41 At home, his moans of pain immediately wake his wife, Ataro, who rushes to his aid and massages his back as she loudly curses Badni. Her shouts awaken Harisingh’s father and uncle who also rush to his side. Harisingh’s father, Samman, is anguished by his son’s pain, but advocates caution while Harisingh’s uncle, Phaggan, threatens to retaliate and attack Badni that same night. Phaggan commands Ataro to bring him his lāṭhī as he prepares to attack Badni and “scatter the bastard’s corpse all over the ground.”42 But Samman holds Phaggan back, reminding him of an incident a few weeks earlier when members of another Dalit subcaste had quarrelled with a few members of the Jat community, and later a mob of Jats from the surrounding areas had assembled and “forced their way into their houses and tore everyone limb from limb.”43 Samman warns that any attack on Badni would draw a much more devastating retaliation from the

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rest of the Jat community. Phaggan argues that if they do not stand up for themselves now, they will only continue to be exploited and oppressed, forced to hide “like foxes in their holes” from the upper-caste “lions.” He eventually submits to his elder brother’s authority and returns to bed. But Phaggan is still seething, and the story ends with his personal promise to “see Badni again” while he stares at his own lāṭhi leaning against the wall of his room. The most striking element of melodrama in this story is the liberal use of epithets, maledictions, and curses to heighten the emotional drama of the narrative. As Brooks explains, “[o]ne of the most immediately striking features of melodrama is the extent to which characters tend to say, directly and explicitly, their moral judgments of the world. From the start, they launch into a vocabulary of psychological and moral abstractions to characterize themselves and others.”44 Anger and an overarching feeling of helplessness pervade Kardam’s narrative, unlike the redemptive tone of “25 Fours Are 150.” While the character of Sudeep in that story was able to save himself from the conditions of his low-caste birth through the avenues of education and urban employment, and manages to emancipate his father from debilitating ignorance, there is no such way out envisioned in this story’s episode. Instead, “Lāṭhī” tells the story of a community literally beaten into submission, although they are, unlike Sudeep’s father, perfectly aware of the exploitative nature of their social position. The impotent anger and frustration of the story’s characters is therefore released in the form of verbal outbursts directed at the one individual, Badni, who on this particular night embodies the systematized enforcement of their low social status. Interestingly, the character who takes the most recourse to the hurling of abuses (gālī denā) is Harisingh’s otherwise silent wife, Ataro: . . . a loud wail escaped Ataro’s lips followed by a volley of insults: ‘Badni, may you die! May nobody be left in your family to light your funeral pyre! You will be punished for all the wickedness you do in the world’. She kept shouting abuses at Badni while she soothed Harisingh’s back with her hands. . . . Ataro screamed even louder than Harisingh: ‘May you be destroyed Badni!  .  .  . and let there be no one left to carry on your name!’45

This is virtually the only speech Ataro is allowed in the story. It is a speech that is markedly rustic, firmly placing the narrative in its rural

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locale.46 Otherwise Ataro silently fulfills her wifely role: massaging Harisingh’s back and plying him with warm milk, jaggery, and turmeric while the men of the house discuss whether to take any kind of active recourse. While Ataro is not the only character to utter an oath, she does so more frequently than anyone else in the story, and her curses are the most threatening of all. In their anthropological study of Dalit women’s cultural lives, Franco, Macwan, and Ramanathan observe that “rituals of rebellion have a socially cathartic function, ensuring that conflicts occur in prescribed ritual contexts, leaving the dominant ideology intact; . . . while these expressive forms bank down rebellion at one level, they also make active resistance conceivable at another.”47 Indeed, Ataro is in no way capable of “destroying” Badni, but the vehement expression of her anger is ritually appropriate, perhaps even required, as she busies herself over the healing of her husband’s damaged body. Her outbursts function as ritualized female expression. The pronouncement of her rage and grief proves cathartic. She calms herself “only after shouting many abuses” and is then able to return to bed. It is possible, too, that Ataro’s maledictions, although ignored by the other characters in the story, encourage Phaggan’s own violent response to Badni’s attack. Phaggan’s final oath ominously ends the story, promising future retaliation and underscoring the spirit of resistance that is momentarily stifled, but not yet extinguished: The anger and heated exchange from a little while earlier was over now. Once again there was pin-drop silence in all directions. But nobody could sleep. They tossed and turned on their cots. They could all feel the pain of Harisingh’s lāṭhī wound inside themselves. Phaggan was the most agitated. He could not even lie down, let alone sleep. He just sat like a statue but inside he was still shaking with anger. ‘Badni, I’ll see you again’, he muttered. His face was pulled taut in anger, he was making fists and his gaze hung on the lāṭhī standing against the wall opposite him.48

This parting image is powerfully drawn and recalls stage melodrama. We can imagine the lights lowering or the curtain closing on the figure of a red-faced Phaggan glaring with rage and resolve at his lāṭhī leaning on the wall. Indeed it is standard practice in both stage and film melodrama that, in climactic moments and extreme situations, there is often

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a recourse to mute gesture as a means of expressing meaning more powerfully than with words. I would argue that in “The Staff” this final moment of resolve, emphasized both by verbal utterance (“Badni, I’ll see you again”) and starkly symbolic visual imagery, serves the same revelatory and didactic purpose of the “moment of astonishment” illustrated in the father’s revelation in “25 Fours Are 150.”49 Here, at the denouement of “The Staff,” is a call to a Dalit audience to reject victimization, even when the circumstances make the goal of freedom from oppression seem impossible. While the advice of Samman, who advocates acceptance as a means of survival, is for the moment upheld, the most indelible impression of reading “The Staff” is the final image of an angry Phaggan, barely restraining himself from violence. Although the emotional logic of melodrama pervades this story, there are several moments where the narrative mode of social realism dominates. Adherence to the two aesthetic styles is so absolute, however, that very often the passages foregrounding realist strategies can seem as though they belong to a different text altogether or are explanatory asides from the main story. Kardam includes an inordinate amount of what Roland Barthes has referred to as the “cultural code,” or “multiple explicit and implicit references in a text: familiar cultural knowledge, proverbial wisdom, commonsensical assumptions, school texts, stereotypical thinking.”50 Kardam offers explicit details about both the culture of the community (“No village woman ever uttered her husband’s name”) and the geographic makeup of the area (“There was a village named Harsanv a little more than a kilometer along the road that goes from Misalgadh to Gaziabad. There were a few Jat houses along the bank of the spring near Harsanv in the direction of Sadarpur”). The specificity of this kind of detail contributes to the “truth effect” of the narrative, reinforcing its authenticity. The story is not located in an abstract India but is rooted in a specific region of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Kardam uses dialect (such as the localized form of Chamar, “Chamtā”), or he reshapes standard Hindi, principally through vowel lengthening, to represent a rural tongue and to give the sense that the reader is hearing directly reported speech. One of the most effective narrative strategies Kardam employs in this story is a multilayered metonymic interpretation of the symbol of the lāṭhī. On the most basic level it is a staff, an indispensable tool of the rural farmer. Harisingh brings his own lāṭhī with him when he goes to irrigate his field, and it flies out of his hands when he is attacked by Badni, who

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puts the lāṭhī to a different, more malevolent use when he wields it as a weapon to enforce his will over Harisingh. Thus the humble lāṭhī comes to take on a violent and oppressive significance. Kardam explains that for Phaggan, his lāṭhī is a means of living with self-respect, since the strength and skill with which he can wield his own lāṭhī as a weapon protects him from the indignity suffered by his brother Samman who always “defused a situation with flattery and obsequiousness.” Kardam writes of Phaggan: “He was of short stature, but his body was strong. He could hit even the most robust young man on the waist with a lāṭhī with his full strength and reduce him to a heap, so much was the power in his body.”51 Thus it is naturally with his lāṭhī that Phaggan wants to retaliate against Badni. But as Samman tries to dissuade Phaggan, the lāṭhī takes on an even deeper metonymic valence as a signifier of individuals who are willing to wield their lāṭhīs on either side of a caste war. In the context of Samman’s cautionary advice, the lāṭhī becomes symbolic of the disunity of the Dalit community and of their weakness in the face of the opposing force of the Jats, who would fiercely protect their caste privilege. Kardam writes: Samman tried to explain to him: ‘Brother, there’s village after village of them. With one call they’ll get a hundred lāṭhīs together. How can we beat them? They’ll beat our heads in’. ‘That’s their village, not ours. If they have a hundred lāṭhīs then we have five hundred’, he told Samman. ‘Sure there are five hundred lāṭhīs, but you’ll never get them to come out together against someone from the outside. These lāṭhīs are only for splitting one another’s heads open amongst ourselves. You’ll only get four lāṭhīs together to go against someone else’.52

First the lāṭhī has been transformed from a farmer’s implement to a weapon, a means both of caste oppression and coercion in the case of Badni, and of self-sufficiency and respect in the case of Phaggan. In the preceding passage, it also becomes a representative of the disorder and lack of solidarity within the Dalit community. Rather, as Samman explains, lāṭhīs are used only for “splitting one another’s heads open among ourselves.” The lāṭhī therein becomes a symbol of the Dalit community’s source of weakness, and at the same time a symbol of Jat strength. It also becomes symbolic of the central conflict of this aptly named story. Just as Valmiki invests the meaning of the destructiveness of ignorance in the symbol of an incorrect multiplication equation,

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Kardam has focused the well-worn oppressor vs. oppressed plot pattern around a single locus, the lāṭhī.

conclusion Realism as a narrative mode is traditionally discussed in the context of the novel, largely as a strategy of elaboration of detail and the logical contiguity of events that lends a text the air of the real. In short stories, however, the construction of reality requires “a literary technique that insists on compression, a rhetorical method that reveals meaning by leaving things out, and a language style that creates metaphor by means of metonymy.”53 In both short stories discussed here, many different meanings are compressed into the single signs of “25 Fours Are 150” and the lāṭhī of Kardam’s story. The signs themselves become metonymic symbols, both of the demoralized living conditions of Dalits in casteist society and also of the hope for equality. May explains, “in the realistic short story, metonymic details are transformed into metaphoric meaning by the thematic demands of the story that organize them by repetition and parallelism into meaningful patterns.”54 In Valmiki’s story, the symbol of the mathematical equation is repeated and developed throughout: first it symbolizes the ignorance and impotence of Sudeep’s father, then it becomes the transformative event that forces Sudeep to question the authority invested in the upper castes by a hierarchical social structure, and finally it symbolizes the triumph of Sudeep over the social forces against him, as well as the dramatic social progress that can take place within a single generation. In Kardam’s story, the lāṭhī takes on early significance as a tool of the brutal suppression of the weak, and it continues to take on several different meanings depending on whose hands hold the lāṭhī. But the final scene of the story is unambiguous. The lāṭhī leaning on the wall is Phaggan’s hope and his future, his promise to “see Badni again,” by which he asserts his own subjectivity and rejects the role of the victim. Despite the ominous ending of Kardam’s story, however, it is crucial to recognize the difference in tone between “25 Fours Are 150” and “The Staff.” While Valmiki creates a redemptive drama in which a father’s life of systemic ignorance is effectively redeemed by the education and emancipation of his son, who then returns to free his father from the ideological chains of inferiority, there is no such cathartic resolution in Kardam’s story. Samman’s family is, for the moment, rendered impotent, and their lāṭhīs remain leaning against the wall, inert against the greater threat of

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violence from the upper castes. Kardam’s tone is more cautionary than Valmiki’s. The same unrest that could be harnessed for revolt against the upper castes may easily slip into a destructive force among Dalit communities. The divisiveness is something to guard against, as Kardam makes a subtle plea for the need to unify diverse Dalit communities in the struggle for equality rather than advocating retaliatory violence. The absoluteness of ethical conflict is combined in these two narratives with literary realism, which heightens the plausibility of the respective events. These Dalit writers want both Dalits and non-Dalits to think about the world around them in a new way, to challenge exploitation whenever they see it. But the crucial difference between the narratives of the Dalit counterpublic sphere and non-Dalit writers is that the characters in Dalit narratives are more than sympathetic or symbolic objects. Rather, they manifest the possibility of transforming society. The purpose for employing the storytelling strategies of melodrama and realism is to get their readership to acknowledge the ethical conflict at the heart of these stories, and then to recognize it reflected in the world around them and ultimately transform it into the new reality of a just society. This was the ultimate aim, as well, of Ambedkar’s activism and expository writing. This, in microcosm, is the fundamental meaning relayed in many contemporary Dalit short stories that seem to contrast the “Good Dalit” and the “Bad Brahmin.” This dualism is facilitated, as we have seen here, by the creation of Dalit chetnā through the employment of various formal narrative conventions of melodramatic realism. Literary realism, because of its dedication to revealing the world as it is without reliance on the soft lighting of aestheticism makes heroes out of some of society’s most persecuted victims. Melodrama has the power to raise the status of that persecution to elevated heights. Melodramatic realism, as we have seen it employed in these two stories, therefore, serves as the chosen narrative mode for Dalit writers to represent their subjectivity, rage against injustice, and ultimately triumph in the awareness of the possibility of change.

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in the Margins

The study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract “formal” approach and an equally abstract “ideological” approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon.

T

—M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”

his chapter considers the ways Hindi Dalit authors manipulate a diversity of language styles and registers in their narratives. The field of Dalit literary studies has suffered from a purely contentbased perspective that too often sweeps Dalit literary narratives into the province of political rhetoric, flattening the vibrancy, individuality, and originality of a new and constantly developing Dalit literary style. Following chapter 4, this chapter will consider a few key texts closely, as it is this practice alone that can correct the relative absence of careful critical analysis of contemporary Dalit writing. Encouragingly, the recognition of Dalit literature as literature, and not merely another mouthpiece for the rhetorical politics of the broader Dalit movement, is emerging in India with the increasing participation of Dalit writers in national-level literary summits and mainstream literary publications. The participation of several Hindi and Tamil Dalit writers at the 2010 Jaipur Literature Festival led Tehelka journalist Trisha Susan to opine, “newer work, represented at Jaipur by Ajay Navaria and P Sivakami—while still clinging to the power of rhetoric—is ready, too, to embrace a variety of literary aesthetics.”1 I might suggest in reply that Dalit literature has indeed always embraced a variety of literary aesthetics, though these have yet to be illumined in critical readings.

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It is impossible to ignore the role of language when discussing any body of Dalit literature. In particular, the Marathi poetry of the Dalit Panthers has, of all the Dalit literatures in various languages across India, most relied on the difference of its literary language from the mainstream as a source of its power. Just as author and critic Limbale points to the “impolite, uncouth language of Dalits” and the rejection of “standard language” with its “cultivated gestures and grammar”2 by Marathi Dalit writers, translator and critic Dilip Chitre suggests that pioneering Dalit Panther poet Namdeo Dhasal’s poetic register in particular privileges the bibhatsa rasa, or the aesthetic of revulsion. In his introduction to a recently translated anthology of Dhasal’s poems Chitre writes, “The graphic imagery of Dhasal’s poems often zooms in on the contents of sewers and stagnant pools of water that even in their verbalized and therefore somewhat distanced form hit us both by way of sight and smell. Our senses are besieged, as it were, by almost palpable filth and stink . . . Namdeo seemed to be launching . . . a guerilla war against the effete middle class and sanitized world of his literary readers . . .”3 As Dhasal himself explains in his poem “Cruelty,” translated here by Dilip Chitre, I am a venereal sore in the private part of language. . . . 

There’s a current of blood flowing through all pronouns now. My day is rising beyond the wall of grammar. God’s shit falls on the bed of creation.4

(Dhasal 2007, 100)

Such a radical use of language, self-consciously acknowledged in Dhasal’s poem, for the twin aesthetic and political purposes of affronting both agents and consumers of the literary mainstream, is largely relegated to the particular genius of Dhasal and some of the other early Dalit Panther poets. The relationship of contemporary Hindi Dalit prose writers to their literary language is something quite different, more subdued and nuanced. But they have, nevertheless, inherited a focus on language as a tool of differentiation and political commentary, albeit in a different form from what the early Marathi writers so effectively wielded. No serious study or translation of Dalit literature in any language can therefore afford to ignore the centrality of language itself in the construction of Dalit literary form and style. It is therefore this chapter’s goal to investigate the ways in which contemporary Hindi Dalit writers manipulate various styles of language,

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particularly in dialogical passages in prose narratives. Examples from recent Dalit short stories display a heightened awareness of the literary and social impact of manipulating language. These examples—which include the in-text glossing of dialectical speech, the selective employment of both dialectical and modern standard Hindi by characters possessing different levels of Dalit chetnā, as well as the selective use of English vocabulary—suggest a keen awareness and skillful manipulation of social heteroglossia. These literary strategies can be seen in the context of Bakhtin’s approach to the analysis of modern prose in his “Discourse in the Novel,” in which he argues that the ideological thrust of a work can only truly be understood by an analysis of the author’s manipulation of diverse registers and styles of language. Bakhtin defines this heteroglossia in prose as not only the coexistence of different registers of language but also the presence of tension and opposition between styles of language for the very reason that they are not neutral relational systems of signifiers and signifieds, but rather represent distinct worldviews. For Bakhtin, no language system is truly unitary, but “unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations that fill it . . . Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems . . .”5 The prose writer manipulates the languages of his characters in order to bring into dialogue this multitude of worldviews within a single story. Significantly, the existence of multiple worldviews within heteroglossic linguistic systems is not characterized by neutrality or equanimity. Rather, Bakhtin points out the way in which social stratification emerges in the practice of speaking itself: “Social stratification is . . . primarily determined by differences between the forms used to convey meaning and between the expressive planes of various belief systems—that is, stratification expresses itself in typical differences in ways used to conceptualize and accentuate elements of language  .  .  .”6 Bakhtin argues that this stratification makes itself manifest between present and past, as well as among various sociological groups, and is rendered bodily in the wielding of language and speech itself.7 Dalit literature is of course all about social stratification—revealing its pernicious pervasiveness in post-Ambedkar, post-liberalization India, and attempting to overcome its power by instilling political consciousness in its readers—and therefore it

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is no surprise that for reasons both artistic and ideological Dalit authors would strategically and intentionally employ heteroglossic speech in their narratives. This linguistic stratification operates on several levels: distinguishing urban from rural, modern from traditional, progressive from backward, politically awakened from unconscious. A 1970s Marathi poem by Arun Kamble demonstrates a sharp and painful awareness of these tensions between languages and their attendant social significances: “Which language shoulD i speak?” Chewing trotters in the badlands my grandpa, the permanent resident of my body, the household of tradition heaped on his back, hollers at me, “You whore-son, talk like we do Talk, I tell you!” Picking through the Vedas his top-knot well-oiled with ghee, my Brahmin teacher tells me, “You idiot, use the language correctly!” Now I ask you, which language should I speak?8

The narrator of Kamble’s poem is caught—silenced—between languages. The admonitions of his grandfather and teacher suggest that in attempting to speak both languages he can in fact speak neither. Learning to speak one only necessarily undoes the other. And in this silent space of tension between the two stands the meaningful expression of a young Dalit’s crisis of identity. Contemporary Dalit prose writers working in Hindi experiment with manipulating this formal tension. Belying Limbale’s assertion about Dalit literature’s rejection of “standard language,” most contemporary Hindi Dalit narratives are written primarily in modern standard Hindi. It is in characters’ monologues and dialogues that authors employ alternative registers of language that mark speakers as urban or rural, educated or not, and perhaps most significantly, possessive or not of an

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awakened Dalit consciousness. In the following examples, I will point to some of the ways that Dalit authors play with linguistic register in the process of making meaning. In the field of Hindi literary studies, attention to language and style has been paid to the author Phanishwarnath Renu by Kathryn Hansen in her article, “Renu’s Regionalism: Language and Form” (1981). Here, Hansen wrests the definition of the regional novel from those critics who, she suggests, “overrate the importance of content.” Instead, Hansen examines Renu’s strategic and ingenious use of styles and registers of Hindi to construct not only setting and location but also a value system. Hansen cites Hindi author Nirmal Varma, “A writer’s morality is not inherent in his ideas or in the various styles of his expression, his morality is inherent in his attitude to his own genre and language.” According to Hansen, Renu’s alternate use of polished Khari Boli Hindi and the spelling and grammatical permutations of a marked rural speech that she calls “Bazaar Hindustani,” or simplified Hindi, a kind of language that “differs primarily from standard literary language in the degree to which it brings the linguistic patterns of uneducated speakers of Hindi onto the written page,” is significant. As Hansen points out, Renu effectively constructs equally authentic rural and urban worldviews.9 He constructs in his writing an “oral universe,” consciously playing with the “educated reader’s sense of linguistic propriety,” as well as effectively marking his characters’ education and social status through the nuanced forms of their recorded speech.10 Hansen’s analysis of Renu’s literary language and form is instructive for its focus on the meaning of language and the political significance of aesthetic and stylistic strategies. Renu’s permutations, then, in the recorded speech (dialogical passages) of his characters “represents a choice for intimacy, liveliness, and simplicity, a choice against distance, flatness, artificiality.” In contemporary Hindi Dalit writing, I argue that we might push this analysis even further, considering several stories by Omprakash Valmiki, Surajpal Chauhan, Susheela Thakbhaure, and Ajay Navaria, to suggest that while Hindi Dalit authors use various registers of Hindi to construct authentic settings and suggest the distance between urban and rural spaces (and mindsets), there is also something more bitingly political going on. These authors don’t necessarily employ the same strategies and, in many cases, use dialogic passages to distinguish individual authorial styles. Nevertheless, we may think in general terms of the Dalit employment of heteroglossia as making explicit political statements about characters’ degree of success in achieving Dalit chetnā. As

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I will demonstrate, for a character to speak in a “marked” (simplified, non-modern standard) version of Hindi is to exhibit a deficiency of Dalit chetnā, to be characterized not only as “rural” or “traditional,” but more specifically to be condemned as “backward.” This is a profound shift from what Hansen calls the “democratic medium” of Renu’s bazaar Hindustani, as well as from the purposefully confrontational street language in Dalit Panther poetry. Instead, Hindi Dalit writers employ heteroglossia to exhibit nuanced political perspectives. Hindi Dalit authors do not exhibit singular moral perspectives (Varma) or distinct worldviews (Bakhtin) in their stories, but rather use the clash of very different worldviews and ethical systems to make meaning. So, marked registers of Hindi are relegated in almost all Hindi Dalit prose narratives to monologue and dialogue; Hindi Dalit fiction generally uses modern standard Hindi in first- or third-person narration. This highlights the difference of the marked passages of spoken or reported language that I will focus on next.

“this is the village, not the city”: Dialects of Discrimination In the following two examples, authors Surajpal Chauhan and Omprakash Valmiki assign marked speech in a rural register to savarṇ characters who abuse a Dalit (or mistaken for Dalit) protagonist who has traveled from a city to a rural village to attend a wedding. These authors use simplified Hindi (like Renu’s bazaar Hindustani) to emphasize the literary depictions of episodes of hate and caste-based discrimination. In each short story, Chauhan and Valmiki locate the nonstandard, or dialectical, rural speech in the voices of village rustics who shower with invective the protagonists of each story once their caste is “discovered.” In these stories, the rural characters convey not only their ignorance but also their hate through their unpolished speech, and this contrasts with the standard register of the city-returned and politically conscious characters at the center of each story. Secondly, the marked character of rural speech is heightened in both at realization of caste difference and the consequent expression of revulsion, underscoring the backwardness of casteism. Chauhan’s story, “Tillu Kā Potā” (“Tillu’s Grandson”), is included in his 1999 short story collection, Hari kab āyegā (When Will Hari Come?).11 The story—really a single brief flashback—centers on “General Manager” Harisingh, a civil servant recently transferred from Kanpur to Delhi. Chauhan’s first specific attention to spoken language comes when Harisingh calls out

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(in standard Hindi speech) to his office peon, Surya Narayan Tivari, for a glass of water. When Tivari responds, Harisingh immediately recognizes a particular inflection in his voice. They switch to their local dialect (kśetra kī bolī) realizing they both originally come from neighboring villages in Aligarh District. And it is Tivari’s use of this localized register that instigates Harisingh’s flashback to an incident that took place two years earlier. Harisingh, his wife, and two small children are returning to their ancestral home, a small village called Sonpur, for a wedding. The trip is arduous, the last five kilometers on foot on a dusty road. Harisingh’s wife and children are desperately thirsty when they finally come to a small well. The wife immediately reaches for the bucket, but eyeing an old farmer sitting nearby smoking a hookah, Harisingh checks her and asks the old man if they might have some water. He nods his assent, and responds in standard Hindi, “Hāṁ hāṁ, khīnch ke pī lo, is meṁ pūchne kī kyā bāt hai? (“Yes yes, grab it and have a drink, no need to ask”).12 But as Harisingh reaches for the bucket, the old man suddenly asks where they are headed. Harisingh responds that they are headed to Sonpur, and that he is the grandson of the late Tillu (Tillu kā potā). He even mentions his government job in Delhi, but by now the old farmer is incensed. He grabs the bucket from Harisingh and immediately begins cleaning it off. He shouts, Are bhaṅganiyā nek pīchhe kū haṭ ke pānī pī, yah śahar nā hai gāṁv hai, mare laṭhiyā ke kamar toṛ daī jāegī. Sāre (sāle) bhaṅgiyā-chamrā ke sahar meṁ jāke naye-naye lattā (kapṛe) pahar ke gāṁv meṁ ā jāt haiṁ. Kuchh patau na chaltu ki je bhaṅgiyā-chamār ke haiṁ ki nāy (nahīṁ). Hey untouchable bitch! You better stand back from the well to drink your water—this is the village, not the city—unless you want your back broken with our lāṭhīs. These damn bhangis and chamars get to the city, wear new rags, and come around here to the village. You can’t even tell if they’re bhangis or not!13

Though the story is short and the dialogue minimal, the selective use of Hindi marked by this localized rural dialect is significant. The frame narrative is written in modern standard Hindi. Brief snippets of dialogue are spoken by Harisingh, his wife and children, and the old farmer in modern standard Hindi. Only two passages stand out in a marked register: the initial exchange of recognition between Harisingh and Tivari, and this stream of invective from the old farmer who previously had not spoken nor been spoken to

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in this kind of marked tongue. In the above passage, however, the old farmer’s register changes abruptly upon the moment of realization of the caste identity of Harisingh and his family. He invokes the vocative, clips his words (māre, instead of hamāre), rounds his long ā endings, inverts /l/ and /r/ sounds, and uses pejorative vocabulary including caste names like Bhaṅganiyā and Chamarā (rather than Bhangi and Chamar). The last two of these instances, seemingly in anticipation of a reader’s confusion, are followed by parenthetical glosses such as sāle for sāre and glossing the pejorative lattā (rags) with the standard kapṛe (clothes, fabric). It is important to point out the extent to which Dalit authors anticipate their readers. Many gloss the dialectical speech of their characters, providing standard Hindi vocabulary in parentheses beside the dialectical variant of the word or spelling. Chauhan thus uses the localized register for two seemingly conflicting purposes in this story, at once invoking the familiarity of home and later investing it with alienation and insult. The presumably upper-caste farmer’s discriminatory speech is noticeably produced as rural, a speech which no longer belongs to Harisingh, just as his life as a government servant in Delhi means status and comfort and no longer having to endure the kinds of affronts so often encountered in the village. Thus, the nostalgic language of home and tradition is at once rescripted as the language of hate and ignorance. Finally, however, the farmer and his marked speech are ultimately rendered inconsequential, for far from being cowed into submission, Harisingh’s wife seethes at this insult and refuses the old farmer’s water, “This isn’t water, it’s poison . . . we’ll drink at our own house . . . We have no need of your sweet water.”14 Omprakash Valmiki uses a markedly rural register of Hindi to similar effect in his lengthy title story of his most well-known collection, Salām (2000). In the story, Kamal Upadhyay, a Brahmin, travels to a small village to attend the wedding of his good friend Harish, a Dalit. Kamal is enchanted by the chance to authentically experience village life, despite its privations and discomforts (a hundred members of the groom’s bārāt (wedding party) must crowd onto a single school verandah for the night to sleep). As he explains, “Gāṁv ke bāre meṁ sirf paṛhā thā. Dekhā āj hī hai.” (“I’d only ever read about the village, but today I have seen it”).15 But Kamal isn’t willing to surrender entirely to the pace of village life. He frets to his friend Harish that he is accustomed to drinking a cup of chai before 6 a.m., an act he intimately associates with his mother rising at five in the morning to perform pūjā, after which she always made him his cup of chai. This narrative detail serves to remind Harish, as well as the

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reader, of the daily performance of his own upper-caste identity, and it also advances the plot by explaining why Kamal leaves the wedding party early the following morning in search of a local chai wallah. He finds a shop open and asks the shopkeeper for a cup of chai. The shopkeeper replies that it will take a few minutes, and he ignites the coals in his small stove. Valmiki provides us with rich detail of the fire coming to life and the accoutrements of the rural shop, as Kamal sits and watches everything intently with an anthropologist’s eye for detail. Once again he marks his caste difference by remembering his mother who “would be repeating some śloka or another even as she prepared tea.”16 Casual chatter ensues between Kamal and the shopkeeper but stops abruptly when the shopkeeper learns that Kamal has come from Dehradun and makes the connection that Kamal is here as a guest of the Dalit wedding. He tells Kamal he in fact will not find any chai in this shop. Kamal tries to make the shopkeeper understand that he is in fact a Brahmin, but his efforts are futile and the shopkeeper refuses to believe him. “Yo paise sahar meṁ jāke dikhāṇā. Do paise ho gāe jeb meṁ to sārī duniyā ko sir pe ṭhāye ghūmo . . . ye sahar nahiṁ gāṁv hai . . . yahāṁ chūhṛe-chamāroṁ ko merī dukān meṁ to chāy nā miltī . . . kahīṁ aur jāke piyo.” . . . “Sahar meṁ chūtiyā baṇānā . . . maiṁ to ādmī kū dekhte hī pichhāṇ (pahchān) lūṁ . . . ki kis jāt kā hai?” “Go and flaunt your money in the city. You get a couple of coins in your pocket and you wander around trying to turn the world on its head . . . this is the village, not the city . . . here Chuhras and Chamars don’t get any chai in my shop. Go somewhere else and drink.” . . . “You can make fools of people in the city . . . I can recognize a man’s caste by looking at him.”17

As the exchange heats up between Kamal and the shopkeeper, a crowd begins to gather outside. The shopkeeper addresses the first curious, then angry crowd. Chūhṛā hai. Khud ko bāman batārā hai. Jumman chūhṛe kā bārātī hai. Ab tum log hī faislā karo. Jo yo bāman hai to chūhṛoṁ kī bārāt meṁ kyā mūt piṇe āyā hai. Jāt chhipāke chāy māṁg rā hai. Mainne to sāf kah dī. Budhdhhū kī dukān pe to milegī nā chāy chūhṛoṁ-chamāroṁ kū, kahīṁ aur ḍhūṁḍh le jāke.

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He’s a Chuhra. He calls himself a Brahmin. He’s in the wedding party of Jumman Chuhra. Now you people tell me, if he’s a Brahmin, then why is he coming to drink piss in a Chuhra’s wedding? Now he hides his caste and comes asking for chai. I told him clearly. Chuhras and Chamars won’t get any chai at Buddhu’s shop, let them look somewhere else.18

As in Chauhan’s story, the rural register (suggesting location certainly, but also a measure of ignorance) is given to the savarṇ shopkeeper. He changes the pronunciation of words (pichān for pahachān) extensively enough that Valmiki provides a parenthetical gloss, and elides or shortens vowels (ṭhāye for uṭhāye/ kū for ko); he trades the /sh/ of shahar for /s/ in the same evocative phrase as the old farmer uses in Chauhan’s story, “this is the village, not the city.” For both Valmiki and Chauhan, this is the language (not modern standard Hindi) in which casteism is propagated and in which hate is nurtured.19 For Kamal, being denied service based on (a misapprehension of) his caste identity, and the more threatening incident that follows as he flees from the shop chased by several angry villagers, is, as we have seen time and again in previously discussed stories, the occasion of the assumption of a new political consciousness. But unlike those Dalit characters that come to understand the nature of the exploitative system in which they are caught, the Brahmin Kamal learns to put aside his own privilege (of which the reader has been frequently reminded) and wakes up to the reality of caste-based abuses that abound in Indian society. As Valmiki explains, Usne pahalī bār akhbāroṁ meṁ chhapī un khabaroṁ ko shiddat se mahasūs kiyā. Jis par vishvās nahīṁ kar pātā thā vah. Phalāṁ jagah dalit yuvak ko pīṭ- pīṭkar mār ḍālā, phalāṁ jagah āg meṁ bhūn diyā. Gharoṁ meṁ āg lagā dī. Jab-jab bhī Harīsh is tarah kā samāchār Kamal ko sunātā, vah ek hī tark doharā detā thā. “Harīsh apne man se hīn-bhāvnā nikālo. Duniyā kahāṁ-se-kahāṁ nikal gaī aur tum log vahīṁ-ke-vahīṁ ho. Ugte sūraj kī rośnī ko dekho. Apne āp miṭ jāegā.” Lekin is vakt Kamal ke sāmne Harīsh kā ek-ek sach bankar khaṛā thā. Sach sābit ho rahā thā. For the first time he realized the seriousness of those reports published in newspapers, reports that he had never before really been able to believe. In one place a Dalit youth was attacked and beaten, in another, set on fire.

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Houses were set ablaze. Whenever Harish relayed this kind of news to Kamal, he would repeat the same objection. “Harish, banish this inferiority complex from your mind. The world has emerged from all this and you people are still right there. Look at the light of the rising sun. Learn to believe in yourself. If you get educated and get ahead, then you’ll erase all of these things from society yourself.” But at this moment, every word of Harish’s seemed absolutely accurate to Kamal. He was learning the truth.20

Kamal’s elevated rhetoric here, recalling the self-assured speech he used to dole out to Harish, stands in stark contrast to the rustic language of the shopkeeper. From his own comfortable position—Brahmin, educated, employed, and urban—borrowings from the elevated languages of psychology (hīn-bhāvnā, inferiority complex) and poetry (ugte sūraj kī roshnī, the light of the rising sun) come easily. But these words are rendered meaningless, ultimately, and Kamal is silenced when finally faced with the vernacular of hate.

Dialogizing Dalit Chetnā It is not only the case that Dalit authors put marked speech—dialectical, bazaar, rurally inflected—in the mouths of “backward” savarṇ characters. Indeed, it is also a common practice, as we will see in these two examples, for Dalit authors to use language to determine differences in consciousness between Dalit characters as well, and even occasionally to mark a shift in consciousness (i.e., the attainment of Dalit chetnā) in the very same character. The two examples I will discuss here thus complicate the easy binary constructed by the stories above, and they establish more fully the case that Dalit authors are supremely conscious of the ways in which the creative manipulation of language, particularly reported speech or dialogue, can work to establish Dalit chetnā and help construct the ethical ideology of the political Dalit narrative. My first example comes once again from the story Pacchīs Chauka Deṛh Sau, or “25 Fours Are 150,” also by Omprakash Valmiki, from his short story collection Salām, already discussed in the previous chapter. This is a story, like many Dalit stories, about a young man’s voyage out of illiteracy, ignorance, and self-effacement to a newfound political awareness and the achievements of education and employment that accompany his move from the village to the city. In this case, a young Dalit man, Sudeep, recalls a childhood debate

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with his father over the multiplication tables he was learning in school that reveals, in retrospect, the depth of his father’s ignorance and his conditioning in the psychological logic of village caste hierarchy. “Nahīṁ beṭṭe . . . pachchhīs chaukā sau nahīṁ . . . pachchhīs chaukā ḍeṛh sau . . .” Unhoṁne pure ātmaviśvās se kahā. Sudeep ne chauṁkkar pitā jī ko or dekhā. Samjhāne ke lahaje meṁ bolā, “Nahīṁ pitā jī, . . . pachchhīs chaukā sau . . . yah dekho gaṇit kī kitāb meṁ likhā hai.” “Beṭṭe . . . mujhe kitāb kyā dikhāve haiṁ. Maiṁ to haraf (akṣar) bī nā pichhāṇūṁ. Mere lekhe to kālā achchhar bhaiṁs barābar hai. Phir bhī itnā to zarūr jāṇūṁ ki pachchhīs chaukā ḍeṛh sau hotā hai.” Pitā jī ne sahajtā se kahā. “Kitāb meṁ to sāf-sāf likkhā hai—pachchhīs chaukā sau . . .” Sudeep ne māsūmiyat se kahā. “Terī kitāb meṁ galat bī to ho sake . . . nahīṁ to kyā chaudhrī jhūṭh bollenge? Terī kitāb se kahīṁ ṭhāḍḍe (baṛe) ādmī haiṁ chaudhrī jī. Unke dhore (pās) to ye moṭṭī-moṭṭī kitābeṁ haiṁ . . . vah jo terā headmaster hai vo bī pāṁv chhue hai chaudhrī jī ke. Pher bhalā vo galat batāvenge . . . master se kahaṇā sahī-sahī paḍhāyā kare . . .” Pitā jī ne ukhaṛte hue kahā. “Pitā jī . . . kitāb meṁ galat thoṛe hī likkhā hai . . .” Sudeep ruāṁsā ho gayā. “Tū abhī bachchā hai. Tū kyā jāṇe duniyādārī. Das sāl pahale kī bāt hai. Tere hoṇe se pahale. Terī mhatārī bīmār paṛgī thī. Bachne kī ummed nā thī. Sahar ke baṛe doctor se ilāj karvāyā thā. Sārā kharchā chaudhrī ne hī to diyā thā. Pūrā sau kā pattā . . . yo lambā līle (nīle) rang kā loṭ (noṭ) thā. Doctor kī fees, davāiyāṁ sab milākar sau rupae baṇe the. “No son, 25 fours aren’t 100 . . . 25 fours are 150 . . .” he said with complete self-confidence. Sudeep started and looked at his father. “No father, . . . 25 fours are 100  .  .  . look here, my maths book can’t have a mistake,” he explained cautiously. “Son, why are you showing me that book? I can’t read even one letter. All those black letters are hard to make out. Still, I know enough to know that 25 fours are 150,” father said simply. Sudeep innocently responded, “It’s written clearly here in the book—25 fours are 100 . . .” Becoming offended, father replied, “Well there might be mistakes in your book too . . . otherwise would Chaudhuri tell lies? Chaudhuriji is a

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much bigger man than your book there. He has so many of these big fat books . . . even that man who is your headmaster touches Chaudhuriji’s feet. Even then he’s telling you everything all wrong . . . tell master he should teach you right . . .” “Father . . . there aren’t any mistakes written in the book . . .” Sudeep began to cry. “You’re still a kid. What do you know about the world? I remember ten years ago. Before you were around. Your grandmother fell sick. There was no hope of saving her. A big doctor from the city gave her some medicines. Chaudhuri gave the money for everything. A whole hundred note . . . it was a long, blue note. The doctor’s fees, medicine, it all came to a full hundred rupees.”21

Significantly, Sudeep’s father’s speech is shot through with dialectical difference while both the third-person narration and Sudeep’s own speech—both as a child and as an adult—remains unmarked. Further, Valmiki has provided a gloss of several words in the father’s speech, providing Hindi alternatives for Urdu words or a standard spelling of a word (akṣar, pās, etc.), whether originally in Hindi or an English loanword. Valmiki thus anticipates his audience’s disorientation from Sudeep’s father’s speech, demonstrating an awareness of the varied interpretive frameworks of his reading audience and an intentionality behind his use of dialectical speech. Significantly, Valmiki employs this speech only in the voice of the father, the character who is yet mired in the psychological muddle of caste-based inferiority. Later, when his consciousness is transformed thanks to Sudeep, the father’s voice is silenced. When the truth dawns on Sudeep’s father, Valmiki notes importantly that he is speechless (avāk hokar), and we don’t hear his voice again for the rest of the story. Rather, we are left with the modern standard Hindi of Sudeep and the third-person narration—the rational, enlightened voices of the politically conscious. Let us also consider the final lines of the story, in which Valmiki describes the process of realization in silent physicality: Unhoṁne apnī mailī chīkaṭ dhoti ke kone se āṁkh kī kor meṁ jamā kīchaṛ poṁchhā aur ek lambī sāṁs lī. Rupae Sudeep ko lauṭā die. Unke chehre par pīṛā kā khaṇḍahar ug āyā thā. Jisko dīvāroṁ se īṇṭ, patthar aur cement bhurbhurākar girne lage the. Unke antas meṁ ek ṭīs uṭhī, jaise kah rahe hoṁ, “kīṛe paṛenge chaudhrī . . . koī pānī dene vālā bhī nahīṁ bachegā.

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He rubbed the sleep stuck in the corner of his eye with his filthy, grubby dhoti and gave a long sigh. He returned Sudeep’s rupees. Ruins of pain showed on his face. Ruins whose bricks, stones, and cement were crumbling and starting to collapse. A sharp inner pain wracked him, as though it were saying, “Worms will eat away at you Chaudhuri, and may there be no one left to give you comfort.”22

It is significant that Sudeep’s father does not speak at the end of the story and that Valmiki chooses instead to emphasize his pain with a description of his mute features and suggests that it was as though (jaise) he were uttering the curse that ends the story. I contend that for many contemporary Dalit writers, Dalit consciousness, that politically awakened frame of mind that refuses to accept the casteist status quo, simply cannot be expressed in regional dialectical inflection because such inflection is too weighted with connotations of tradition, backwardness, and political ignorance. A second example further underscores this point. The following passages come from the story “Badlā” (“Revenge”) published in 2006 by Susheela Thakbhaure, a Dalit writer based in Nagpur and one of the more prolific women writers of the Dalit literary sphere.23 The story takes place in a village and tells of the persecution of a Dalit family from the perspective of the elderly matriarch, Chau-a Ma. Her grandson Kallu is warned repeatedly by Chau-a Ma and by his parents not to react when teased and provoked by the upper-caste boys in the village who gang up on him and who count on the fact that he wouldn’t dare fight back. But one day Kallu does fight back. Hours later, the fathers of these boys, along with many other representatives of the village’s upper-caste community (members, as Thakbhaure repeats throughout the story, of the “Thakur, Sharma, and Raghuvanshi”—names clearly marked as Brahmin—family clans), gather outside Chau-a Ma’s hut—red in the face and carrying lāṭhis, shouting for Chau-a Ma to produce her grandson. This exchange takes place between the old Dalit woman who is trying to protect her family from the angry mob outside her house. Chau-ā Mā unko manātī huī bolī—“beṭā ho, tum bhī mere beṭā ho . . . tum bhī mere nātī ho, vo bhī merī nātī hai, ab jhagṛā khatam karo . . .” Rajan kā bhāī yah sunte hī bifar gayā – būṛhī ḍokarī, tū saṭhiyā gaī hai? Terā dimāg to ṭhīk hai? . . . Tū bhaṅgan ḍokarī, ham tere nātī-pote kaise ho sakte haiṁ . . . ? Rajan ṭhākur kī āṁkhe aṅgārā ban gaīṁ. Chehrā lāl bhabhūkā ho gayā, jaise abhī kahar barsā degā.

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Chau-ā Mā ko bahut dukh huā. Vah ruāṁsā hokar bolī“Hao beṭā, maiṁ būṛhī ḍokarī . . . tum sabkī sevā karte karte būṛhī ho gaī . . . tum sabko gūṁ-mūt kiyo . . . tum sabkī māṁ ko dāīpano maiṁne kiyo, sabse pahle tumko maiṁne hī dekho, maiṁne hī tumheṁ āsīs dī. Beṭā maiṁ to tumko apnī santān jaise mānūṁ hūṁ. Sabhī ko māṁ jaiso prem karūṁ hūṁ. Māṁ jaisī āshīsh deūṁ hūṁ . . . tum to baṛe nārāj ho gaye beṭā . . . ? To pacify them Chau-ā Mā said, “You’re my son, you’re also my son . . . and you’re like my grandson, he’s also my grandson  .  .  . now stop fighting . . .” As soon as he heard this Rajan’s brother got irritated. You old hag, have you gone crazy? Your brain is broken. . . . You’re an old Bhangi hag . . . how can we be your sons and grandsons . . . ? Rajan Thakur’s eyes had become glowing coals. Rage had turned his face red, as though he was about to explode. Chau-ā Mā felt miserable. Starting to cry, she said— “Yes son, I’m an old hag . . . I’ve become old looking after all of you . . . I’ve cleaned up your shit and piss . . . I’ve nursed you for your mothers . . . I was the first one to lay eyes on all of you . . . It was me who blessed you. Son, I think of you as one of my very own. I love all of you like a mother. I bless you like a mother . . . why are you so angry my son . . . ?24

As Chau-a Ma recounts her labor as prescribed by her caste and gender (her work as a manual scavenger, wet nurse, and midwife), her speech here is emphatically marked with rural dialectical patterning. Her long /ā/ verb endings become rounded /o/s, while many of her other vowels (such as the /u/ in gūn) are elongated. Compare this with the speech of her daughter, mother of little Kallu, who addresses the mob at her door in a very different manner. “Pāpī, pākhaṇḍī hamse laṛan āye haiṁ. Hamāre dushman, hamāre darvajje pe hamse laṛan āye haiṁ. Beimān merī māṁ ko kilpā-kilpā ke rulā rahe haiṁ . . . inkā satyānāsh ho jāye. . . . Mere beṭe ko kuchh ho gayā, to dekh lenā, maiṁ bhī kisī ko nahīṁ chhoṛūṁgī . . . tum sabkā khūn pī jāūṁgī . . . ek ek kā khūn pī jāūṁgī. He kālī maiyā . . . jo mere bachche ko hāth lagāye, tū uskā khūn pī jānā . . . He maiyā, tū uskā bhog le lenā . . . He maraī mātā, tū usko sīdhā līl jānā . . . Inko buro ho jāye inko . . . hamse laṛan āye haiṁ . . . inkī ṭhaṭhrī baṁdh jāye . . . dushman kahāṁ ke . . . pāpī pākhaṇḍī . . . inke muṁh meṁ miṭṭī paṛ jāye . . .”

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We have come to fight these cruel-hearted hypocrites. We have come to fight our enemies on our own doorstep. These heartless people have made my mother cry . . . Let them be destroyed . . . If anything happens to my son, then see here, I won’t spare anyone . . . I’ll drink the blood of all of you . . . I’ll drink the blood of every single one of you. Hey Kali Mata . . . you drink the blood of anyone who touches my son . . . Hey Mother devour him . . . Oh my mother, gulp him right down. . . . Let them be destroyed . . . they have come to fight with us . . . may their skeletons crumble . . . enemies from somewhere . . . cruel-hearted hypocrites . . . may their mouths fill with filth . . .25

Kallu’s mother’s speech is in a completely different register from Chau-a Ma’s. Unlike Chau-a Ma, she is not self-effacing or ingratiating. Rather, she is angry and aggressive, hell-bent on defending her son against the angry crowd, going so far as to evoke Kali Mata to drink the blood of anyone who touches him. Nor is her speech marked by the same dialectical patterns as Chau-a Ma’s—her spelling and pronunciation are much closer to modern standard Hindi even as her choppy exclamations, ellipses marking moments of trailing off into wordlessness, and the bloodthirsty evocations of Kali Mata indicate the passion and distress with which she gives this speech. There is a generational difference between Chau-a Ma and her daughter to be sure, which may contribute to the logic of their differentiated speech patterns, but I would argue that there is also a difference in consciousness. Kallu’s mother possesses a measure of self-respect and righteous anger that Chau-a Ma does not, and like Sudeep and his father in the previous story, this consciousness is expressed in a more hegemonic register of Hindi unmarked by caste, class, region—in effect, difference. We return again to Chau-a Ma, desperate, at the conclusion of the story. The angry threats of the crowd outside her house have dissuaded her from her desire to be accepted by them, and she finally cracks. I resume Thakbhaure’s narrative here: Hameshā sabse māfī māṁgnevālī Chau-ā-Mā, sabko āshīsh denevālī Chau-ā-Mā āj dushmanoṁ se gin-gin kar badlā le rahī hai—beīmānoṁ . . . kamīnoṁ . . . tumhārā nāś ho jāyegā. Tumhāre peṭ meṁ kāṭ chalegī . . . tumhārā kāl muṁh ho jāyegā . . . tumko maraī mātā khā jāyegī . . . pāpiyoṁ, tumhārā pāp tumko le ḍūbegā . . . satyānāśiyoṁ . . .” Today Chau-a Ma, who was always apologizing, always blessing everyone, had her revenge against each and every one of her enemies—“Liars . . . lowlifes  .  .  . go to hell. May your bellies be ripped open  .  .  . may your

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mouths go black . . . my mother will devour you . . . sinners, your crimes will drown you . . . you wretches . . .”26

Like Valmiki before, Thakbhaure here makes clear the moment at which “always apologizing” Chau-a Ma acquires Dalit consciousness. But unlike Valimiki’s silencing of Sudeep’s father, and the offering of a curse that was only “as though” he had said it, Thakbhaure allows Chau-a Ma to vocalize her newfound political awareness and self-respect. And in this vocalization, her speech is changed—gone are the elongated vowels and rounded /ā-o/ verb endings—replaced by standardized spellings and grammatical constructions. Once again these authors are constructing a moral universe in their narratives with attention to the clash of heterogeneous modes of speech. We see again that Dalit consciousness simply cannot be expressed in nonstandard Hindi and that in the heteroglossic interactions of dialectically marked speech with more standard hegemonic stylistics lies a tension in which meaning about the acquisition and expression of political consciousness is created and conveyed. As Bakhtin suggests, “Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language.”27 Thus the employment of dialect in passages of dialogue between characters in Hindi Dalit fiction does more than differentiate between their regional origins and education levels, but rather comprises a process of “dalitization” within the narratives themselves: that is, to speak in marked registers of Hindi is to exhibit a deficiency of Dalit consciousness. 

selective englishes A final, striking example of Hindi Dalit authors’ manipulation of heteroglossia in prose fiction is the selective and pointed use of English, a strategy most obviously exploited in several stories by Delhi-based author Ajay Navaria. More than any other contemporary Dalit writer working in Hindi, Navaria, whose uniquely nuanced stories will be discussed at some length in the following chapter, employs English selectively and to great effect. In particular, Navaria allows the clattering of dissonant spoken registers meeting each other to evoke the theme of alienation, particularly of the urban, educated, politicized Dalit from his distant—both ideologically and physically—origins. Navaria’s skillful employment of English, sometimes within a “neutral” modern standard Hindi third-person description or interlaced in the speech of urban characters, and sometimes jarringly smashed up against rustic dialects akin to those already discussed

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here, allows his readers to experience the sense of distance and dislocation he evokes. In other instances, Navaria manipulates the heteroglossic infusion of English to upend reader expectations and demand that we think more carefully about the kinds of social assumptions we make upon hearing spoken language marked in various ways. In the story “Upmahādvīp” (“Subcontinent”), Navaria narrates from the perspective of Siddharth, a young, educated Dalit office manager in Delhi.28 While chapter 6 concerns itself with the larger themes of this story and others by Navaria, it is worth calling attention here to the selective use of English vocabulary in one particular passage. Note the mention of the English books at the head of Siddharth’s bed, upon which he casts an alienated glance that suggests, along with the sputtering of the “tube light” and its weak defense against the pervasive darkness, the depths of Siddharth’s unease, both in his social world and in his own skin. This passage is immediately followed by a flashback to his childhood and the brutal beating of his father by some upper-caste thugs. The reader is swept from the contemplative quiet of the description of Siddharth’s bilingual urban life to the rustic, self-effacing cry of his grandmother begging for mercy for her son: Bāhar kā aṁdherā kamre meṁ bharne lagā thā. Paśchim meṁ sūraj kī lālī kālī paṛ gaī thī. Maiṁne uṭhkar switch-on kiyā. Tapedik ke rogī kī tarah purānī tube light ne sāt-āṭh bār khāṁsā aur halkī-pīlī balgam-sī beraunak rośnī se kamre ko bhar diyā. Khiṛkī ke bāhar ab kitnā aṁdherā thā. Bāhar kā aṁdherā andar ke is ujāle se aur syāh, aur vībhats lagne lagā thā. Sirhāne rakhī “Riddles in Hinduism” aur “Art and Social Life” par nazar paṛī. Dillī . . . kyā hamārā ghar? Hamārā Rājasthān hamāre purakhoṁ kī janmabhūmi. Hamārī mātṛbhūmi. Parantu sach meṁ hamārā kyā hai vahāṁ? Maiṁ sūkhī latāoṁ se ghirī bhavṛī meṁ utarne lagtā hūṁ. Utartā jātā hūṁ. Sīṛhī-dar-sīṛhī. Ek gahrā kuhāsā. Sarr . . . see . . . jhann . . . Ek . . . do . . . tīn . . . pachchīs. Pachchīs sīṛhiyāṁ nīche, guḍup, guḍup. Thāre pair paḍūṁ Māharāj. Galtī māfī. Abke nā hogī aisī galtī. Jalam bhar nā hogī aisī galtī. Sahar meṁ rahbā ke kāraṇ bhūl kar gae. The raham karo mālik. The darkness outside had started to fill the room. In the west lay the red and black remnants of the sun. I got up and turned on the lightswitch. Like a tuberculosis patient, the old tube light coughed seven or eight times then filled the room with a lackluster light the yellowy shade of mucus. How dark it had become outside. With the light inside, the darkness outside seemed

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even more inky, more scary. My glance fell on the English titles at the head of the bed, Riddles in Hinduism, and Art and Social Life. Delhi . . . was this our home? Rajasthan was the birthplace of our ancestors. Our motherland. But really what there is ours? I start to descend the crumbling steps of our old tank, from which jut scrub bushes and withered vines. I keep going down. Step by step. The mist is dense. Sarrr . . . . ssseeee . . . jjhannn . . . One, two, three . . . twenty-five. Twenty-five steps down. Guddup . . . guddup. “I lie at your feet Maharaj. Forgive me. I won’t do it again. In my whole life I won’t do it again. I had forgot ‘cause of living in the city. Have pity sir.”29

Navaria uses the dissonant clattering of these two registers to strong effect: the adult Siddharth—middle-class, well-read in Ambedkarite and Marxist theory, politically progressive—is worlds away from the desperate privations of his childhood as a Dalit boy in a rural Rajasthani village, and that distance is neither bridgeable nor wholly comfortable. Rather than explaining, Navaria effectively manipulates the tension between divergent registers to convey this message. In this short passage, Navaria uses English words to mark both the technological trappings of urban life: the “tube light” that can be “switched on” to combat the spreading darkness. Yet the sputtering of the tube light proves ineffective and only heightens Siddharth’s unease. This suggests that the material “progress” of urban life and the class mobility demonstrated by the story’s narrator, both traditionally heralded as ways out of the darkness of caste-based oppressive hierarchies and into the light (so to speak) of democratic equality, are yet unequal to the task of conquering caste. Then, in the next few lines, Siddharth’s gaze shifts to the English titles of books by Ambedkar and Russian Marxist writer Plekhanov, titles that reveal his political perspective in a manner more subtle than explaining it outright. But the Hindi question that follows his contemplation of these books—“Dillī . . . kyā hamārā ghar?”—once again sets us at a remove from the promise of the elevated register of these texts. Navaria thus chooses to use English words to describe the artifacts of urbanity and political consciousness that inhabit Siddharth’s home, and reverts again to Hindi to remind us that Siddharth yet does not feel at home among them. Thus the heteroglossic interaction of these few words illuminates a complex and meaningful thematic element. Returning to Bakhtin to highlight what this heteroglossic interaction allows Navaria to establish, “the stratification of language . . . establishes its own special order within it, and becomes a unique artistic

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system, which orchestrates the intentional theme of the author.”30 The theme of this story, as with many of Navaria’s stories, is the alienated existence of the modern urban Dalit, and it is powerfully underscored by his skillful use of heteroglossic registers of language. Navaria can also play with English in his stories, manipulating deeply entrenched social connotations of English and those in positions of power who wield it. An example comes from another of Navaria’s stories—“Yes Sir”—first published in 2008 and later included in his 2012 story collection of the same name.31 The passage is an exchange between an office manager and his peon: “Tumne dekhā hai kabhī R.O. system, Tivari, hamāre yahāṁ kaī sāloṁ se hai.” Us din Narottam ne kahā to Tivari sulag gayā, uske ahaṁkār se. “Achchhā batā Tivari, R.O. kā kyā matlab hotā hai?” Narottam ne file par likhnā band kar diyā aur nazar uskī āṁkhoṁ meṁ jhāṁkā. Tivari ko lagā ki in nigāhoṁ kīṛā-makoṛā ban gayā hai. “R.O. matlab ek tarah kā Aquagaurd, sir.” Tivari ne satark hokar jawāb diyā. Vah dikhā denā chāhtā thā ki vah koī miṭṭī kā mādho nahīṁ hai. “Bas, tum logoṁ meṁ yahī kami hai . . . gadhe ghoṛe sab barābar.” Narottam jhallā paṛā. “Toothpaste kharīdne jāoge to kahoge ki Colgate kharīdne jā rahā hūṁ aur detergent kharīdo to kahoge Surf kharīd rahā hūṁ. Are bevkūf, Aquaguard to company kā nām hai. Ise water purifier kahate haiṁ . . . pānī sāf karne vālī machine aur R.O. system to do alag chīzeṁ haiṁ. T.V. par nahīṁ dekhte? Ise dreamgirl Hema Malini apnī donoṁ betiyoṁ ke sāth bechne ke lie ātī hai.” Yah kahte hue Narottam apnī ādat ke viparīt kuchh muskarā gayā. Yoṁ vah kabhī muskarātā bhī nahīṁ thā. Muskarā to Tivari bhī jātā, par uskī chhātī meṁ to Narottam kā kahā ‘bevkūf ’ shūl kī tarah gaṛ gayā thā. “Have you ever seen an R.O. System, Tivari? We’ve had one at our place for years.” That day when Narottam said this, his arrogance inflamed Tivari, “OK, tell me Tivari, what does R.O. mean?” Narottam stopped writing in his file and peered into his eyes with a penetrating stare. Tivari felt that these looks transformed him into a nothing more than a bug. “R.O. means a type of Aquaguard, Sir,” Tivari answered cautiously. He didn’t want to seem like a complete idiot. Narottam exploded, “You know, this is exactly what’s wrong with you people . . . donkeys, horses, everything’s the same.” If you go buy toothpaste, then you’ll say, I’m going to buy Colgate and if you buy detergent

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you’ll say, I’m buying Surf. Arre dummy, Aquaguard is the name of a company. It’s called a water purifier . . . a machine that cleans water and an R.O. system are two different things. Haven’t you ever watched T.V.? That dreamgirl Hema Malini comes on with her two daughters to sell it.” As he said this, Narottam smiled a little, contrary to his usual manner. He never smiled generally. Tivari would have smiled too, but Narottam’s word “dummy” had pierced his chest like a knife.32

Navaria uses this condescending dialogical exchange over the use of English and Western branding to surprising effect. The conversation specifically marks status; we fully expect the balance of power to be weighted toward the upper-caste, elite Narottam and away from the poor Dalit Tivari, who clearly feels victimized and excluded by Narottam’s criticism of his linguistic ignorance. We are thus surprised to find out that Narottam is in fact a Dalit and Tivari a caste Hindu. He has achieved his status through, in part, the employment reservation system, and assumes a higher post than the hapless Tivari. He guards his professional and class status zealously, wielding his knowledge of the water purification technology of the upper middle class household, the pop culture knowledge of TV commercials, and the sneering disdain for the misplaced use of brand names for modern products like toothpaste and detergent by the less educated, his distance from them summed up here by the contemptuous “you people” (tum log). Navaria’s narrative strategy here speaks to his implicit understanding of his readers’ expectations as they have been constructed by the existing linguistic hierarchies of modern society, as well as the way in which they have been established by the common conventions of representation of dialogue and language use in Dalit narratives suggested earlier in this chapter. The aloof and critical posturing of the Dalit Narottam and the self-conscious vulnerability of the savarṇ Tivari seem at odds with the character constructions developed in part by the strategic employment of heteroglossia in the other stories discussed in this chapter. And yet it also underscores the ways in which consciousness is inseparable from the very language in which it is expressed, and the insightful and sensitive ways in which contemporary Dalit authors exploit this knowledge for the purpose of creating socially and politically conversant characters and stories.

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conclusion I suggest that Dalit literature, in its social activist role, orients itself towards two specific target audiences: a Dalit audience among whom it intends to foster political consciousness, and a non-Dalit audience for whom it endeavors to reveal the “reality” of caste society. To these ends, Dalit writers exhibit a self-consciousness in the way their narrative form, as well as their stories’ content, engage with the subjective belief systems of their audiences. Thus it is at our peril that we ignore the formal strategies of Dalit writers, particularly with their purposeful and carefully structured employment of heteroglossia in their narratives. In these examples, the speech of the Dalit characters who do not possess a hegemonically defined “Dalit consciousness”—be they Dalit or not—is consistently rendered in nonstandard Hindi dialect, while the characters who do possess this consciousness most often speak in a register of Hindi that is seamless with the standard style of the narrative frame. Navaria’s employment of English vocabulary reveals yet another level of heteroglossic narrative practice, allowing us to see the ways in which language can project alternative social identities that may not be wholly comfortable for those who create them. Further, the impact of elite language in close contact with rustic dialogue forces us to feel all the more strongly the social and emotional distance between various Dalit psyches. In all of the stories considered here, it is in the collision of these various linguistic registers within such tightly constructed short story narratives that the ethical stance of the author towards issues such as traditionalism, home, modernity, and the like are revealed. Contemporary Dalit writers thus selectively employ nonstandard Hindi dialects to differentiate between these characters. In so doing, they succeed in constructing a hierarchical coding that forces us to think more carefully about the simplistic egalitarian presumptions of Dalit literature than are revealed through content analyses.

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experience of Modernity

My beloved kid Piloo hanging upside down—it was a terrifying sight. Kaka had flayed his hide. In just a short while my leaping-jumping Piloo had been reduced to a pile of meat. Soon customers would buy his meat from the shop. Someone would buy his testicles, someone his head, and someone else his trotters. Some poor tanner’s wife would buy his entrails to satisfy her alcoholic husband’s desire and to fill her hungry children’s stomachs. No one would remember my bounding Piloo, my sweet kid goat.

T

—Ajay Navaria, “Bali”

his vivid description of the butchering of a kid goat through a child’s eyes, and the growing awareness in this young boy’s consciousness of the gulf of meaning between the boisterous antics of a cuddly kid goat and the sum of its (body) parts in the meat market, comes from the story “Sacrifice” (“Bali”) by Delhi-based Dalit author Ajay Navaria.1 In his participation in the killing and dismembering of his beloved kid, the boy undergoes his first experience of alienation, a narrative theme prevalent throughout Navaria’s fictional narratives. This traumatic moment is the beginning of a distancing of the protagonist from the “traditional” occupation of his family (butchering), and eventually a physical distancing from his family’s village and a social and psychological distancing from their ways of thinking and identifying themselves in society. The emotion of this passage underscores a salient theme: the emotional toll that this alienation (from home, family, and traditional belief systems and social practices) takes on the protagonist, who remains as scarred by this separation as he is liberated from the strictures of his “old” caste identity. This chapter will push the discussions of previous chapters in a new direction. Navaria’s stories do indeed exhibit allegiance to the stylistics

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of Dalit consciousness, particularly in his transparent sermons about the injustices meted out to Dalits in feudal village society or about the gender equality among Dalit communities versus the cruel patriarchy of Brahminical society. However, there are also moments in each of his narratives where Navaria takes experimental steps; plays with time, space, and liminal transitions; and subtly challenges aesthetic and thematic norms of Dalit literature. This is achieved in large part by a narrative focus on the Dalit individual rather than on the community. Navaria’s characters are true, rounded characters, rather than archetypal stand-ins representing an entire community, and they often undergo emotional and psychological transformations in the course of the narrative. Navaria’s stories address the crisis of identity that befalls middle-class Dalits who have achieved a relative level of professional and material status in the modern Indian city. His characters are educated and politicized, comfortable speaking in the modern vernacular of the urban Indian, steeped in Ambedkarite religious and social theory, and patrons of the institutions of capitalist modernization, such as fast-food restaurants and mobile phone dealers. An ideological impulse is behind all of Navaria’s writing, a clarity of vision that shapes his short fiction and sets it at the forefront of contemporary Hindi literature. His resistant spirit draws the reader in—his strident critique of casteist social hierarchies and the clear-eyed perception of the violence these social hierarchies inflict on family relationships and individual psyches. Navaria stands alone in contemporary Hindi literature for his analytical, sensitive narrative treatment of the modern urban Dalit male. Despite being himself a modern, educated, urban Dalit male, Navaria does not intend his stories to be interpreted as autobiographical, although they are clearly informed by his own experiences and experiments in selfunderstanding. Born in Kotla Mubarakpur in Delhi to a Rajasthani family (his grandfather moved from a rural village near Jaipur to Delhi in 1942, and such a move from village to city is one Navaria explores repeatedly in his stories), Navaria is one of the leading young writers on the Hindi Dalit literary scene, though to relegate his growing significance to the Dalit literary sphere alone belies the radical innovations his writings are introducing to Hindi literature in general. A professor of Hindu ethics at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, Navaria is the author of a published novel and two collections of short stories,2 as well as several stories and critical essays that have been published in a wide variety of literary, academic, and activist journals. He regularly publishes new work in Hindi literary magazines,

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Dalit and otherwise, and has served as guest editor of the Hindi literary monthly Haṁs twice, once for a special Dalit issue and again for an issue focusing on young voices in Hindi literature.3 Navaria, along with stalwart Omprakash Valmiki, represented the Hindi Dalit literary sphere on a national stage for the first time at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2010 and participated in several panels in 2012. Navaria’s richly imagined prose proves that literary aesthetics is central to contemporary Hindi Dalit literary production. We look to his stories to understand how Dalit authors wield aesthetic and stylistic tools in the construction of political consciousness. In his own self-analysis, Navaria aligns himself with a tradition of fearless writers who express their dreams and convictions even in the face of social approbation. He writes in his introduction to his first published book, the short-story collection Paṭkathā and Other Stories, My stories are the creative works of my dreams. For your convenience you can call them stories, but to understand them fully, you can think of them as dreams. Can such dreams be dreamed in Indian culture and society and not be understood as anti-social and anti-religious? Should an author quit dreaming in fear of religious decrees or fatwas? Should he give it up? I have chosen courage for myself from our tradition of fearlessness.4

Yet, as committed as Navaria is to writing the truth of his dreams, he is also aware of the tension between social activism and the art of literature. He suggests that his stories are like “bridges,” passageways to new terrains of consciousness that he invites readers to cross with him. He does not force them, however, and leaves his more strident political messages for nonliterary realms. A story for me is a bridge between the private and the public. The author crosses this bridge and invites others to come across it themselves as well. This minimal activism could irritate some, but on an artistic level a more activist stance than this would be the death of the work for me. The integrity of a work should not be compromised, maybe this is why I chose other areas for stronger social critique.5

Readers of Navaria’s fiction will nevertheless be hard pressed to ignore the socially progressive impulse behind his writing. But readers who are conversant with the thematic and stylistic standards of Dalit writing, as

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young as the genre is, will also recognize Navaria’s purposeful complication of ideas of heroism, innocence, enlightenment, progress, and the like that are increasingly understood as normative. This chapter is concerned with three of Navaria’s short stories: “Subcontinent” (“Upmahādvīp,” 2004), “Sacrifice” (“Bali,” 2004), and “Eternal Law” (“Es Dhamm Sanantano,” 2003).6 The stories are unique in their theoretical considerations of alienation, as well as the physical and figurative distance between rural and urban Indian spaces. Furthermore, they evince conventions of literary modernism in order to effect a reconsideration of the promise of modernity and the secular foundations of the nation-state to deliver Dalits from marginalization. The scope of the aesthetic strategies and multilayered thematic content of Navaria’s stories cannot be brought to light by relying on theoretical approaches from the scholars and writers discussed so far in this book, however. Rather, they require that we establish an alternative critical idiom and reading strategy that unpacks Navaria’s narrative strategies and establishes how his short fiction expands the normative themes and structures of Dalit literature. As previously discussed, these include the interweaving of conventions of realism and melodrama, a privileging of narratives of atrocities and injustices located in a rural or village context, differentiations of language and register to evoke differing levels of political consciousness, and a fidelity to Ambedkarite political philosophy in the construction of Dalit chetnā. Navaria’s texts instead are characterized by structural innovation, including obfuscating language that creates a sense of alienation, as well as regular constructions of flashbacks, sequences of both narrative and traumatic memory, and liminal temporalities. Navaria’s stories can be read as narratives of alienation, accounts of complex negotiations with the modern, and meditations on the widening gap between urban and rural spaces and their attendant social and political ideologies in the Indian subcontinent. Navaria’s stories make it clear that the transition from village to city, from feudal caste hierarchies to the pseudo-equality of a secular modernity, is fraught with conflict. Significantly, this conflict is domestic and personal; it is manifested in intergenerational divisions, misunderstandings, and aggression, or with a pervasive sense of alienation from oneself, one’s community, and one’s environment. These stories are not cautionary tales about the dangers of leaving family, home, and tradition for a stake in the promise of casteless, classless, undifferentiated, and “universal” subjecthood of the modern

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nation–state, but rather are introspective meditations on the losses of self and community that necessarily come with doing so. A consideration of some important discussions of modernism and alienation will provide a useful framework for understanding these themes in Navaria’s stories. Part one of this book characterized Dalit literature as a counterpublic sphere of writers, publishers, and readers who inhabit a space of alternative discourse that exists outside of the normative public sphere, a literary body defined by its oppositional, or marginal, relationship to a wider public. Discussions throughout part two have introduced the exhortations of a developing Dalit literary aesthetic and have suggested that some of the most important tenets of this aesthetic include addressing “distasteful” subject matter, such as the details of hereditary Dalit occupations like tanning and waste-collecting, evoking violent imagery of rape and assault, and narrating stories and testimonies of abjection in a vernacular language that could be considered an affront to classical Hindi aesthetic notions of literary speech, or “high Hindi.” With these points in mind, it would not be a stretch to consider Hindi Dalit literature in general as a kind of “literature of alienation,” and its authors as “alienistic performers.” According to literary theorist William Monroe, “[a]lienistic performers ‘front’ what is predictable and comfortable about culture by confronting and affronting readers who may feel touched in ways that make them uncomfortable. The performers of alienation are usually ‘in your face’ and the reversing aspect of their work often has the virtue of impropriety about it.”7 Monroe’s characterization is apt for our understanding Dalit literature as a distinct genre. To consider Dalit literary discourse as a literature of alienation offers another perspective on the role literature plays in the Hindi Dalit counterpublic. The goals of many Dalit writers are to make their non-Dalit readers uncomfortable and to decenter their understanding of literature by expressing what is not traditionally literary, or aesthetic. Additionally, they want to force people to confront an unnerving social reality and perhaps their own complicit participation in it, while at the same time attempting to light revolutionary fires in the hearts and minds of Dalits. Dalit literature can be understood then as an alienistic performance meant to both confront and affront the non-Dalit world and to force Dalits themselves to recognize their own alienation. Dalits produce literature that discusses the reality of caste-based oppression, thereby disallowing comfortable, “modern” conceptions of the caste-free, class-free, secular nation of universal citizen-subjects in

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modern, independent, democratic India. This leads Aditya Nigam (2000) to argue that Dalits are waging a critique of modernity. M. S. S. Pandian has pointed out the absence of Dalits in mainstream notions of modernity. “It is evident that the Indian modern, despite its claim to be universal— and, of course, because of it—not only constitutes lower caste as its ‘other,’ but also inscribes itself silently as upper caste. Thus, caste as the other of the modern, always belongs to the lower castes.”8 In recent decades in major fields of the social sciences, however, caste itself has become more visible than it ever has been. This is especially notable after the discomfort surrounding the discussion of caste in the public sphere in the nationalist and early postcolonial periods because of the notion of caste’s dissonance with the idea of the modern state. Nigam writes, . . . the dalit has emerged—not merely as the object whose history ‘we’ secular historians and scholars can now write, but as the subject who writes her own history. It is this emergence of the dalit as the subject-object of another history—one that falls outside the reckoning of secular/nationalist historians that we must now deal with.9

As we have seen, Dalit authors have indeed become subjects who write their own experiences and perspectives into literature, and their literature also falls outside the reckoning of normative understandings of literary language, aesthetics, and social and political relevance. Their literature alienates non-Dalit audiences in order to bring attention to the insertion of their voices and their bodies into the discourse of modernity, to ensure that they cannot be stricken from mainstream imaginations. Navaria’s treatment of alienation is different from that which characterizes most other Dalit literature, however. Navaria’s characters are alienated from themselves: from their past, their origins, their family, and often even their present. His stories explore alienation within the Dalit character who, by all appearances, has achieved the ideal of a modern casteless identity. This kind of alienation is, as Frederic Jameson has suggested, a common feature of the “late capitalist culture critique . . . the expression of a pathos inherent in the traditional romantic diatribe against ‘modernity’ and its ills.”10 Though Jameson finds the literary expression of alienation as a critique of modernity to be somewhat tiresome in western romanticism, it is remarkable in the context of the literature of contemporary Dalits, for whom the promise of modernity meant, as Gopal Guru explains, “the language of rights to equality,

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freedom and dignity, self-respect and recognition.”11 Modernity for Dalits in the colonial period meant new opportunities for advancement through increased access to education as well as professional development in the British army, while in the last generation or two, institutionalized systems of reservations and affirmative action have allowed a minority of Dalits to establish a middle-class population in Indian urban centers, increased political participation, and facilitated a wider dissemination of the rhetoric of self-awareness and community liberation. Phule and Ambedkar embraced modernity as the route to emancipation for Dalits, and the post-Ambedkar generation of Dalit writers and politicians have stayed true to this pro-modernity ideology, citing education, secularization, and political participation as the most promising avenues for Dalit advancement. As we will see in the following discussions, then, Navaria’s questioning of the efficacy of modern life for urban, middle-class Dalits—in other words, whether modernity has delivered its promise of freedom from oppressive caste hierarchies—is an important innovation in Dalit literary discourse. The following analysis of three of Navaria’s short stories suggests the nature and significance of this literary and ideological innovation.

dalit Bodies in UrBan spaces Navaria manipulates the trope of alienation in his short fiction, bending it to serve multiple uses. He may not be the first Dalit writer to do so, but he does employ formal strategies in extraordinarily novel ways that heighten the impact of the alienation theme. Shalini Ramachandran (2004) has also explored the theoretical concept of alienation in her study of early (1960s and 1970s) Marathi Dalit literature. She highlights both social and psychic alienation in the well-known anthology Poisoned Bread (1992): . . . the emphasis is on a certain unfeasibility of subjecthood, as the inhabitants of the stories feel the pull of modernity, but are punished, fragmented in the process of seeking entry into it. Thus, even as Dalit subjectivity is brought into existence in the short narratives, it is dismantled. . . . Resistance in the narratives is registered in this impossibility, in the disintegration of the Dalit body—literally or symbolically—as death or mutilation. . . . Dalit writers effectively use the condensed form of the short story to focus their final narrative instant on the subject’s dissolution.12

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In Navaria’s stories, on the other hand, I suggest that the entry of the narrative subject into the modern does not lead to a dissolution of the body, but rather a state of alienation from it, and from the extended bodies of one’s family and community. The “modern” in Navaria’s fiction can be replaced here by the term urban, as the city is, in all of his stories, representative of social, political, educational, and economic opportunity. The modernity of the educated, urban Dalit is signified in additional ways, with references to technology, equitable gender roles in the domestic sphere, and the use of English words embedded in Hindi prose. Publisher and journalist S. Anand has suggested that the selective use of English vocabulary by Dalit authors is “symbolic of all things modern,”13 and the access of Navaria’s Dalit characters to mobile phones, cars, and other forms of technology represent not only a level of middle-class economic status but also a conversant relationship with the tools and toys of modern civilization. But Navaria’s characters do not have a comfortable relationship with their middle-class positioning within modern, urban spaces and all their technological and professional accoutrements, and this unease creates alienation. Navaria’s characters go through the motions of modern, secular life, but they are not entirely comfortable in it. Their disquiet emerges in a kind of suspension of control and awareness of the physical body, or an alienation of the mind from the physical self. This does not, perhaps, qualify as a full-blown critique of modernity, but it does offer a rather more complicated look at its promise of an unmarked subjectivity unmediated by caste, class, or religious identity. The Marathi Dalit writers of the late sixties and seventies were the first to write about the failure of the city to offer full participation in the modern as promised. Gopal Guru (2004) has pointed out that while Gandhi called for the preservation of the idealized village society, Ambedkar encouraged Dalits to go to the city to work, to escape the feudal backwardness of the village and gain representation in India’s march toward modern nationhood. But Guru suggests that with the inequitable distribution of material wealth, only the higher classes decide who has access to the modern and who does not, and Dalits continue to be relegated to the margins of modern society.14 The resulting disillusionment with the promise of the urban space as site of entry into the modern is well documented in early Marathi Dalit literature of the Dalit Panther era. The characters in these stories and poems are at the bottom of caste and class urban hierarchies, living in slums, and struggling daily for survival. S. P. Punalekar writes of Baburao Bagul, one of the founders

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of modern Marathi Dalit literature and the author to first address the demoralization attendant to Dalit urban life in his story “Jevhā Mi Jāt Chorlī Hotī” (“When I Had Concealed My Caste”):15 “The characters in Bagul’s stories include factory workers, scavengers, rag-pickers, petty traders, and lower-grade government servants. He tries to locate the roots of their identity crises and tensions and in a larger locale of market economy and political system governing the relations between the ruler and the ruled.”16 Eleanor Zelliot has identified Bagul as the Dalit writer who has most starkly represented the misery of the poor, urban Dalit in prose, while Namdeo Dhasal is the urban Dalit’s principal champion in poetry.17 Playwright Vijay Tendulkar evoked the nature of the Dalit body in the urban space as it exists in Dhasal’s groundbreaking poetry collection Golpiṭhā, This is the world of days or nights; of empty or half-full stomachs; of the pain of death; of tomorrow’s worries; of men’s bodies in which shame and sensitivity have been burned out; of overflowing gutters; of a sick young body, knees curled to belly against the cold of death, next to the gutter; of the jobless; of beggars; of pickpockets . . .18

Vidyut Bhagwat has also pointed out how Marathi writers in the megalopolis of Bombay presented the urban space as a principal agent in the defeat of Dalit aspirations. She writes: For the Dalit in the city, the new situation takes a tragic form. His flight from the culture of feudalism and face-to-face repression in the village offers him both the reality as well as the illusion of becoming a member of a free universe. But he soon realizes that once again he remains an unnoticed, expendable stone at the base of the edifice of modernity, the ugly city dominated by the rich and the powerful.19

Despite the overwhelming and malevolent representation of the urban Dalit experience in Marathi literature, urban spaces and the alienation of Dalits within them are either nonexistent in Dalit literature in other languages, or of a very different nature. Rita Kothari points out the lack of representation of the urban middle-class Dalit experience in Gujarati Dalit literature, suggesting a disinclination on the part of Dalit writers to privilege the experience of the individual over that of the community. She writes, “Does an urban Dalit elide over his ‘nuclear’ and urban

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identity in literature? Does the need to ‘represent’ and speak for/with his community make it imperative to affiliate with a rural, feudal history of anger?”20 Yet Kothari also recognizes a need to address themes of individualized urban identity in Dalit literature: “The sociological shift from rural to urban has attendant problems of identity which is fraught with contradictions—mirroring the urban sociology in Gujarati Dalit literature perhaps also means resolving the contradictions.”21 The conflicts of the educated, middle-class Dalit in an urban space are indeed the focus of much of Navaria’s fiction, particularly his short story “Subcontinent.” These characters have a much less tortured relationship with the urban experience, having benefited from the institutionalized avenues of social advancement such as reserved seats in education and government sectors, and yet they retain a subject position that is still at a remove from full citizenship. This story demonstrates Navaria’s particular strategies in presenting alienation, including flashbacks, detailed description of setting, and constructions of liminality.

“Subcontinent” (“Upmahādvīp”) The story moves fluidly and often between past and present. The bulk of the narrative consists of two major flashback episodes. The frame that brings it all together is the narration of Siddharth, a young professional Dalit living in Delhi, the father of one daughter and married to a college lecturer. The setting of the frame story is a fourth-floor Delhi flat, at sundown, when the narrator is just waking from a nap. The liminal qualities of the time of day, plus the narrator’s own mind, mired in a kind of halfsleep, allow for fluid transitions back and forth across time and space. In the two flashbacks, Siddharth is alternately remembering when he was a child and then an adolescent, and both the flashback stories are set in his ancestral village. The first major flashback takes us back to when Siddharth is a small boy. He is walking with his father and grandmother to visit his father’s sister in a neighboring village. His father has recently found work in the city, and the trio is wearing new clothes bought in the city with his wages. It is a beautiful day, and they are in high spirits. But at the start of the flashback narrative, they have already been attacked by a group of upper-caste men from Siddharth’s village. These thugs, one in a worn police uniform, have taken offense at their new clothes and the influence the family appears to have come under in their exposure to the city, a

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kind of burgeoning awareness of their rights. As their attackers explain it to the village pandit: “The wise men said it right, Panditji, you shouldn’t trust whores and bulls. They’ll fuck anything. And this bastard is strutting with arrogance. The sisterfucker was threatening to go to court! Now we’ll see if you will wear nice clothes around here again. Will you dare strut around in the village again?” The boy who was cursing Dadaji was the same one who had beaten Amma with his shoes. He said all this staring at Father who lay face-down on the ground, half-dead. “The fucker got a big head goin’ to the city! He wants to show off . . .” one said, rolling up his sleeves. “He forgot the village rules! This ain’t the city motherfucker. It’s the village . . . the gāṁ! Here you live by the rules. Only our law governs here. Do whatever the fuck you can.”22

In their association with an urban space and the new kinds of social and economic opportunities it entails, the Dalit characters have transgressed their prescribed socioeconomic roles dictated by village caste hierarchy, and for this they are punished bodily. Siddharth’s father is beaten unconscious, his body bloodied and the pockets of his kurtā emptied of rupees. The boy is hit hard across the mouth and stands mute, watching his family being assaulted. His grandmother is humiliated, made to writhe in the dust at the feet of her attackers begging for mercy, called a whore, and beaten. The men and the pandit saunter back into the village, leaving the small family to pull themselves together. In the second flashback, Siddharth is an adolescent guest at a village wedding. A crowd of angry men has gathered outside the wedding because the groom, a Dalit, has dared to mount a horse for the wedding procession to the bride’s house. This is against a village law forbidding Dalits from riding horses, and a laṭhī-wielding crowd has gathered to enforce the law. The groom’s grandfather begs the men for forgiveness while they threaten him, but an enraged member of the wedding party charges the angry mob, and a brawl breaks out. Siddharth is struck by a laṭhī and falls unconscious, only awakening later to witness his aunt being raped while he is forcibly held to the ground.23 In the present time and setting of his urban apartment, Siddharth’s reverie is broken by a cup of chai falling to the floor and smashing. He thinks about how different his life has become since he moved from the

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village to the city. He thinks about how there is no place for Dalits in the village, except as exploited subjects of the upper castes. He explains, Here is the village—our roots, our land. Where there is indignity, abuse, helplessness and weakness. Every moment the fear of dishonor. Every second the feeling of being small. There is sand everywhere, squeezed dry of water. There is no police station for us, no hospital, and no court. There’s the village panchayat, but it is not ours. In the panchayat there is no justice for us, no hearing. Only taunts. In the village there were no fields. The land was not ours, only the labor. The harvest was theirs, the fields were theirs, the houses were theirs, the earth was theirs and we had just a hut.24

Siddharth continues with the contrasts of his new life, and that of his wife and daughter, in the city. It is a life of modernity made possible by an urban anonymity. They have a house, a car and driver. His daughter takes singing lessons and attends a private convent school. They eat at Pizza Hut and speak on cell phones. But the narrator is still haunted by his caste; he and other Dalit workers in his office are believed to have achieved their positions only because of the quota system, and for this they are taunted. This situation is not at all comparable to the beatings and humiliation suffered in the village, but it is not absolute equality, or the unmarked citizenship of the “modern” man. Rather it is a life still bounded by caste identity, fettered by prejudice and “tradition.” Finally we learn that Siddharth’s unease was triggered by an invitation to a cousin’s wedding in his childhood village. His wife and daughter are anxious to see his village and encourage him to take them to the wedding. It is implied that they know nothing of his traumatic past, and Siddharth is clearly worried about bringing these two worlds together. In a bizarre twist at the very end of the story, Siddharth suddenly decides to go back to the village, to bring his family along, and perhaps to settle some old scores. In the final lines of the narrative, he fishes a revolver from the desk drawer and cryptically says, “We have to go. If we don’t go, then we’ll die.” His wife stares at him in surprise and the story ends. Attention to descriptive language throughout the story offers some insight into the pervasiveness of the alienation felt by the characters, principally the protagonist, of “Subcontinent.” In Siddharth’s half-awake, half-asleep state, haunted as he is by the dreams of his past, which Navaria describes in realistic and straightforward prose, his own apartment and wife look and feel strange to him, as though he is viewing his life from the

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perspective of a confused outsider. Navaria strings sentence fragments together to highlight the protagonist’s state of disarray, “Thinking too much wouldn’t let me sleep. Squandered sleep, ravaged wakefulness. Just a little light, the tiniest brightness. Light like ruins. Consciousness like ashes . . .” (“Zyādā sochnā nīṁd nahīṁ detā. Ujaṛī –ujaṛī nīṁd, ujaṛā-ujaṛā chetan. Thoṛā-thoṛā ujālā thoṛā sā hī ujālā. Khaṇḍahar sā ujālā. Rākh sī chetnā . . .”).25 This broken string of unfinished, abject thoughts, punctuated by staccato repetitions of adjectives, is broken by Siddharth’s wife’s query about whether or not he will drink some tea. This is a familiar pattern in the story, Siddharth almost constantly slipping into reverie, a liminal dreamspeak that leads him to his overwhelming reality: the village, the past. But then he will suddenly be snapped back to the present by her voice, or the sound of a teacup smashing to the floor, or a shrill scream as a rat runs across the floor. He is almost an unwilling participant in the present, or perhaps unable to fully be in the present, in the city, until the atrocities of his rural past are resolved. The natural world too is perceived as hemmed in by the structures of the city, such as the description of the evening light when Siddharth awakes from his reverie of memory: My eyes opened and I saw a broken piece of sky, agitated, caught in the square of the window. A big, inky black cloud had grabbed the feeble sun and squeezed it, breaking the sun’s legs.

And later, when the daylight becomes faint enough to turn on the lights inside, Like a tuberculosis patient, the old tube-light coughed seven or eight times before filling the room with a lackluster light, the yellow shade of mucus. How dark it had become outside. Because of the light inside, the darkness outside seemed even more inky, more scary.26

These descriptions of both the feebleness of the daylight, trapped by the walls of buildings and overwhelmed by looming clouds, and the menacing nature of the night, which the electric light of the urban apartment does little to diffuse, creates apprehension. There is embedded in this narrative a conscious construction of liminal space and time to match the cloudiness of Siddharth’s state of mind. These narrative descriptions create a mood of disquiet and dread, a mood that eventually focuses on

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obvious markers of modernity such as the advertising of foreign products and a collection of academic books whose titles are in English. There was a small boy on the back of her white T-shirt clutching a bottle of some foreign brand of soda, sticking his thumb up. I could see him until she turned towards the kitchen. He was climbing my wife’s back . . . in the skin of some charming sheep? Thinking about this made me uneasy. . . . My glance fell on the English titles at the head of the bed, Riddles in Hinduism and Art and Social Life. Delhi . . . was this our home?27

Everything in Siddharth’s line of sight is off-putting; it either threatens him or perplexes him. Even the books—Ambedkar’s Riddles in Hinduism, and Marxist thinker Georgi Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life—two texts that immediately reveal the progressive political sensibilities of the narrator, seem off-putting to him in his restless state. The pervasiveness of Siddharth’s unease, and the descriptions of the threatening darkness of an agitated, angry sky outside the window, barely held at bay by the weak electric tube light, contribute to his alienation. This is well before Siddharth narrates his tale of himself and other Dalits feeling isolated and reviled in his government job near the end of the story, the plot point that most clearly spells out his sense of displacement in the supposedly casteblind secular city. Navaria’s construction of a persistent mood of alienation in the text is palpable. Monroe describes the unsettling qualities of narratives of alienation, “. . . the sulky signs of alienation often imply an intense but diffuse accusation. We often cannot tell where the accusing finger points or what it condemns, but we feel an instinctive doubt and discomfort, perhaps an undifferentiated sense of shame. Something unspecified is wrong, something pernicious that we cannot fully grasp.”28 What that pernicious element is that pervades “Subcontinent” soon becomes clear. Siddharth thus narrates two violent experiences of castebased abuse and attacks that shaped his childhood and adolescence— incidents that Siddharth suggests drove him to create a new life in the city. Eventually, Siddharth reveals that his own wealth and status in the city, his job, his wife’s academic career, his daughter’s voice lessons and trips to Pizza Hut; all of this hangs by a delicate thread of “enforced” equality. The story suggests that in the chasms of people’s hearts yet lurks the same malicious discrimination and prejudice, the same human cruelty and its religious justification that remains untouched in villages, not yet transformed by the social interventions of modernity. What alienates

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Siddharth from all the elements of his modern life, what makes him anxious, is the knowledge of the proximity of this lurking malevolence. People only offer us smiles in our presence. No one would dare laugh at us. Here there is the police. Here there is an expensive lawyer. In this world of utter anonymity in the city, there’s happiness all around—unending, eternal. This anonymity forever colors our rainbow dreams. But here in the familiar world there are the same snakes. The same whispers, the same poison-laden smiles. Our ‘quota is fixed’. I got promoted only because of the quota . . . that’s it. Otherwise . . . otherwise, maybe I’m still dirty. Still lowborn.29

Although Siddharth has benefited from the material advantages of modern society and enjoys a comfortable middle-class life, he is still aware of the precariousness of this newfound status. To use Monroe’s language, his “encultured self ” is the one that has become accustomed to buying power, and to the surface-level respect and civility that power brings, but his sense of self was shaped much earlier by violence in his rural childhood and is therefore attuned to the malevolent social forces still at work underneath the polished surface of urban modernity. His constant slipping back into the past, his inability to be fully present in the moment, is evidence not of a “desire” to be elsewhere, to be back in his village, but perhaps rather of an inability to escape it. By ensuring his own well-being and that of his small family in the modern city, Siddharth has isolated himself from his community identity that remains vested in the village, and he is never completely able to make the journey away from it on his own.

an impossiBle JoUrney to the city? The story of the journey from village to city, and sometimes—painfully— back again, is another narrative trope that characterizes Navaria’s fiction, and that perhaps most clearly elucidates the alienating personal and familial, even bodily, ramifications of gaining access to modern subjecthood. The following discussion will focus on the story “Sacrifice” (“Bali”), while also referring back to “Subcontinent,” in an analysis of the figurative distance between village and city in Navaria’s fiction. Before such an analysis, however, note that the narrative trope of journeys from rural to urban spaces as a metaphor of self-transformation has

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been a common one in both western and non-western literature since the advent of the city itself. And in the generations of literature in which the metropolitan and the pastoral have been opposed as contradictory poles of the self, both have been fraught with significance. Raymond Williams explains the complexity of this symbolism in The Country and the City, On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved center, of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness, and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation.30

As I have already suggested, from the perspective of the Dalit, the city is the nexus of opportunity and anonymity, of education and wealth, the only possible escape from the exploitative rural socialscape. In a country where more than 70 percent of the population still lives in rural areas and where Gandhi famously quipped that the heart of India is said to reside in the village, Ashis Nandy points out the significance of the city in the rural Dalit imagination: Obviously, the anonymity and atomization in a city are doubly seductive in a society scarred by socio-economic schisms and cultural hierarchies. A Dalit, landless, agricultural worker or rural artisan seeking escape from the daily grind and violence of a caste society has reasons to value the impersonal melting pot of a metropolitan city. He is ever willing to defy the pastoralist’s or the environmentalist’s negative vision of the city. Because to lose oneself in the city is to widen one’s freedom in a way not possible by migrating to another village, however distant from home.31

The previous discussion, however, of representations of the city in early Marathi Dalit literature destabilizes this rosy dream of a personal and communal transformation in the postcolonial metropolis. And in “Subcontinent,” Siddharth’s upsetting awareness of the precariousness of his privileged social position and of the snakes who continue to hiss just beneath the civilized surface of his government job, his car and driver, and his daughter’s private school also throws into question the stability of the secular and universalist foundations of the postcolonial nation-state. Gopal Guru suggests that, although post-independence constitutional

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provisions and welfare policies aimed at Dalits have offered new opportunities, the urban Dalit still faces both physical and economic marginalization and “the Dalit claims to modernity suffered from the lack of recognition either by the state or by the Hindu (civil) society.”32 Navaria’s fiction presents alternative considerations regarding the role of the metropolis in the minds of rural Dalits. Often, Navaria’s characters look at the city, and the material, political, and ideological changes it renders in people from the village, with distrust and scorn. This attitude is highlighted in the following discussion of Navaria’s “Sacrifice”. A second kind of distance between the village and the city in Navaria’s fiction manifests itself psychologically between generations, between those young Dalits who have made the journey and started a new life, and those older family members who refuse to join them or are brought against their will. The village is, for them, the site of their lifelong suffering, the rustic social hierarchy the justification for untold hardships, what Williams has referred to as “processes of exploitation . . . dissolved in a landscape.”33 Nonetheless, it is still home, still at the center of family and community identity formation. As Siddharth explains about his grandmother in “Subcontinent,” Papa had brought Amma to the city, after Dadaji’s death. But Amma . . . she could never really adjust to the city. Not even at Papa’s insistence. The thatch from the huts of her village was lodged in the dark wrinkles of her face. Thatch blackened by the soot and smoke of kitchen stoves. . . . From the time she came to the city, until she finally left her body behind, she could never settle here.34

The village is continuous with the old woman’s body, the smoke and soot from years bent over her kitchen fires embedded in her skin, grounding her to the land where she was born, and where she had always lived. This imagination of the rural evoked in the physicality of the body, as well as the distance and dissonance between rural and urban bodies, is the focus of the following discussion.

“Sacrifice” (“Bali”) Although the theme of sacrifice runs deep in this story, the narrative begins with its most obvious referent. A young boy, Kalu, reluctantly helps his elder brother, Kaka, butcher a kid goat who had once been Kalu’s pet.

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(A bit of this despondent scene provided the epigraph for this chapter.) The story goes on to feature a very long, detailed description of the death and dismemberment of the goat and of the horror and grief of young Kalu, for whom this is a life-shaping experience, one he never forgets, although he himself eventually becomes a skilled butcher like his brother. As he explains it, Seeing the meat already cut up and seeing a goat being butchered are two different things, brother. I wasn’t born a butcher. But Kaka’s training and beatings made me one,” said Kalu . . .35

After several pages of Kalu’s first-person narrative about the butchering of the kid goat, the narrative shifts, and the first-person voice now becomes that of Kalu’s nephew, Avinash. Avinash and his wife and son have come from the city to Kaka’s home in the village, and Kalu has come from another village to attend a sacrifice in Avinash’s son Kushan’s honor. Avinash is clear from the beginning about his distaste for this kind of ritual performance, but he relents for the sake of a visit to his mother. Avinash and his father, Kaka, have a strained relationship for several reasons. For one, Avinash has married a Dalit woman from another subcaste (jāti), which is a source of shame and ridicule for his father. Though Kaka’s family is also Dalit, they live in the village and do not have the same liberal notions of a pan-Dalit community within which there are few familial or jāti divisions. Rather, Kaka is still concerned with the complex hierarchy of jātis that govern marriage relations among members of the same varṇa. Kaka taunts Avinash: This one is our first-born, brother Kalu. He’s got my nose cut—brought dishonor to our caste. He has returned after getting himself married to the daughter of some Gautam Buddha from U.P. But we’ve such a kind heart that we still made place for them in our home. Else they’d have been left without shelter,” said Father to Kalu gesturing towards me. Arrey, at least chant the names of ‘Rama-Kisna’, Ramesar! Kalu is like your uncle! If you’ve forgotten even this . . . what is it you people say? Yes, your ‘Jai Bhim’!”36

Further angering his father, Avinash did not follow in his father’s footsteps and become a butcher. Instead he left the village for the city, where he changed his name from Ramesar (evocative of the Hindu god Ram) to

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Avinash, and refused to allow his father to name his grandson Ganeshi (again, evoking the Hindu elephant-headed deity Ganesh), instead choosing Khushan, rejecting any reference to Hindu mythology in his and his son’s name. Kaka’s taunt about chanting “Jai Bhim” makes it clear that Avinash has become part of an Ambedkarite community in the city. Like the reference to the books in “Subcontinent,” the phrase “Jai Bhim,” a paean to Ambedkar that is a common greeting among Ambedkarite Dalits, reveals the political mindset of the protagonist. After suffering through his father’s criticisms and asides to his brother Kalu, Avinash shouts at his father that he should be ashamed that he is so caught up in the rules and traditions of caste hierarchies. When his father leaves, Avinash is left with Kalu, who begins to tell another story. This time the story is about Kaka when he was an adolescent in a village outside Delhi and in love with a young Brahmin girl from school. Avinash is mesmerized by Kalu’s story, never having considered his father in such a human light before. Because of the gulf between their castes, the couple’s relationship remained secret and ended abruptly when both were married to suitable partners in their own castes. Years later, in the story’s present, Kaka finally learns from Kalu of his young love’s fate, that her husband died days after their marriage and she lived as a widow with her in-laws who shaved her head, starved her, and beat her. Eventually she was raped, escaped to another village, lived among a Dalit community, and raised a daughter alone. She has recently died, and in Kaka’s realization of this he is transformed into a compassionate man such as Avinash has never before seen. At the end of his story, Kalu, whose health is increasingly demonstrated to be failing, is wracked with coughs, falls unconscious, and is taken to the hospital, where he dies. His last thoughts are of Piloo the kid goat he was forced to slaughter as a child. And in the emotional upheaval of the night’s realizations and tragic events, father and son are finally reconciled. Kaka finally accepts a cup of chai from the hands of his daughter-in-law, signifying that he accepts her into his family and has decided to respect his son’s chosen way of life. As was suggested at the beginning of this section, the very physical dissonance between rural and urban Dalit bodies is made manifest in Navaria’s prose. Additionally, the literal and figurative distance of the journey from village to city and the ideological, psychological, and emotional distance between those who have made the journey and those who have not is striking in this story. To illustrate this, I string together here several separate quotes from the narrative, detailing Avinash’s growing

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fascination, as well as revulsion, with his rural uncle’s movements and gestures, in particular, his habit of squatting on the floor. I greeted Uncle Kalu and sat down in a chair. Father sat in a chair opposite. Only Kalu was squatting on the floor, smoking a bīḍī. “Why don’t you sit up here,” I motioned towards an empty chair. . . . He was overtaken by a coughing fit. His eyes bulged. I immediately filled a glass of water and brought it to him. He poured the water from the glass into his cupped palm and drank. He found some relief. When he finished he ran his hooked forefinger through his grizzled mustache, wringing out the water that clung to the hairs, and flicked the drops aside. Watching him I felt a kind of revulsion. . . . . . . He gazed intently at me. Then, lost in thought, dangling his arms on his knees, he drummed his fingers on the floor. He shifted in his position like a clucking hen, and then sat motionless as though he’d been sitting this way for years. . . . He was still squatting on the floor. How long had I been watching him sit in this position! I wondered if this posture was something he had perfected. He must not have felt any pain in his thighs from sitting this way. I would not be able to sit like this for two minutes, my feet would fall asleep and my legs would start to tingle. . . . Kalu was still sitting on his haunches. He had indeed gotten up once to pee, but had resumed his position as if he had never gotten up at all. It seemed like he had been sitting here motionless forever. What a strange man. The sight of him sitting in such an awkward posture began to irritate me.37

Avinash’s curiosity, then fascination, then revulsion, then awe, then irritation with his uncle’s movements, or lack of movement, adds an element of humor to an otherwise emotionally wrenching story of caste inequality, widow abuse, lost love, death, and family discord. But even more telling is the sense of place and self, here emphatically performed in the practices of squatting and drinking, that Avinash has lost as he has gained a foothold in modern urban living. Avinash is political; he has renounced his own name for its reference to Hindu mythology, married

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an educated Dalit woman who works as a teacher, and adopted the religious and social language of an Ambedkarite, but he has lost the ability to squat on his heels for hours. In some sense, Avinash sees in his uncle Kalu the person he himself might have been if he had never made the physical and ideological journey to the modern city, instead remaining in the village and learning the art of butchering from his father. His emotions in the face of this reality are funneled into his obsession with his uncle’s posture, and his rapidly shifting reactions suggest grief at this loss of identity. Perhaps it would not be too extreme to say that Avinash’s physical and intellectual journey to the city, his entry into the modern, has resulted in a loss of an essential, unmediated self that is celebrated in the rustic deportment of the body, in the rejection of chairs for sitting and glasses for drinking. Another incident, centered on Kalu’s inability to pronounce the name of Avinash’s son, demonstrates the distance Kalu also feels from his urban-dwelling nephew: “Go get him, son,” Kalu said. When my gaze fell upon the dirt collected in the corners of Kalu’s kohl-lined eyes, I was faintly disgusted. “Who?” I asked, tearing my eyes away from the filth in his eyes. “What is that English-sounding name you gave your son, brother? I can’t get my tongue around it. Khus . . . nam,” he said, stammering, and I laughed. “Not Khusnam, Kushan.” Embarrassed, he said, “Yes brother, Khusnan, Khusnan.” “Arre, who’s gonna remember when you give him a name like that?” It was Father’s turn to strike.38

Much as Avinash’s body cannot contort itself into Kalu’s squatting position, Kalu’s tongue cannot wrap itself around the foreign-sounding name of Avinash’s son. It is cause for Kalu to be embarrassed and another indication of how far Avinash has strayed from his family, becoming fodder for his father’s derision. This detail provides more evidence of the nowunbridgeable distance between the men in this family, ideological and educational distance, wrought by the physical distance of village and city and embedded in the behavioral distance between bodies. I have largely set aside those elements in this story that reflect more normative aesthetic imperatives, although there are plenty. There are moments of outright sermonization in this story, such as the description of the horrific treatment of the widow Archana at the hands of her

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Brahmin in-laws and her eventual refuge among a Dalit community. This reflects, and propagates further, the impulse in much Dalit writing to demonize Brahminical social custom as misogynist and inhumane, while celebrating the egalitarian social practices of lower-caste communities. Also, through the mouthpiece of Avinash, Navaria is able to lecture about the progressivism of Ambedkarite ideology and praise the ascendance of rational thinking over superstition. Yet these instances are set within a much more complex family drama and beset by narrative moments such as those discussed above, resulting in what appears as a meditation on the personal and familial losses that accompany modern political awakening. Avinash is dislocated from his family and community, having left even his name behind. I do not want to suggest that Navaria is proposing a regress to political ignorance and life under structures of caste-based exploitation. Yet it is evident that he uses literature to explore the personal costs of such social and political transformations, both of individuals and communities. The road to freedom and modernity is not without sacrifice.

the intrUsion of memory Finally, this chapter will generally address the multiple deployments of memory in Navaria’s fiction, and it will ultimately introduce a third short story for consideration, “Eternal Law” (“Es Dhamm Sanantano”) First, however, it is interesting to consider the ways in which memory becomes a narrative tool in the stories already discussed. Sukeshi Kamra makes a distinction between two different kinds of memory in Bearing Witness, her study of narratives of India and Pakistan’s partition violence. She suggests that while “narrative memory” is coherent and chronological, the kind of memory that tells a story, traumatic memory is broken, isolated, uses inadequate language, and is in some ways beyond the control of the narrator. Traumatic memories are characterized by a sense of “intrusion of the past” in their telling.39 There is a somewhat chaotic patterning in traumatic memory, including a lack of sequence and memory-fragments. Narrative memory, on the other hand, is much more organized and controlled by its owners and tellers. Navaria mixes examples of both traumatic and narrative memory in his writing. In “Subcontinent,” the memories themselves are narrated in clear prose, but the frequent transitions into and out of each experience of memory are marked by physical transitions in a liminal space. Navaria invokes the image of an old water tank with broken, crumbling

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steps covered in weeds. Drawn to the edge of the tank, pulled as though by some magnetic force, before each flashback Siddharth descends the steps of this water tank in his mind. I start to descend the crumbling steps of an old step-well, surrounded by withered vines. I keep going down. Step by step. The mist is dense. Sarrr . . . ssseeee . . . jjhannn. One, two, three . . . twenty-five. Twenty-five steps down. Guddup . . . guddup.40

At the bottom of the twenty-five steps of the tank lie his memories, hissing like snakes in the deep mist. Even language is dissolved in the mist as Siddarth descends into his memories, the counting of the steps turning simply into noise, “guddup.” In another instance of the transition to memory, an old wound throbbing on his head evokes the flashback to the brawl at the wedding party, and Siddharth is once again drawn to the steps of the well. An old wound throbbed on my scalp under my hair. Chhhup . . . chup . . . chhhup. Darkness had spread near the step-well. Dense black. The gasping of grass. Whispering, like hissing black snakes. Steps . . . broken and unsteady. One . . . two . . . three . . . fifteen. Guddup.41

Siddharth’s memory is inscribed on his body, in the old wound on his scalp, and he is powerless to defy or escape it. Once again he must navigate the increasingly black and uncertain terrain of the old water tank in order to relive his memories. The persistence of Siddharth’s wound is evidence of the persistence of his memory: As Elaine Scarry suggests, “What is remembered in the body is well remembered.”42 Ramachandran also highlights the significance of pain in Marathi Dalit writing, “As a narrative strategy, the writers effectively use the body ‘in pain’ to articulate protest at the severity of as well as pervasiveness of the conditions that the Dalit villager or urban underclass faces.”43 The body in pain here is not only an important signifier in a semiotics of oppression but also a permanent site of traumatic memory. As long as the wound “throbs,” though hidden from public view under Siddarth’s hair, Siddharth will be drawn compulsively to the steps of the old water tank, and to his past. While in “Subcontinent” Siddharth is possessed and arrested by his traumatic memories, narrative memory operates in “Sacrifice” as a way in which to repair the generational rift between Avinash and his father,

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to bridge the divide that was rent by Avinash’s embrace of modernity. Kaka feels abandoned by his son because Avinash has changed his name, renounced Hindu ritual, and married a woman of his own choice, thereby robbing his father of the patriarchal benefits of a dowry and the service of a daughter-in-law, essentially because Avinash has opted out of his worldview and chosen another. Avinash therefore sees his father as a relic, and their relationship is colored by the common misunderstandings of different generations. But the locus of this misunderstanding is Avinash’s stake in the modern, and Kaka’s scorn and suspicion toward the same. It is through the recounting of memory to both Avinash and Kaka, through the medium of Kalu, the rural uncle who quite literally embodies the nature of the village, that the two men who live in different worlds finally come to understand and respect one another. There is in Kalu a kind of inherent, native wisdom that is revealed through his clear narrative memory that is able to heal the relationship between Avinash and Kaka even as his own body disintegrates. Avinash, then, in all of his modernity, is nonetheless educated in an important lesson of love, loss, family, and understanding by his rural uncle Kalu. Similarly, in the following discussion about the third and last of Navaria’s stories to be considered here, we will look at the ways in which Navaria complicates even further the normative notions of the benefits of the quest for the modern in Dalit society by a kind of doublespeak: his characters’ political rhetoric advocates an abandonment of feudal village society and a move to the city, while their nostalgia, constructed through the telling of memory, mourns for a lost community and pastoral innocence.

“Eternal Law” (“Es Dhamm Sanantano”) The bulk of “Eternal Law” is a flashback, framed by two short, almost indecipherable scenes in the present. Both these present moments are represented in obfuscating, stream-of-consciousness language that distances the reader from the text.44 The story opens with the narrator in distress and semiconscious. He seems to have suddenly woken from a disturbing dream, in which he hears a faint, repeating voice referring to his caste and his being on the quota, and he is unable to move or respond; there is only the sound of the voice in his head. “The bastard is on the quota . . . sick . . . he hides his caste,” the voice said. Very faint, but perfectly clear . . . and I heard it over and over throughout.

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But all I could do was hear it. I wasn’t in a position to do anything, not even to move. This wasn’t sleep . . . but was I really awake? Maybe my eyes were closed because I had only opened them when Nilima shook me.45

A woman, Nilima, has apparently shaken the narrator awake, but he is not yet fully conscious. Here the narration becomes very confused, with brief and disparate references to a college staffroom, dry leaves on the ground, and the narrator running. The next several lines of the opening paragraph illustrate the narrator’s feeling of utter alienation and inertia; he is in control of neither his thoughts nor his body, seemingly unaware of his own reality. But the memory of the voice was splitting, like something sharp. Who knows what level my consciousness was on. Unconscious, subconscious, half-conscious, good conscious, bad conscious . . . and, and who knows how many consciousnesses. Man and his mind and his words and his dissimulation. Or maybe this was just a doorway to his thoughts . . . a twilight. Nilima had said something and then gone. But I  .  .  . wasn’t I there? Perhaps even the words she spoke had gone away with her. She left no footprints behind.46

This narrative-defying, fragmented description of a liminal space between reverie and wakefulness, the fractured language reflecting the strangeness and atemporality of dreams, immediately distances the reader from the subject. Just as the retellings of dreams can never be as vivid as the experience of them, as their immanence and tangibility is lost upon waking, so the trauma of caste-based violence and discrimination can never be fully realized by someone who has never experienced it. It is suggested that the narrator is haunted by a fear, or an actual incident, of his caste identity being discovered at the college where he teaches, but we are never sure. This semiconscious, confused speech gives way almost as quickly as it begins. A layered collection of coherent narrative memories follows, tinged not with fear or confusion, but with a distinct sense of nostalgia. The narrator remembers his grandfather, a jovial man who had fled his village with his family after beating up and throwing down a well an upper-caste man who had committed some “crimes” against him. The narrator’s grandfather secures a plot of land in a scheduled caste settlement on the outskirts of an unnamed city and establishes himself as a

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community leader-in-exile who assists Dalits persecuted because of their caste. Alhough the narrator himself is not permitted by his grandfather to go to the village, he grows up on stories and memories of the old village: Often Grandfather would lie on the big cot and when we insisted would tell us stories about the old days, to which we would listen eagerly. . . . There were some Thakurs in his stories, some Brahmins, some . . . who knows how many kinds of people. When I would go to the cinema, then I found I did not like Thakurs, landowners, and Brahmins because in the films they were always beating people up, or having them beaten, for no reason.47

The narrator’s understanding of the village and its cast of archetypal characters, comes from movies, his grandfather’s stories, and the testimonies of those Dalits who would flee the village to “come weep at grandfather’s feet.” His grandfather is emotionally affected by leaving his village, and he is known to covertly wipe a tear from his eye when he tells his grandson tales of the old days, but he nevertheless admonishes the narrator’s father never to return, That night Grandfather sent me to call Father and said, “Daya, do not covet pieces of land from the village. Don’t go there. You must never go there. Wherever a man waters his memories, it is there that he finds himself. You stay here! You’re listening, aren’t you? Stay here! There is no one there to speak for you. Times have not changed. Only your identity has changed. Only hypocrisy has grown.” Father listened quietly and nodded his head in agreement.48

The boy’s grandfather dies when he is twelve years old, and the family relocates again, this time to a government colony in the city. They rent the house his grandfather built to a large family of rural Chamars, who perfectly embody the pastoral ideal: “They were carefree folks, but trustworthy.” The narrator remembers going to the house to collect the rent when he was a boy. Though they were desperately poor, the narrator’s memory is dominated by details of cooking food, shouting, singing, dancing, and tambourine-playing while the family performs the songs of their village. He has a sense of what they are saying but cannot understand everything because he has been forbidden from speaking his village tongue. “We had never been taught our own language, and if we tried to speak it we suffered a scolding. Do you want to be a rustic?”49 As in

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the majority of stories discussed in chapter 5, language here once again becomes a signifier either for modernity or backwardness, with modern standard Hindi acting as the most important marker of modernity. But in this moment in the narrator’s memory, his parents’ desire to keep him from being marked as a bumpkin instead isolates him from the joy of this family of laborers. He watches from the outside, wistfully, because to join them would be to go backward. Other changes too come with the move into the city. The other was that instead of calling Ma Bahū we started calling her Mummy. The first change was certainly difficult, but we adjusted. But we felt such shame in calling Ma Mummy instead of Bahū. Grandfather and Grandmother always called Ma Bahū, so we had also started calling her that. But here all the children laughed at us. So reluctantly we started calling her Bahū sometimes and Mummy sometimes and eventually exclusively used the word Mummy. Even Father (pitā-jī) slowly became Papa. This habit was established after one or two years. We were starting to be refined (saṁskārit) according to our new surroundings.50

The ironic use of the term “saṁskārit,” a high-class Brahminical term that suggests a rejection of low class/caste practices and a striving to achieve a more “elite” socialization, is very telling. The children here are being persuaded to use the English terms Mummy and Papa over the village terms Bahū and Pitā-jī. The English terms feel like an imposition; they are unnatural, and the children are reluctant to adopt them. The pressure to assimilate into the culture of their surroundings feels like a process of self-aggrandizement, promulgated by Hindu reformers in the nationalist era who encouraged untouchables not to eat beef, or tan leather, or clean up animal carcasses in an effort to alleviate their stigma of pollution. Ambedkar categorically rejected this very practice in favor of modernization, advocating for Dalits to abandon the Hindu hierarchical code altogether rather than try to rise within its ranks by submitting to uppercaste prejudices. But here, what is meant to be modernization, what is meant to relinquish these Dalit characters from the stigma of the “rural” and “backward,” in fact feels oppressive. Finally, the narrator layers his memories, speaking of the nostalgia he felt as an adolescent in the government colony for the more rural settlement of his childhood. He narrates several tales of himself and his boyhood friends performing odd jobs, such as shoe-shining, creating fake

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stories to try to elicit more money from their customers, and cavorting at the edges of a water canal, catching birds and roasting them, daring each other to eat them. Though he acknowledges later as an adult that many of these boys did eat the birds out of hunger and that they all lived in a state of extreme want, there was nevertheless a pervading sense of camaraderie that infused his memories of those days. We are reminded, as the story ends and the obfuscating prose of a schizophrenic present is once again evoked, the narrative dissolving into incomprehensible words and sounds, that it is modern life that in fact is much more unsettling, that with all of the economic comfort and social mobility and anonymity comes a loss of self and community that is, undoubtedly, damaging to the psyche. Though the narrator’s memories of the past depict a life of poverty and discrimination, they are softened with the nostalgic reminiscences of the joys of community and simplicity, reading almost as an ode to bucolic boyhood. This is in sharp contrast to the threatening tenor of the present in the traumatized, confused narratives that frame the larger story. Like Siddharth in “Subcontinent,” it is clear that in moving to the city, taking advantage of state employment quota systems, and impersonating the unmarked, modern citizen-subject by concealing his caste from his coworkers, the narrator has in practice joined the undifferentiated ranks of residents of the modern metropolis. But also like Siddharth, he is psychologically tortured by the fear of reversal, of being found out, of the crumbling of the thin façade of modern equality that surrounds the nation’s urban spaces. At least in the village, among his community, he was sure of his identity. There his environment, although often difficult to navigate, never appears as threatening as does the modern present.

toward a modernist critiqUe Aditya Nigam has written of the fundamental role of the Dalit production of knowledge as collectively representing a critique of modernity, defined as a state of civil society characterized by the ideal of the unmarked, universal subject. This subject is best articulated by its participation in the two theoretical pillars of modernity—secularism and the nation. Nigam suggests that there is no specific body of Dalit writings that can be pointed to as a critique of modernity per se, but that the critique is inherent in the establishment of Dalit writing, that it is an “absent presence” in all Dalit writing. He reads the intrusion of Dalit voices in the fields of history, the social and political sciences, and literature as

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“ . . . the insurrection of little selves. This insurrection of little selves marks a global crisis of modernity and its great project of realizing the emancipation of Universal Man—embodied in the abstract citizen, unmarked by any identity. This project, we realize today, was meant to be achieved by erasing and repressing particular identities.”51 Therefore, Nigam reads the Dalit reinsertion of themselves into historical and political discourses as a reclamation of an identity and unique set of experiences that was once silenced out of a lack of access to education and media, and is now being silenced out of a deference to the modernist ideology of erasing hierarchy by erasing difference, and the creation of the universal subject. Thus, a theoretical understanding of the role of Dalit narratives positions them differently than many of the materialist and political projects of Dalits in the interest of social advancement in the last century. Indeed, the contemporary Dalit movement in India, from its inception with Mahatma Jotirao Phule’s political and educational activism in Maharashtra in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has depended heavily on the tools of modernity, including education, political representation, and material capital. Phule himself suggested in 1890, “Without education knowledge is lost; without knowledge development is lost; without development wealth is lost; without wealth Shudras are ruined.”52 Ambedkar also put great faith in the institutions of the modern state, as his numerous graduate degrees and his role as the architect of the constitution of the modern Indian nation-state attest. Partha Chatterjee writes of him, “Ambedkar was an unalloyed modernist. He believed in science, history, rationality, secularism, and above all the modern nation-state as the site for the actualization of human reason.”53 Chatterjee goes on to suggest that Ambedkar’s use of narrative, specifically his creation of an alternative “original” narrative for Dalits, is also part of the modernist project of grounding Dalit identity not in a timeless and abstract religious narrative, but rather in the context of linear historical development as driven solely by the actions and institutions of human beings. He summarizes Ambedkar’s new narrative of Dalit history thus: He argued that there was, in the beginning, a state of equality between the Brahmins, the Shudras, and the untouchables. This equality, moreover, was not in some mythological state of nature but at a definite historical moment when all Indo-Aryan tribes were nomadic pastoralists. Then came the stage of settled agriculture and the reaction, in the form of Buddhism, to the sacrificial religion of the Vedic tribes. This was followed

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by the conflict between the Brahmins and the Buddhists, leading to the political defeat of Buddhism, the degradation of the Shudras, and the relegation of the beef-eating “broken men” into untouchability. The modern struggle for the abolition of caste was thus a quest for a return to that primary equality that was the original historical condition of the nation.54

This (re)creation by Ambedkar of the meta-narrative of Dalit history, grounding the roots of untouchability in a political and economic context rather than a religious one, was an essential component of the project to construct the secular nation-state, one of the “fundamental pillars of modernity,” as Nigam has characterized it.55 According to Nigam, the pervasive Indian nationalist approach of considering history through a Marxist lens that privileged class over caste “tended to do violence to that enterprise of self-definition,” that is, the assertion of Dalit subjecthood. Ambedkar’s turn toward Buddhism and his creation of a new historical narrative of a clash between Buddhists and Brahmans in Indian society was “an ingenious attempt at instituting as cultural memory a new historical discourse. . . . To be able to speak of the past in the language of history and modern subjectivity was the task at hand.”56 It seems, however, that the task has changed. Though the construction of a modern, secular Indian state promised Dalits full participation in educational and political institutions, tools with which they could finally achieve their freedom from caste oppression, the dream of full equality and the reign of secular rationalism in Indian society has yet to be fulfilled. Certainly the state system of reservations in the educational and political sectors has contributed to the rise of a new Dalit middle class and increased power sharing, with political parties constructed along the faultlines of marginalized caste representation, such as the Bahujan Samaj and Republican Parties. There has also been a marked shift, as has already been discussed, of Dalit labor from rural to urban spaces, and the everseductive promise of the city to erase caste hierarchies and “traditional, feudalistic” constructions of Hindu social identity. Yet, as we have seen, Dalit writers in the contemporary Dalit literary movement have begun to poke holes in the unqualified promise of modernity. It is both these limits of modern social and political institutions, as well as the silencing of Dalit identity that are intrinsic to the theoretical construction of the modern subject, addressed in contemporary fictional narratives of alienation such as Navaria’s. How do we characterize the shift, then, of the Dalit narrative from being part of the modern project

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of nation-building, to the contemporary critique of the absences inherent in that same modernity? If we consider Frederic Jameson’s definition of alienation as the “inward turn of modernism,”57 then we might also alternatively construe such narratives of alienation as constituting a literature of modernism, one which demands that the determinist ends of modernity, democracy, secularism, and the nation be reconsidered by those subjects who still find themselves inhabiting the margins of the modern, even as they endeavor to dive into the middle. Monroe suggests the gulf between modernity and modernism when he characterizes the latter as a critique of the former, or modernism as “a subversive stance that opposes those dominant certainties” and later as “cluster of oppositional strategies that often include elements of suspicion and hostility toward the dominant cultures of modernity.”58 Harvey defines modernism as a critique of modern claims to universalities when he describes Western European expressions of modernism in art during World War I, “This particular surge of modernism, therefore, had to recognize the impossibility of representing the world in a single language. Understanding had to be constructed through the exploration of multiple perspectives. Modernism, in short, took on multiple perspectivism and relativism as its epistemology for revealing what it still took to be the true nature of a unified, though complex, underlying reality”59 Navaria’s stories, in their focus on the urban, educated Dalit individual, rather than the rural community, represent this shift toward multiple perspectives. Again, the contemporary Hindi Dalit literary counterpublic sphere is characterized by its multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and narrative forms. This chapter has extended the discussion of the range of Hindi Dalit literature and broadened the analytical frame in which we can consider the growing body of Dalit texts. To cite Nigam once more, “If we listen attentively to the voices from within, we can hear precisely their refusal—despite heavy investments in the modern—to be willing parts of the two great artifacts of our modernity, namely, secularism and the nation. . . . belonging as it does to this instance of crisis, both in the manner and the moment of the emergence of the new Dalit assertion direct(s) us to read it as a critique of modernity.”60

conclUsion In conclusion, a detailed consideration of three of Ajay Navaria’s short stories—“Subcontinent,” “Sacrifice,” and “Eternal Law”—has clarified

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the themes and aesthetics of contemporary Hindi Dalit literature. In his employment of memory that is both traumatic and nostalgic, experimental constructions of language that often purposefully obfuscate the meaning of the text and distance the reader from the characters, and narrative details of disquiet to create a pervading sense of alienation, Navaria has challenged the aesthetic exigencies established by the predominant architects of the Hindi Dalit literary counterpublic. Further, Navaria’s fictions participate in a contemporary critique of modernity, not merely in their existence (Nigam), or simply as a means by which Navaria is inserting his “Dalit voice” into public discourse. Rather, the crises of identity and alienation of Navaria’s characters point to a recognition of the impossibility of universal subjecthood—no “secular society” is truly secular—as well as acknowledge the personal and collective losses of self and community that are inevitable when we strive for an identification with the modern. Considering the critique, or perhaps complication, of modernity implicit in the collected literary strategies and thematic approaches in Navaria’s three stories, we may consider them collectively as representing a kind of literary modernism. According to Monroe, “Modernism, as a strategy of alienation from modernity, alerts us to the arbitrariness of society’s “arrangements,” heightens our sense of sacrifice, and awakens us to the costs of seeing ourselves and our world in one way and not another.”61 Navaria’s stories alert us to personal challenges that arise, almost like a side effect, from embracing the opportunities for betterment, including education, political awareness, and material consumption. His focus is not society as a whole, but rather those elite Dalit protagonists who choose to re-envision their lives, who have the wherewithal to leave one world and make space for themselves in another.

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Dalit wiDow proclaims the brute strength of her female ancestors and slams a board over the head of her attacker, knocking him cold. A young Dalit girl, held captive and brutalized for two days, explodes in rage and slices off her rapist’s penis amidst a crowd of stunned onlookers. These and other startling images constitute a feminist recuperation of a hegemonic cultural and casteist rape narrative that imagines Dalit women as disempowered victims. Within that framework, this chapter considers the narration of sexual violence in several contemporary Hindi Dalit short stories. First, I look at the ways in which the ever-present threat of sexual violence against Dalit women has been rhetorically constructed as part of Dalit women’s identities by both Indian Dalit and feminist communities. Looking at two high-profile cases of publicly performed sexual violence against Dalit women that have been analyzed by scholars Anupama Rao and Anand Teltumbde (1963’s “Sirasgaon” incident involving the stripping and public parading of four Dalit women, and 2006’s “Khairlanji” gang-rape and massacre of the Dalit Bhotmange family, respectively) reminds us how the justice system and the media conspire to diminish the clear role of sexualized violence in maintaining caste hierarchies. The institutions silence women’s voices, reifying the social script of rape in which women remain pawns in a social struggle between men. Next, I consider the strategies used by leading Hindi Dalit authors to reiterate sexual violence as a fundamental aspect of not only Dalit women’s identities but also as a basic element in the operation of male caste hierarchies; as a consequence, women’s subjectivities are erased from narratives of sexual violence. Finally, I consider the writings of Dalit feminist author

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Kusum Meghwal, particularly those featuring rape and revenge, as opening up the imaginative possibilities of “the female appropriation of the grammar of physical violence.”1 Ultimately, this chapter points to the complicity of disparate forces, both physical and rhetorical, that contribute to the violent appropriation of Dalit women’s bodies and the silencing of Dalit women’s voices, as well as the emancipatory possibilities offered by the emergence of Dalit women’s literary speech to reclaim subjectivity and agency through the creative power of narrative. Debates about this issue precipitated the formation of the National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW) in 1995 and have remained at the fore of activist and scholarly discussions. Along with the Dalit women’s movement have emerged questions of, on one hand, the compulsion for Dalit women to talk “differently,” or from the perspective of their own experiential authority, and, on the other, the need to develop a “Dalit feminist standpoint” that can be shared by others and that can interrogate overlapping categories of caste, class, ethnicity, and gender.2 Anupama Rao’s edited volume Gender and Caste brings together several essays published in Indian journals that trace the negotiation of a distinct political identity for Dalit women. Rao suggests that “[t]he political empowerment of Dalit and other lower-caste women has posed a strong challenge to Indian feminism. . . . Dalitbahujan feminists critique both anti-caste and feminist movements for their particular forms of exclusion.”3 Their alienation, both from the anti-caste rhetoric of a Dalit movement that perpetuates oppressive patriarchal structures, as well as from an Indian feminist movement that negates caste and class differences in the pursuance of a universal “sisterhood,” comprises the particularity of Dalit women’s perspectives. For many scholars and activists in the Dalit women’s movement, violence is the lynchpin around which both the experience and enforcement of gender and caste identities revolve. For example, Kalpana Kannabiran and Vasanth Kannabiran argue that caste and gender constitute “twin mediators of oppression,” the logic of sexual violence being central to each. Citing numerous high-profile cases of sexual assault against Dalit women by upper-caste men, Kannabiran and Kannabiran point to the “mediation of inter-caste relations through a redefinition of gendered spaces,” or, in other words, how upper-caste men appropriate Dalit women’s bodies as a way to emasculate and control Dalit men. If the “‘manhood’ of a caste is defined by both the degree of control men exercise over women and the degree of passivity of women in the caste,” then, logically,

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“the structure of relations in caste society castrates [the Dalit man] through the expropriation of his women.” An attack on a Dalit woman is an attack on her entire community, “an assertion of power over all women [and men] in her caste.”4 Sharmila Rege further suggests that Dalit women are rendered “impure” or “lacking in virtue” because economic circumstances make their labor outside the home crucial and thus the rape of Dalit women may not even be considered rape because of the “customary access” upper-caste men have to Dalit women’s sexuality.5 According to Ruth Manorama, founder and president of the NFDW, Certain kinds of violence are traditionally reserved for Dalit women: extreme filthy verbal abuse and sexual epithets, naked parading, dismemberment, pulling out of teeth, tongue, and nails, and violence including murder after proclaiming witchcraft, are only experienced by Dalit women. Dalit women are threatened by rape as part of a collective violence by the higher castes.6

Sexual violence perpetrated against Dalit women, particularly by upper-caste men as a means of terrorizing an entire community of Dalits, is more often than not performed in a public space or within existing oppressive institutionalized hierarchies. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan observes that “In India . . . most cases of reported rapes are instances of what we might call institutional rape, rape perpetrated by members of repressive state forces like the police or the army, or of groups like landlords, upon helpless women of the oppressed classes, often when the women are in custody in police cells or bound by contracts of bonded labor.”7 Anupama Rao adds that “the bodies of Dalit women are seen collectively as mute, and capable of bearing penetration and other modes of marking upper-caste hegemony without the intervention of a discourse of desire and/or sexuality because of the over-determination of this violence as caste-privilege.”8

Scripting atrocity In her recently published The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Rao analyzes narrative reconstructions—those in the legal record of the subsequent court case, as well as the recollections of survivors and witnesses—of the famed incident known in popular memory as Sirasgaon. In this incident, which took place in a village of the same

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name in Aurangabad District, Maharashtra, on December 22, 1963, four Dalit women were forced from their homes, stripped, and publicly beaten, and paraded naked through their village.9 A Dalit woman, Sonabai, was sexually propositioned and insulted by an upper-caste landowner one day while she walked alone to deliver lunch to her husband Kishan, who worked for the landowner. Some months later, when Kishan decided to leave the landowner’s employ, he had a conversation with the landowner’s wife in which he asked how she would feel if he insulted her modesty. The landowner’s wife related this conversation to her husband. Soon afterwards, the landowner and a group of stick-wielding men went to Kishan’s house. As he was gone, the men pulled out Sonabai, as well as her mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law, and stripped, beat, and paraded them naked for all to witness their “shame.”10 Rao points out that this crime (reported to the police by relatives of the attacked women) was not registered under the then-existing Untouchability (Offences) Act (1955), nor was its investigation or subsequent narration in the police reports, courts, and media invested with much awareness of the (still somewhat new in 1963) legalistic notion of a “caste atrocity.” No mention of the women’s injuries was made in any reports, and the statements of all of the victims were combined into a single narrative by the police. This dismissive attitude demonstrates the lack of authority given to women’s voices.11 Though several of the perpetrators of the crime were punished (jail time and a fine), Rao argues that it is significant that the sexual violence of the attack—sexual violence specifically performed as caste violence—was rendered invisible because it encouraged public understanding of the crime as one of revenge, rather than as a symptomatic exemplar of a brutal yet commonplace exercise in caste and patriarchal privilege. Although the dominant narrative reconstructions of the event represent it as a case of sexual violence committed under individualized circumstances, Rao argues that sexual violence and caste violence are inherently intertwined, as “rape, the stripping and parading of women, and other forms of gendered humiliation reproduce upper caste male privilege” and that in these cases “sexual violence perform[s] a didactic function in socializing men and women, Dalit and caste Hindu alike, into caste norms.”12 Therefore, ultimately, “. . . the perverse logic of caste’s sexual economy is such that the violation of Dalit women as a matter of right and the violent disciplining of Dalit men are two sides of the same coin.”13

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Anand Teltumbde’s chronicle of a more recent case of caste atrocity, Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop, relates the massacre of four members of the Bhotmange family in Khairlanji, in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, on September 29, 2006.14 In this case, Surekha and Priyanka Bhotmange (mother and daughter) were ripped from their home by an angry mob of villagers, publicly stripped, gang-raped, and murdered, while Priyanka’s two brothers were tortured and mutilated before also being killed. Teltumbde discusses the atrocity itself, as well as the chronology of events leading up to it, and the media, legal, and public sphere digestion of the crime afterwards. He suggests that, as in the case of Sirasgaon, while the narrative scripting of the crime asserted the individual and scandalous “cause” as an adulterous relationship between Surekha and a male cousin from a neighboring village, a nuanced reading of the affair reveals a savarṇ community incensed by the upward mobility and political assertion of a Dalit family. The extremely gendered nature of the violence in this case—not only the public exposure and sexual brutalization of the two women in the family but also the alleged coercive invitation to the two brothers to take part in it—reveals in painful detail yet again how the social scripting of violence is intended to maintain caste hierarchies. Tellingly, the person actually being punished for perceived transgressions in this case was none of the persons killed in the brutal attack, but rather the patriarch of the family, Bhaiyalal Bhotmange, a Dalit man who owned and cultivated his own land (though it was repeatedly subject to annexation attempts by his savarṇ neighbors), who profited enough from his farming to be able to build a proper house (though he was denied this right by the village panchayat), and who sent his children to school, possessing, as Teltumbde describes it, “all the symbols of progress in a village setting: education, Ambedkarite rationality, bicycle, and even a mobile phone.” 15 In his book, Teltumbde traces how what was clearly a methodically carried out attack to punish a family who symbolized the possibility of social advancement for Dalits was re-scripted in the public sphere as a personal issue of adultery in which a female victim of rape and murder (as well as witness to the massacre of her three children) becomes, instead, the antagonist, while the mob that attacked her garners sympathy for their “outraged” sensibilities. He documents how the post-mortems of the victims were hurriedly and shoddily performed, erasing any physical evidence of rape, then considers that early newspaper accounts of the attack discussed the supposed “illicit relationship” between Surekha and

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her cousin that persisted even after the incensed villagers “asked the two to stay clean,” while none of these reports mention anything about the caste of either the victims or their attackers.16 Thus, while the enactment of brutal sexual violence in the attack itself was clearly enacted to subdue a family at the margins of caste society, the narration of that violence in both the police and media response controlled the meaning of the attack in such a way as to minimize its social import as an act of casteist mob “justice” that would inevitably incur an angry (Dalit and liberal activist) backlash.17 Further, Teltumbde suggests that the public—whose opinions are mediated by the information provided by institutions of the state and mass media—are too blind to recognize and be angered by such incidents. He writes, A caste atrocity forces the acknowledgment of a certain reality—and this premise is certainly not shared by a majority of the population. The majority likely does not see anything odd in a Dalit girl being raped or murdered by caste Hindus. Such violence is naturalized. Caste atrocities are part of the ecology of India. If a crime is committed against a Dalit at such a frequency as one every eighteen minutes—as per the government record of reported crimes—what is the novelty in it? The banality of caste violence seems to have inured both Dalits and nondalits.18

The eerily similar examples of Sirasgaon and Khairlanji—bookending nearly a half century of postcolonial India—illustrate how rape and other forms of publicly performed sexual assault are deemed a legitimate exercise in caste privilege and are orchestrated to bring shame to the woman, as well as, by extension, to punish her entire family and community. This, coupled with the inefficacy or unwillingness of the police in pursuing upper-caste abusers, heaps layers of silence over the female targets of the assault. Recent reports by the NFDW suggest that fewer than 5 percent of rape and assault cases against Dalit women ever reach the courts, and fewer than 1 percent end in conviction.19 The infamous rape of Rajasthani women’s rights advocate Bhanwari Devi in 1992 as a retaliation for her anti-child marriage activist work, resulting in the subsequent acquittal of her attackers by a judge who pronounced, “An upper caste man could not have defiled himself by raping a lower caste woman,” suggests the extent to which women’s testimonies are silenced in the public sphere.20 These shared perceptions coupled with the unwillingness of public sphere institutions to recognize the political motivation for such crimes

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compel us to examine the rhetorical situating of sexual violence in narrative forms within the cognitive framework of a “rape script,” or the social coding that prescribes the semiotics of an act of sexual violence. The idea of rape as a socially scripted interaction has been explored by Sharon Marcus, who defines a rape script as “a framework, a grid of comprehensibility which we might feel impelled to use as a way of organizing and interpreting events and actions” in her development of a theoretical approach to rape prevention.21 She suggests that a “rape script takes its form from . . . a gendered grammar of violence, where grammar means the rules and structure which assign people to positions within a script . . . The gendered grammar of violence predicates men as the subjects of violence and the operators of its tools, and predicates women as the objects of violence and the subjects of fear.”22 Marcus attempts to deconstruct how rape is posited as “inevitable” so that the script that codes it as such can be challenged and rewritten. Rao’s and Teltumbde’s analyses make clear the multiple rhetorical registers (legal, journalistic, activist) of the public circulation of information that come to constitute an obscurantist social “script” of events. It thus becomes increasingly evident that, as an alternative form of narrative, literature allows a critical space for the re-scripting of such events and the subsequent revelation of social truths masked by more institutionalized forms of narrative. Many scholars of South Asian feminism have explored Marcus’s theory of a rape script in relation to various literary and cinematic narratives to consider how it is either complicated or resisted in the very different contexts of colonial and postcolonial societies.23 For example, Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan contrasts English fiction that depicts the threat of the rape of English women by Indian men with the way rape is depicted in a “third world women’s text.” Taking Anuradha Ramanan’s Tamil short story “Prison” as an example of the latter, she examines how narrative structure and gender politics shape depictions of rape.24 She suggests that in Ramanan’s story the female rape victim “scripts her own narrative,” crafting a position of social and economic power by shaming the man who raped her. Conversely, the “first-world” texts of British male novelists reify the inevitability and totality of female victimhood; “all that is really left for the raped woman to do is fade away.”25 Sunder Rajan points out those elements that make Ramanan’s and other “third world” women’s narratives of sexual violence “feminist texts of rape,” dominant among them the countering of a narrative determinism that conscripts women into compromised positions of silence and absence.

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Considering another rape narrative, produced a decade later, Priyamvada Gopal asks two fundamental questions of Shekhar Kapur’s 1994 film Bandit Queen, a fictionalized biopic of Phoolan Devi, the former dacoit and politician assassinated in 2001. The film was at the center of a firestorm of debate about the representation of sexual violence, victimization, and agency in mainstream media.26 Kapur admittedly takes creative license in the way he depicts Phoolan Devi being gang-raped by upper-caste men, acts which were earlier recorded in Mala Sen’s book, India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi (1993). Arundhati Roy criticized the film as a Bollywood-style “rape-‘n’-retribution” drama that is exploitative to women, especially in light of both Roy’s and lawyer Indira Jaisingh’s claims that Phoolan was reluctant to speak about being raped.27 Gopal asks whether the repeated depictions in the film of Devi’s brutalized body are “symbolic of the vulnerability of all female bodies” and following this “if the representation of her victimisation is harmful to feminist efforts to recuperate female agency.”28 While sympathetic to Roy’s and others’ critiques, Gopal concludes that Bandit Queen “documents the female appropriation of the grammar of physical violence, the interventionary strategy at the heart of Marcus’s essay” because Phoolan does not merely inhabit the role of victim but acts retributively against her attackers; thus, while “the female body in this text is certainly vulnerable or ‘rapable’ [it] is also clearly capable of resistance” because Phoolan refuses to remain a victim, but rather commits an act of extreme violence against her rapists.29 Gopal argues that the film is distinctive for its narrative structure and its avoidance of building up to a singular, climactic rape scene, instead representing the layered sexual violence of Phoolan’s story along with her transformation into an agent of vengeance. The difference of Dalit literary treatments of rape from such revenge narratives is their explicit mission to put the “sociopolitical practice” of caste oppression at the heart of their narratives. Unlike a narrative such as Bandit Queen, which has as its center the sexual exploitation and eventual violent reprisal of a lower-caste woman, with attendant references and allusions (what Gopal calls “vague connections”) to the intersections of caste, class, and gender oppression, Dalit literature makes those processes its central subject and molds its characters and their stories accordingly. In the Dalit stories I will discuss, rape becomes merely a structural aspect of the narrative, an element in the backstory. Sunder Rajan suggests that this narrative deferral of rape (which accompanies the ironic absence of

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the raped woman herself in many male-authored rape stories) can be a key element in the creation of a “feminist rape text”: Feminist texts of rape counter narrative determinism . . . in a number of ways: by representing the raped woman as one who becomes a subject through rape rather than merely one subjected to its violation; by structuring a post-rape narrative that privileges chastity and leads inexorably to “trials” to establish it; by locating the raped woman in literalizing instead of mystifying representations of rape; and, finally, by counting the cost of rape for its victims in terms more complex than the extinction of female selfhood in death or silence.30

It is essential to extend the arguments about feminist texts of rape made by Sunder Rajan, Gopal, and others to consider Dalit literary texts that reproduce, complicate, or rewrite the casteist rape script to address caste hierarchy as a social problem to be at once recognized and vanquished. These narratives contain the desire for social change at their center.

EraSing womEn Before we can understand the difference of Dalit feminist narratives of rape revenge, we must explore normative narrative representations of rape and sexual assault in several examples of fiction by Dalit men. Hindi Dalit short stories typically follow a uniform narrative pattern. The story begins with some sort of humiliating episode or injustice: an insult, a denial of basic services, an act of physical assault or humiliation, or a rape of a Dalit woman. The (male) protagonist in the story, who either undergoes or witnesses this traumatic experience, is then moved through the constraints of his socialization as an “untouchable” and seeks an emotional and political reawakening as a Dalit. Thus the story becomes at once documentary and pedagogical; the “reality” of Dalit experience is “authentically” represented, and the possibility of individual and social change is taught by example. Rape does not solely figure in these stories as the traumatic and transformative event at their center, but it is nevertheless a wildly popular trope. In the typical (and typically male-authored) Dalit rape text, a Dalit woman is raped or brutalized, very often in a public space, near the beginning of the story. This structural placement of the rape immediately differentiates these stories from the other narratives of rape already

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discussed here. In the colonial-era British novels in which rape figures centrally, Sunder Rajan has pointed out, the act occurs in the middle of the story and is subtly eroticized by both a long narrative buildup (causing the reader to anticipate the rape, to literally look forward to it) and the blurring of the line between rape and seduction. In Ramanan’s story, she explains, the protagonist reconstructs her subjectivity by marrying her rapist. In Dalit stories of rape, the victim’s male family (father, brother, husband, sons) typically comes to her aid and immediately seeks justice. They first look for redress through official institutions of justice such as the police, the panchayat, or the courts, and when they are rebuffed, they come to the realization that the recuperation of their pride lies solely in their own hands. This sparks a requisite political awakening. The men find their redress in various ways—violence, shaming, education, or a relocation from the village to the city, symbolic of the refusal to participate any longer in a “traditional” feudal village caste hierarchy. Women, especially the women who have suffered the attack, have little voice and are often left by the wayside as the narrative focus turns towards the male agents of the recuperation of honor. Thus the dominant strategy of representing rape and sexual violence against women in Dalit literature has been to foreground brutalized Dalit women’s bodies as catalysts for revenge narratives enacted by men, thereby fundamentally erasing women from the script. Unlike the eroticization of the female rape victim/avenger at the center of mainstream rape-‘n’-retribution films, or the absence and silence of the raped woman at the heart of British colonial rape narratives, or even the brute radicalization of Phoolan Devi in The Bandit Queen, the rape of Dalit women in these stories serves as a catalyst for Dalit men in the story to revolt against their upper-caste oppressors. As Gabrielle Dietrich has noted, “. . . the struggles between Dalit men and others are often displaced onto instances of violence against Dalit women, which are then recuperated in a struggle between men to control the interpretation of the extent and the nature of the originary violation.”31 Indeed the predominance of rape narratives in both Dalit men’s creative and testimonial writings underlines that the attacked woman herself is tangential to the rape script. Mohandas Naimishray’s short story “Apnā Gāṁ” (“Our Village,” 1998) is a typical example. This story is the longest in his popular collection, Voices (Āvāzeṁ).32 The plot begins at a tragic and dramatic height: a young Dalit woman, Chamiya, is paraded naked through the village center by the son of the local Thakur, ostensibly as punishment for her husband’s

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failure to repay his debt of 500 rupees. The story briefly backtracks to the events leading up to the humiliation of young Chamiya, then devotes the majority of its pages to the days following the attack and the negotiations among the village Dalit community as they decide what to do in response. Chamiya is the wife of Sampat, a young Dalit man who has passed the tenth class in school in a neighboring village, becoming the most educated person from his community. Weeks before, he had left for the city to find work. Nothing has been heard from him since he left. Chamiya has become the target of harassment from the sons of the Thakur’s household, who hold over her the responsibility of her husband’s unpaid debt, as well as his audacity in avoiding the traditional village bonded labor system and seeking paid labor in the city. Chamiya is called to “work” at the Thakur’s house, a euphemism, she knows from talking to other women in the village, for sex. She tries to avoid the house and members of the Thakur’s family. But one day, walking with a bundle of firewood on her head, she is surprised on a lonely road by the cruelest of the Thakur’s three sons and his goons. They beat her with lāṭhīs, strip her, and parade her the rest of the way down the road to the center of the village where everyone watches her shaming with horror but without the courage to intervene. The story therefore makes clear that the assault itself is about much more than her husband’s unpaid debt, or her family’s movement towards a more independent and profitable life (like the Bhotmanges of Kahirlanji); it is also about Chamiya’s unwillingness to submit sexually to the Thakur, to participate in the social script that makes low-caste women always available to high-caste men, so she is coerced into conforming. Later that night Chamiya returns home to her grandfather-in-law’s house, the home of Hariya, the oldest and most venerable member of the Dalit settlement (bastī) in the village. She creeps into the room that she shares with Sampat and spends the night in silent terror while everyone else in the house is so ashamed of their own inaction that they dare not speak to her. The tension breaks in the morning, however, and soon the house is full of neighboring families who grieve with Chamiya, discuss whether or not to send word to Sampat in the city, and busy themselves preparing food for the household. But no one can bring himself to eat, and Hariya decides that since they are otherwise powerless, the only way they can resist is to go on a hunger strike. He resolves not to send word to Sampat, whose “blood is too hot and who has felt the air of the city.” But Sampat reads a report of the incident in the newspaper (an interesting detail that reflects the dissemination and public consumption of atrocity

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stories that we saw in the two cases discussed previously) and arrives that same night, angry with his family for failing to safeguard Chamiya’s honor (izzat). Invoking Ambedkar, about whom he has learned in his short time in the city, Sampat convinces his family to abandon their hunger strike and organize a group of villagers to go to the police station several villages away and file a report. Though Sampat is full of the spirit and promise of justice, convincing his fellow villagers that the police’s duty is to protect everyone, he is quickly stripped of his illusions. After a day’s walk to the police station, eleven villagers—all men, for Chamiya is not invited to make an appeal on her own behalf—appear to file a report about Chamiya’s public shaming. But when the police—who, it is implied, are on the payroll of the Thakur—suggest that Chamiya must have done something to deserve her punishment, Sampat reacts angrily and soon the villagers are themselves attacked by the policemen’s laṭhīs and locked for the day in the dungfilled buffalo stall behind the station. Eventually the emissaries to the police station return to the village, injured and dispirited, and the panchayat of the Dalit settlement convenes several times over the following days to decide what to do. Sampat advocates a move to the city “where there is no untouchability and no casteism,” while others suggest burning down the Thakur’s house. Finally Hariya proposes settling a new village, “our own village” (apnā gāṁ), miles away from the Thakur’s reach. The plan is embraced, and soon a hundred Dalit families pack up and depart in a procession, while the village’s upper castes watch and despair over who will be left to clean up after their animals and cut their babies’ umbilical cords. The story ends as the procession comes upon a small community of Muslim villagers from Rajasthan who have settled on near a river, digging water pumps deep in the ground and building brick ghāts for washing clothes, hoping to make that their business. They form a connection, and the Dalit families decide to settle there as well. The story ends on a utopian note, with old Hariya and his sons deciding their first priority is to build a school for their children. Let us consider for a moment the narrative placement of the sexual assault (stripping and naked parading), and its effect in the story. I also want to focus in some depth on the startling abundance of melodramatic principles in the opening scene of the story, the three paragraphs that describe Chamiya’s humiliation, in order to demonstrate how Chamiya becomes, through the employment of specific melodramatic narrative strategies, a spectacle to the men who consume her with their gaze. The

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scene, and in fact the story itself, begins with a series of close-ups of villager’s faces, their eyes and mouths wide open in terror or clamped shut in surprise and anger serving as signifiers of the horror of an event that, as yet, has not been revealed to the reader: “Mixed signs of fear and shock were evident in the eyes of everyone in the village. Women screamed. Anger erupted in some pairs of eyes, and a few jaws began to set themselves in determination. There was no light in old eyes, but they felt that something very bad had happened in the village. An uproar began to swell in the village. Chamiya’s lament was swallowed by the din.”33 Reading this opening description, one can imagine a movie camera swooping in for these close-up shots and the sense of building urgency as the reader comes to understand that something terrible must be happening, something not yet revealed. Next, we might continue to imagine, staying close to the picturization of the narrative, the camera quickly zooms way out and we see and hear a village scene as described in the second paragraph: a central square in which a woman is being paraded naked, a group of young thugs ahead of her and behind her shouting epithets, screams and shouts of horror as women hurry their children inside their homes and others fleeing in fear or standing transfixed. Then the perspective shifts yet again and is filtered through the rheumy eyes of an old man, Chamiya’s grandfather-in-law, for whom the full realization of the terrible scene before him is slow and excruciating: 80-year old Hariya heard the commotion and looked outside, blinking. He tried to make out the fuzzy shadows moving in front of his eyes. It was Chamiya, his grandson’s wife. There was not a piece of clothing on her body. But why was she naked? Surprised, he squinted his old eyes even more narrowly. Nearby stood four of the Thakur’s thugs. His middle son was also there. Hariya’s head lolled. His whole body shook in anger. Hariya was like an old, sick horse that did not move even as the reins continuously slapped his back. His old bones were paralyzed. He looked at the sky with tear-filled eyes. The sky was still there, just like always. He was certain at this moment the sky would fall right here. That the earth would explode. But neither did the sky fall nor did the earth burst open. Dhuliya’s main square stood right there where it had always stood. The leaves were not even swaying in the trees. It was completely silent. There was a smell of approaching danger. The language of fear could be read on every leaf. Chamiya was in

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front and behind her followed the thugs and low-lifes. The naked march was coming toward him. One of them had stripped her body, but all of the others had exposed their true natures. He heard one of the thugs saying, “We own you bastard Chamars, and yet you dare look at us in the eyes?” Now another brute chimed in, “From now on you fuckers shit and piss in your own damn houses!” Then the Thakur’s middle son shouted, “We’ll force all your daughters to strip just like Chamiya until your heads are fixed!”34 (31)

Time slows to a virtual standstill at the beginning of this passage. Everything goes silent. Hariya, as though in slow motion, peers into the harsh daylight to try to make out the strange sight before him. When he realizes what he is seeing, he looks heavenward with tear-filled eyes in a classic pose of despair. Though mute, his emotion is exteriorized in gesture and expression, and then even further displaced on the still leaves on the trees and the smell of fear in the air. The extreme emotion of the scene is further heightened by the fact that Hariya is an old man, unsteady on his feet and with blurred vision. If it were Chamiya’s young husband whose perspective we shared in this opening scene, we would doubtlessly feel his righteous anger, plus a concomitant urge for action. Of course, the story gives us little clue about Chamiya’s perspective, but we might imagine it as a complex combination of fear, grief, pain, and rage. Instead, along with the elderly Hariya, we are compelled to take on a meditative perspective, forced to dwell for a moment, as he does, on the depravity of the situation. The manipulation of extreme bodily conditions to represent extreme emotional or moral conditions is a common custom in melodrama, “as well as mutes, there are blind men, paralytics, invalids of various sorts whose very physical presence evokes the extremism and hyperbole of ethical conflict and manichaeistic struggle.”35 Hariya’s squinting eyes and childlike and methodical thought process (“This was Chamiya . . . but why would she be naked?”) indeed heighten the tragedy and spectacle of the opening scene. There is no ambiguity in how readers are meant to feel or how to interpret the event Naimishray describes. The emotions of “fear and shock” made explicit in the close-ups of the eyes and mouths in the first paragraph, and the slow transformation from confusion to despair acted out in the physical gestures of Hariya limit our own reaction to a reflection of the same. Indeed, the hyperbolic quality of the entire opening sequence appears informed by the melodramatic convention Peter Brooks calls a

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“mute tableau,” in which all the characters in a scene signify their emotions nonverbally through posture and gesture. Brooks suggests that melodramas take “recourse to tableau at moments of climax and crisis, where speech is silenced and narrative arrested in order to offer a fixed and visual representation of reactions to peripety.”36 Though Naimishray describes the “uproar” and “din” of the villagers as they scatter in the presence of Chamiya’s naked body, no character is able to manage the logical expression of words. Instead, only unattributed and undifferentiated noise underscores the scene. The unintelligibility of the above scene is at last broken by the oaths of the Thakur’s son and his friends, and the reason for Chamiya’s forced procession becomes clear: she is being punished for the Dalit community’s overstepping of caste boundaries. The moral polarization between the villagers—represented here by Hariya, not, ironically, by Chamiya herself—and the Thakur’s gang is made all the more stark by the contrast of the inability of Hariya and the villagers to make verbal sense of their pain. A “text of muteness” hounds them, while the upper-caste villains, the Thakur and the corrupt police, are never at a loss for words, declaring their evil intentions with every utterance. Perhaps most glaringly, Chamiya herself is mute throughout not only the assault, the central event of the story, but throughout the incidents leading up to it, as well as the community negotiations that come afterwards. For example, after an incident of harassment by the Thakur’s son before her public shaming, Naimishray describes Chamiya: When she got to the house she threw down the weight she was carrying on her head into the dirt courtyard and ran into the back room, hurling her body down onto the rope cot. Immediately the cot screamed under the stress . . . charrrrr . . . But who could hear the scream that was coming from inside her body? Her eyes filled with tears.37

Naimishray writes of the moment when Chamiya realizes the terrible fate awaiting her, “Her heart leapt into her mouth when she heard him utter the name of the village. Blackness began to spread before her eyes. She sat there dumbly in the middle of the road. What could she do?”38 And finally, on the morning after her march through the village, muteness grips the entire household, “In the house everyone’s heart was breaking. They could not even speak to each other. They stayed alone, shrunk into themselves.”39 After Naimishray thus reveals the depths of

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shame Chamiya suffers silently, she is effectively dropped from the narrative as her husband and other Dalit men take action and become the story’s new protagonists. Using a victimized woman as mute spectacle is common in many male-authored narratives of sexual assault. Likewise, as discussed in the previous chapter, in Ajay Navaria’s story “Subcontinent,” the adult male protagonist is haunted by the childhood memory of a village woman’s rape at the hands of an upper-caste attacker after a Dalit wedding ceremony is broken up by a group of upper-caste villagers who regard it as too ostentatious. He writes of his vague memory, “To the right of my eyes, a few feet away I saw, from beneath the white-dhoti–clad bottom of a pale pandit-god, the darkened soles of someone’s feet kicking furiously, and swinging on the back of this pale pandit a fat snakelike topknot . . . and a scream. Terrified. Continuous. Splitting the sky in two—“Chann!”40 Here the rape victim herself is reduced merely to a fleeting vision of “darkened soles of someone’s feet,” but his memory of witnessing the incident is what finally drives the protagonist to return to the village, with a gun, to exact revenge. Thus, for many Dalit male writers, rape individualizes otherwise anonymous Dalit women only to the extent that they are seen to be overcome with a sense of overwhelming shame. This shame, as we have seen in these examples, is articulated either by a third-person narrative or suggested by the complete erasure of the victim herself from the narrative. Unquestionably, revenge or resistance is solely in the hands of Dalit men, thus denying the Dalit woman the identity of either a victim whose own testimony validates her experience, or an agent of her own self-preservation and retribution.

Dalit womEn writE DiffErEntly Dalit feminists are developing alternative expressive spaces in their own literature where they can voice resistance and re-imaginations of this representative norm. In particular, established writers such as Bama (Tamil), Baby Kamble (Marathi), and Urmila Pawar (Marathi), as well as emerging feminist writers, continue to challenge the codification of a newly celebrated Dalit literary voice that is overwhelmingly male and often overtly misogynist in its orientation towards the Dalit female experience. Again, nowhere is this more evident than in literary representations of rape and sexual assault against Dalit women.

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Feminist writers and critics in the contemporary Hindi Dalit literary sphere are working to rescue Dalit women’s bodies from passive manipulation in perpetuating the casteist rape script in which they serve as transactional objects in a power struggle between men. These writers demonstrate powerful alternatives to such a scripting, as well as resistance to an assumed adherence to a singular “grid of comprehensibility” (Marcus). I have already discussed the Dalit feminist critique of Dharamveer’s reading of the rape script into Premchand’s “The Shroud” in chapter 2, and the charge that his reading of the story perpetuates the fetishization of sexual violence against Dalit women and the silencing of those women’s voices. In addition to these kinds of critiques, it is in the field of literary narrative that we find alternative, feminist imaginings of the rape script. Rajasthani writer Kusum Meghwal is exemplary in her exploration of alternative possibilities for female agency. Such agency can take the form of a woman-centered rape revenge fantasy that allows Dalit women to disrupt the normative social script of sexual assault by refusing to acquiesce to the physically passive role prescribed to them (Marcus). In these narratives, women enact both verbal and physical acts of resistance; most importantly, the psychological liberation that results from their resistance belongs to them alone. Such disruption of the casteist rape script is on prominent display in two short stories I will consider here, “Mangali” and “Spark” (“Aṅgārā”), both by Kusum Meghwal. Meghwal is the founder of the Rajasthan Dalit Sahitya Akademi and the author of several books, including the shortstory anthology Juṛte Dāyitva (1996); a book-length poetic meditation on the position of women in Indian society, Is Nārī ko Pahachān (“Take a Look at This Woman,” 1998); and a book about the representation of Dalits in mainstream Hindi novels, Hindī Upanyāsoṁ Meṁ Dalit Varg (The Dalit Class in Hindi Novels, 1989). Meghwal counts herself a member of a community of Dalit women writers and activists who promote a feminist consciousness in the politics of caste; she traveled with the National Federation of Dalit Women to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and contributed to the 2007 special issue of Yuddhrat Ām Ādmī discussed in chapter 2, in which several Dalit feminist critics excoriated Dharamveer’s reading of the rape script into “The Shroud.”41 In several of the short stories in her prolific collection, Meghwal reinserts women’s subjectivity, both as victims who have actually suffered an attack and are fundamentally changed because of it and as victors who hold the power of retribution in their own hands.

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“Mangali” The story bears the name of its female protagonist. Mangali is a day laborer at a construction site, and at the outset of the story we learn that her husband is ill with typhoid. Mangali must complete a day’s work before she receives enough wages to pay for even a small dose of only one of a doctor’s prescribed medications. By the time she reaches home, her husband is unconscious and unable to take the medicine. After a short while, he dies in her arms. Mangali, left a young widow, does not return to the construction site for a few days after her husband’s death. When she does return with her head veiled, the contractor abuses her for having skipped work until she shows him her bangle-less wrists, and he realizes she is newly widowed. He is suddenly ingratiating towards her and offers that she can stay for free in the servant quarters of his house. “Innocent by nature,” Mangali agrees. Pretending to be sympathetic and attempting to woo her with small gifts and kindnesses, over the course of a few weeks the contractor begins to make advances toward the unsuspecting Mangali, who Meghwal frequently reminds us is “innocent.” In the final scene of the story, the rising tension comes to a climax after the contractor makes his desires, and her obligations as a lower-caste woman living in his house, clear to Mangali: The revelation of the contractor’s lurid designs caused an explosion. Mangali was made of stronger stuff than he had initially thought. Trembling in anger she replied, “Contractor Sahib I had no idea that this monster was hidden inside you and that with the excuse of helping me through my troubles you have actually brought me here to take advantage of me. But I am telling you firmly that I am a daughter of a Bhīl woman who, if she gives birth to a child while she is cutting wood in the jungle, she’ll cut the umbilical cord herself, lift the child in her arms and go home. So don’t try to come any closer or I will cut you like a goat.” The contractor exploded in rage—“Even while living in my home you dare threaten me? Good-for-nothing untouchable bitch! You think you’ll remain a chaste woman your whole life? Just who do you think will save you now?” Saying this he swooped toward Mangali and tried to pull her tight in his arms. Mangali swiftly pushed aside her veil and in a flash lifted a thick piece of firewood lying by the stove and hit the contractor in the head. The

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contractor had no clue that there was such a powerful woman hidden inside Mangali. He lost consciousness and fell right there on the spot. Panting, running in rage like an angry goddess, she arrived at the police station and filed a report against the contractor. As it happened the police took her side. Instead of preying upon Mangali, they offered her protection. The chief sent two constables with her and gave her a seat in the jeep. They quickly arrived at Mangali’s quarters and arrested the unconscious contractor.42

The radical about-face of the narrative and of Mangali’s character is typical, as we will see, of Meghwal’s unique treatment of female protagonists in the face of sexual violence. Throughout the story Mangali plays the stereotypical role of the embattled Dalit woman, struggling against the social forces of poverty, exploitative labor conditions, and the everpresent threat of sexual assault. Her victimization by these forces is compounded by the death of her husband, making her an even more obvious target for social and sexual exploitation. There is nothing to suggest, until the end of the story, her sudden victory. Meghwal emphasizes Mangali’s status as “victim,” repeatedly characterizing her as innocent and trusting, and making it a point throughout the sparse narrative to depict Mangali’s submissive demeanor and chastely drawn veil in the presence of the contractor. Perhaps Meghwal is guarding the character of Mangali against criticisms grounded in the widespread masculinist assumption that “improper” women invite rape; but she could also be positioning her protagonist and antagonist as “moral” opposites to underscore the radical re-visioning of the story’s denouement. For all along the reader is also given clues to the contractor’s devious motives (“Just a few days later the contractor began to lay a snare for Mangali”; “The innocent Mangali did not notice the contractor’s scheme hidden behind his sympathy. As though fattening up a goat for sacrifice, he would feed her pān and sweets . . .”) while Mangali remains unaware, creating a sense of the inevitability of her impending violation and the repetition of the typical Dalit-woman-as-helpless-victim narrative. But at the moment of Mangali’s delayed realization of the contractor’s plot, such narrative determinism is overturned. Meghwal asserts, “Mangali was made of stronger stuff than he”—and admittedly we—“had thought.” Mangali’s transformation from helpless widow into the “angry goddess” that manages at once to fell her attacker and demand recognition of his crime from the apparatus of the state at the conclusion of the

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story is first signaled by her evocation of the lineage of strong Bhil women from whom she descends. It is as though the very articulation of this feminine inheritance is what gives her the strength to fight the contractor and replace her own victimization with his. As Mangali refuses to become a raped woman, she becomes subject of a second, somewhat fantastical narrative in which Meghwal transforms her into the victor. Mangali is in fact able to doubly assert her dominant subjecthood over the contractor, first with the strength of her physical attack, after which “he lost consciousness and fell right there on the spot,” and second with the backing of the police who “as it happened . . . took her side,” an event as unlikely in the “real world” as young Mangali knocking out the burly contractor with a single blow. It is important to note that here, instead of the it is Mangali’s husband, instead of the Dalit woman, who has effectively disappeared from the plot of the story. While her victimized status for the bulk of the story is contingent upon her status both as widow and as Dalit woman, her transformation to “angry goddess” at the end of the story constructs a new, self-scripted social role that rewrites the stereotypical rape script. For many modern literary and cinematic treatments of “deviant” womanhood in India, the centrality of the goddess in various Hindu religious traditions provides a rich mine of narratives and symbols. Clearly, Meghwal’s repetition and expansion of the goddess trope is conversant with these reclamations of the goddess as a “symbolic resource.”43 But Kancha Ilaiah explains that the predominance of goddess worship traditions among Dalit communities in South India, particularly Andhra Pradesh, does not conform to such appropriations but is rather a powerful rejection of the institutionalization of “violent” Hindu gods who are “killers and oppressors of Dalitbahujans.”44 Badri Narayan suggests that the grassroots imagination in North India is similarly inflected, and this explains why Mayawati, the Dalit chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, successfully marketed herself as a sort of goddess.45 Sunder Rajan suggests that because most goddess-worshippers come from low castes or even nonHindu communities, veneration of the goddess is a radical act. She also argues that while “unconventional” women may find “sanction” for their behavior through goddess models, they are never evoked as mainstream role models for girls and women.46 Ilaiah extols the goddesses of Dalit worship as “strong wise women” who are examples neither of “delicate femininity” (as is Sita, Lord Ram’s long-suffering wife in the Rāmāyaṇa) nor of anti-male violence. The Dalit goddess tradition, in direct contrast to mainstream Hinduism, does not glorify “violence as a positive cultural

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ethos.”47 But it is, in fact, just this violent potential of the goddess (Hindu or Dalit) that is evoked in Meghwal’s story. It is precisely Mangali’s own exercise of violence, and its consequent disruption of the violence that was about to be visited upon her, that makes possible the triumphant ending of the story and the rewriting of the rape script.48

“Angārā” In “Spark,” another Meghwal story, the female protagonist actually does suffer a violent sexual attack before she fights back, exacting her bloody revenge. When the story opens, we see seventeen-year-old Jamuna weeping at the threshold of her family’s hut while her parents cower inside. Outside a crowd has gathered to jeer and taunt her, calling her a prostitute and cursing her for bringing shame to her family. Jamuna relates her ordeal: a few days earlier, while she was cutting the grass with her scythe on the embankment separating some fields, the village Thakur’s oldest son, Sumer Singh, and his uncle, Nathu Singh, sneaked up on her. Before she could scream, they covered her mouth with a cloth and forced her at knifepoint to an abandoned storeroom and “blackened her face” (muṇh kālā kiyā). They kept her locked in the storeroom for several days, feeding her dry rotis, and raping her continuously. Jamuna explains that she begged them to at least refrain from forcing themselves on her in the daylight. She tried to convince them that as soon as they touched her they would be unclean, and asked how they could entwine their bodies with hers, as though there were no difference between them. “What about your practice of untouchability and casteism?” she challenged them. They cursed her and said, “Keep running your mouth bitch, you can’t escape from our grasp now. We’ll enjoy you for as long as we want and when we’ve had enough we’ll kill you and drop you in the jungle where you’ll be eaten by wolves and vultures.”49 But one night they both got drunk and passed out and she was able to escape from the storeroom. Now she stands at the threshold of her parents’ house, ostracized, with nowhere to go. Her brother Hira comforts Jamuna and promises her and both their parents that he will not rest until he has punished the men, restoring her honor (izzat). He and Jamuna go to the nearest police station where she files a report, but a few days later they discover that the Thakur has paid a bribe to the police to have the report destroyed. A relative of the Thakur’s family is a government minister, virtually assuring immunity to Jamuna’s attackers, who

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return to the village waving guns and shouting in the streets that they will shoot anyone who challenges them. When they approach Hira’s family hut, Hira explodes with rage, cursing the impotent (nāpuṃsak) police and the government who are unable to protect the poor. Then, bursting forth like a spark (aṅgārā) from inside the hut, he attacks the men with an axe. There is a prolonged fight and the rest of the men flee except for the Thakur’s son, who eventually falls to the ground, weak and exhausted, while Jamuna watches from inside the hut. I quote the story’s climactic conclusion here: Wide-eyed, Jamuna was staring at this demonic man who had stolen her honor. Now it was her turn. Like a spark (aṅgārā) she ran inside and grabbed her scythe from the corner of the hut. Then she gave that punishment that the government and the police were powerless to give. She had her revenge (pratishodh). She sliced off the symbol of Sumer Singh’s manhood (purushatva ke pratīk aṅg) and threw it far from his body. He was writhing. It was impossible to save him now. Even if he could be saved, his life would be worse than death. The life of a eunuch (hijṛā). Now he will never play again with the honor of a poor young untouchable girl. This was the right punishment for him.50

This is by far the most graphic example among Meghwal’s revenge fantasy narratives. It is unique in that Jamuna’s dramatic enactment of revenge on the body of her attacker is not for the purpose of preventing her own violation, but truly an act of revenge in its most metaphorical manifestation. This man was the one who “stole her honor” (ābarū/izzat lūṭhnā), and in turn she steals his “manhood” (purushatva), the tool of her own violation. Jamuna has destroyed him, rendering him impotent, putting him in the same defenseless and powerless state in which she was meant to be relegated by his violation of her. Jamuna’s rape, abduction, imprisonment, and terrorization, rather than rendering her powerless, empower her to make a public spectacle of her revenge. Whereas she provided a public spectacle at the beginning of the story—as the silent center of a jeering crowd—at the conclusion she is the subject, rather than the object, of the public performance. A crowd of onlookers watches Jamuna’s triumphant dismembering of her rapist, just as a large number of readers will witness the spectacle in its narrative form; thus Jamuna’s feat of retaliatory violence is public on two different levels. This violence is not self-defense, because Jamuna’s violation has already occurred; rather,

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there is a certain sadistic pleasure to be found in the radical, bloody way she takes revenge. Thus Meghwal’s stories, in their restoration of subjectivity and agency to Dalit women who suffer sexual assault, act as a kind of alternative public performance in which Dalit women perform fantasy revenge scenarios, performances that allow them to voice protest and resistance to their upper-caste oppressors, or at the very least experience a cathartic release of anger only possible in the creation of a fantasy revenge narrative. If the humiliation of a sexual assault is largely derived from its enactment in public, that same wrong requires redress also through public spectacle. These stories re-center the Dalit woman as subject and deemphasize the normative scripting of rape as an insult directed at Dalit men. Just as Mangali’s husband dies at the beginning of her narrative, Jamuna’s brother Hira is ultimately unable to avenge his sister—Meghwal rather scripts the act of vengeance as something that only she, both as victim and as subject, can perform. The early emphasis on the “traditional” natures of the women in both stories makes their later almost supernatural transformations even more radical and unexpected. Just as when Mangali returns to the labor site, she has a long veil drawn across her face and her wrists are free of bangles as she dutifully marks her new status as a widow, Jamuna is the face of innocence at the beginning of her story, bearing silently the wrath of her family and community because she understands that such is a woman’s role. When these women transform, they not only gain newfound strength but also metamorphose into semi-divine agents of vengeance. Mangali is transformed into an “angry goddess,” and Jamuna becomes a “spark” that blazes to life in retribution. The dramatic impact of the sudden metamorphoses of these women gives Meghwal’s stories their particular character as revenge fantasy narratives.

concluSion These revenge fantasy narratives employ specific alternative textual strategies of representation to combat the narrative determinism of the rape script. Central to each is the structural de-centering of the rape from its normative role as constitutive of the woman’s, and the community’s, victimhood. “Spark” focuses on Jamuna’s retributive act in the aftermath of the rape, suggesting that a woman does not die or disappear after she is violated, but rather continues her life as an autonomous, agentive

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subject. In “Mangali,” the rape occurs in the past, and the revenge fantasy is narrated in the present. Before the intrusion of the fantastic in both stories, Meghwal works to build the reader’s realization of the inevitable. Mangali’s continued naiveté in the face of the increasing transparency of the contractor’s lurid designs builds a feeling of dread in the reader as she watches Mangali step right into his trap, but then, very suddenly, the reader’s assumptions about what is going to happen are knocked as flat as the contractor himself. The combination of realism with the sudden intrusion of fantasy fits with the blend of realism and melodrama that I have already argued is the predominant narrative mode of Dalit literature but with the difference that the female characters serve as the loci of resistance, subverting their normative roles as rape victims. Meghwal’s revenge-fantasy narratives give access not only to the psychic “reality” of rape, but also to the psychic possibilities of protecting oneself from rape or seeking retaliation after it.51 Such representations of women’s agency in the face of the paralyzing rape script—“fantastical” as they may be in these stories—challenge the logic on which the script operates, that is, that women’s bodies are mute vessels over which male caste battles may be waged. Dalit feminist short stories thus emerge as a space in which women’s subjectivity, muted by the oppressive logic of the rape script, can be reclaimed, and they open the possibility of such subjectivities to make themselves known in the courts as well as in the streets and in the squares of villages.

ConClusion

I

t is no accident that I chose to end this book with Kusum Meghwal, the first Dalit author I ever met, and one who stands here as a single example of an increasingly vocal community of Dalit feminist writers who are working, through the publication and dissemination of their narratives, to subvert the hegemony of the casteist rape script. Further, these women writers struggle against a pervasive masculinist prejudice in the Dalit literary sphere, a prejudice whose logic is predicated on the idea that to represent the particular issues facing Dalit women is to somehow threaten the emergence and consolidation of a unified literary voice of Dalit resistance, a literary voice that is increasingly being recognized and celebrated in both mainstream media and academic scholarship, but one that is coded implicitly as male by the overwhelmingly disproportionate publication of Dalit men’s testimonial, fictional, and poetic narratives, both in original language and translated publications.1 I have known Kusum Meghwal since 2001, when I was working on my master’s thesis and happened, through a series of happy circumstances, to meet her during a several-months, long stay in Udaipur. Her fiction, and her own personal story of becoming a writer and founding the Rajasthan Dalit Literary Academy, became the topic of my master’s thesis and the inspiration behind the years of fieldwork and reading and writing that led to the completion of both my doctoral dissertation and—a dozen years after we first met—this book. I have been heartened in the years since to watch the determined emergence of a powerful coterie of Dalit women writers and activists working in the Hindi sphere—a group of women who collectively pool their voices at women’s literary conferences and in Hindi Dalit magazines like Yuddhrat

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Ām Ādmī and Apekṣā that focus on women’s responses to current debates in the Dalit literary sphere—and the anthologizing of Dalit women’s short stories and autobiographical essays. Kusum Meghwal once explained the desired impact of her stories to me: that rural, uneducated, disempowered Dalit women might hear them and take strength from them, perhaps imagining alternative twists in the cultural scripts that govern their lives. It has been my goal throughout this book to understand the contemporary Hindi Dalit literary sphere on its own terms—to trace its public debates and critical contours, as well as to mine the fictional works of contemporary Dalit authors. The debates, discussions, literary histories, critical frameworks, and fictional narratives examined here make clear that contemporary Hindi Dalit literature goes far beyond the “subaltern speaking” into the terrain of the subaltern becoming. Hindi Dalit literature has matured and diversified, as I have shown, into a space in which a modern Dalit identity is being newly constituted. Toral Jatin Gajarawala, in her book Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (2013), an insightful intertextual study on the function of realism in Hindi Dalit literature, asks the following question: “In light of the alleged inability of realist writing to properly narrativize Dalit lifeworlds, one must ask: Why is it that Dalit fiction turns again and again to the basic tropes of realism?”2 The narratives, debates, and literary institutions under scrutiny in my own book provide clear answers to this important question. First, in investing realism as a progressive literary practice with a consequent emphasis on perspectival and experiential “authenticity” and a specific set of political exigencies (both coded in the concept of Dalit chetnā), Dalit writers reshape literary realism to “properly” render their life worlds on the printed page. The chapters in part I of this book make clear that the demands and consequences of Dalit chetnā are in no way fixed or universally agreed upon. Yet there is no ambiguity about the constitutive importance of the discursive sphere that this concept engenders, and we have seen the ways in which the critical lens of Dalit chetnā allows for both a deconstruction of a host of historical nonDalit claims to Dalit representation, as well as a foundation for building new models of Dalit literary representation. Gajarawala asks another question too: “Dalit aesthetics will have to seek a new source of radicalism, somewhere and sometime else. The question we may ask instead: Are other forms of realism possible?”3 The short answer is yes. These other forms of realism are already on display here. The literary material of the chapters in part 2 of this book demonstrate

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that much Dalit literature has already moved beyond a literal adherence to a realist aesthetic as a radical principle (which, as Gajarawala points out, in its original manifestation served to democratize literature) and instead invests realism with a host of other critical and aesthetic interventions, including melodrama, heteroglossia, modernism, alienation, and the fantastic—all in an effort to reclaim authority over its own representation in literature and the popular imagination. This is not a seamless effort; indeed, I have tried to make clear the ways in which dissension, competition, and debate are at the core of this community of writers, editors, and critics. But I assert that these differences of approach to the processes and the possibilities of narrativization strengthen the diverse collective of voices under the misleadingly singular umbrella of Dalit sāhitya.

NOTES

IntroductIon 1. Munshi Premchand (b. Dhanpat Rai, 1880–1936) is considered one of the most significant Indian authors of the twentieth century. His works include more than a dozen novels and more than 200 short stories in Hindi and Urdu. He helped to inaugurate a new realist aesthetic in Indian fiction, and he was a formative influence on the Progressive Writers Association (formed in 1936). Raṅgbhūmi was his ninth novel. For more information on Premchand see Geetanjali Pandey, An Intellectual Biography of Premchand (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989). 2. Caste hierarchies in India continue to play an extraordinarily influential role in politics and society, as well as in the realm of culture. Much of the impetus behind Dalit literature is that the upper castes have overwhelmingly been both the authors and subjects of literature in India for most of its history. Premchand is generally understood to be among the first modern authors to address caste inequality in sensitive, politicized ways, but he is a divisive figure among contemporary North Indian Dalits. 3. The National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) was established by the government of India in 1961 to advise central and state governments on matters of state-run education. 4. Chamars, whose traditional occupation is often cited as “leatherworking,” are among the most populous and politically dominant Dalit castes in North India. For a history of the Chamar caste see Ramnarayan S. Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011). 5. The full text of the Act can be found at http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1999/ India/India994–16.htm. 6. Dalit is the preferred term for the collection of castes in India formerly known as “Untouchable.” The political contours of the term “Dalit” for Ambedkar and subsequent generations following in his political legacy are considered in some depth in Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi: Manohar, 1996). 7. Pragya Kaushika, “NCERT Plays It Safe with Premchand Prose,” The Statesman, January 29, 2006.

91820 IntroductIon 8. For this sense of “cultural performance,” I borrow Nancy Pezullo’s definition of one which foregrounds “the non-verbal activities that are involved in negotiating public life, including physical, visual, emotional, and aural dimensions.” Nancy Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345–365. 9. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, 25/26 (1990): 60. 10. Bhimrao Ramji “Babasaheb” Ambedkar (1891–1956) was the most significant political leader of the Dalits in India in modern history. A Mahar by birth, Ambedkar pursued graduate degrees at institutions that include Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He returned to India and became a follower of Gandhi, only to split from him later for what he saw as a lack of commitment by Gandhi towards the eradication of untouchability. For many contemporary Dalits, the distinction between Gandhian and Ambedkarite philosophies on the question of caste is extraordinarily stark. For Ambedkar’s own perception of their differences, see B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. (Delhi: Gautam Book Centre, 1945). For accounts of Ambedkar’s time in the West see Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), and Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (Delhi: Sage, 1994). 11. The “internationalization” of Dalit literature through the publishing of English translations of Dalit texts from diverse Indian languages such as Marathi, Tamil, and Malayalam has exploded in the last decade: In 2011, Penguin India published No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India, and in 2012, Oxford University Press published two massive “Anthologies of Dalit Writing,” in Tamil and Malayalam, that attempt to map the growth of the genre in each language over the last century. There has been a spate of single-authored autobiographies and memoirs published abroad, such as Gail Omvedt’s English translation from Marathi of Vasant Moon’s popular Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography in 2001, Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), and Narendra Jadhav’s Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Journey out of the Caste System in Modern India (New York: Scribner, 2005). The progressive Delhi-based publishing house Navayana has also published two significant translated collections of contemporary Dalit short stories: Gogu Shyamala’s Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small Basket, But…” (translated from Telugu by various authors and published in 2011) and Ajay Navaria’s selected stories in Unclaimed Terrain: Stories by Ajay Navaria (translated from Hindi by this author and published in 2013). 12. Toral Gajarawala’s recent book Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012) also presents an important corrective to the general trend of locating studies of caste in Western India. 13. Prominent critics, such as S. Anand, have raised important questions about the commodification of suffering and resistance in the literary marketplace in Touchable Tales (Delhi: Navayana, 2004). 14. Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, trans. Alok Mukherjee (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004), 33. 15. Trisha Gupta, “The Dalit Deliberations,” Tehelka 7, no. 5 (February 6, 2010).

1. the hIndI dalIt counterpublIc 91830 16. Quoted in Lata Murugkar, Dalit Panther Movement in Maharashtra: A Sociological Appraisal (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1991), 237. 17. Kusum Meghwal, Hindī Upanyāsoṁ Meṁ Dalit Varg (Jaipur: Sanghi Prakashan, 1989), 1. Translation mine. 18. For examples of Dalit pamphlet literature and a discussion of the multiple levels of Dalit literary discourse, see Badri Narayan and A. R. Misra, eds., Multiple Marginalities: An Anthology of Identified Dalit Writings (Delhi: Manohar, 2004). 19. Digish Mehta, “Differing Contexts: The Theme of Oppression in Indian Literatures,” New Comparison, 7 (1989): 83. 20. S. Anand, ed., Touchable Tales: Publishing and Reading Dalit Literature (Chennai: Navayana, 2003), 1. Limbale, Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, 19. 21. Sharatchandra Muktibodh, “What Is Dalit Literature?” in Poisoned Bread, ed. Arjun Dangle (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992), 267. 22. Anand, Touchable Tales, 33. 23. Anand, Touchable Tales, 25. 24. Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (New York: Penguin, 1990). 25. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 334. 26. L. Chris Fox, “A Martyrology of the Abject: Witnessing and Trauma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” Ariel 33, no. 3–4 (2002): 35–60. 27. Premchand, “Dūdh kā Dām,” in Premchand Rachnāvali, ed. Ramvilas Sharma (Delhi: Janvani Prakashan, 1996), 283–290. Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, trans. Arun Prabha Mukherjee (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 28. Premchand, “Dūdh kā Dām,” 285. 29. Premchand, “Dūdh kā Dām,” 290. 30. Valmiki, Joothan, 12. 31. Shashi Bhushan Upahdyay, “Representing the Underdogs: Dalits in the Literature of Premchand,” in Studies in History 18 (February 2002), 59. 32. Debjani Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives,” Asian Studies Review 33, no. 4 (December 2009): 434. 33. Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood, and the Collective,” 437. Chuhras are traditionally considered a “sweeper” caste. 34. Ajay Navaria, Unclaimed Terrain, trans. Laura Brueck (Delhi: Navayana, 2013), 123–154. 35. Navaria, “Hello Premchand,” 125. Bhangis have traditionally been considered “sweepers” or “scavengers.” 36. Navaria, “Hello Premchand,” 133. 37. Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood and the Collective,” 434. 38. Rita Kothari makes a similar point about the relative newness of the Gujarati Dalit short story, saying “…it did not evolve out of a larger political movement against the upper castes” (2001, 4308).

1. the hIndI dalIt counterpublIc 1. K. P. Jindal, A History of Hindi Literature, 2nd edition (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1993), 219.

91840 1. the hIndI dalIt counterpublIc 2. Prakash Chandra Gupta, Makers of Indian Literature: Prem Chand (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1968), 60. 3. The Manusmṛti is an ancient Sanskrit legal treatise that dates from the second century BCE to the second century CE. While it addresses an astounding number of topics on the way life should be lived, it is most notorious among Dalits for its elaboration of a harsh treatment of untouchables. A brief example of the dictates the Manusmṛti hands down regarding the treatment of untouchables reads thus: “…the dwellings of ‘Fierce’ untouchables …should be outside the village; they must use discarded bowls and dogs and donkeys should be their wealth. Their clothing should be the clothes of the dead, and their food should be in broken dishes; their ornaments should be made of black iron, and they should wander constantly” [10:51–52]. For a full translation, see The Laws of Manu, trans. Wendy Doniger (London: Penguin, 1991). 4. For more information about the centrality of Ambedkar in the Dalit movement of the twentieth century and the political impact of his burning of the Manusmṛti, see Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement, (Delhi: Navayana, 2013). 5. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 4. 6. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 43. 7. Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 2. 8. Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 7. 9. Ibid. 10. Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere: 1920–1940 (New Delhi: Oxford, 2002), 9. 11. Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere, 12. 12. Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 32. 13. Discussions of the various constellations of members and examples of organizational activities in which I participated are largely from the longest stretch of my fieldwork, from April 2004 to March 2005, with subsequent visits in 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2012. As with any contemporary, living, evolving movement, the various actors, group formations, and their specific activities are ever changing. But this particular snapshot in time still presents a valid, exemplary, and experiential model on which to base a theoretical understanding of the nexus of people, institutions, texts, and media in the Dalit literary sphere as a counterpublic. 14. A small boxed passage of text in every issue of the newsletter exhorts its readers, “Himāyatī fortnightly newsletter: a representative newspaper of the Ambedkar mission. Subscribe to it, read it, and read it to others. From this, mass consciousness (jan chetnā) will be awakened and the Dalit struggle will be sharpened.” Translation mine. 15. Ambedkar’s preeminence as a meaningful symbol in the Dalit counterpublic is abundantly clear; as an author of the Indian constitution outlawing the practice of untouchability, as a premier twentieth century leader and political organizer of Dalits, as the author of such radical tracts as “The Annihilation of Caste,” and in his struggle against Gandhi and the Congress in the fight for separate electorates for

1. the hIndI dalIt counterpublIc 91850

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

Dalits in a postcolonial parliament, Ambedkar’s centrality in the Dalit counterpublic is unparalled. Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule predated Ambedkar as advocates for women’s education and the dismantling of caste hierarchies in the nineteenth century. Bhakti poet Kabir regularly wrote from the perspective of an untouchable in his sixteenth-century poems, and he critiqued the social constructs of caste. Finally, many contemporary Dalits, particularly in Western India, are Buddhists. This is where Ambedkar himself converted to Buddhism before his death in 1956 and where the idea of Buddhism as a secular and native alternative to Hinduism is most entrenched. I attended the BDSA annual national conference of Dalit writers in December 2004 at Talkatora Stadium in New Delhi that drew close to 8,000 people, as well as a few regional meetings in Rajasthan and New Delhi that drew closer to three hundred to four hundred. Hauser, Publics and Public Spheres, 34. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 67. Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere, 68. The 2011 Census of India reports that Scheduled Castes represent 16.2 percent of the national population at more than 166 million. See http://www.censusindia. gov.in/Tables_Published/A-Series/A-Series_links/t_00_005.aspx. The National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights claims that Dalits constitute 19 percent of the general population. See S. K. Thorat and R. S. Deshpande, “Caste System and Economic Inequality,” in Dalit Identity and Politics, ed. Ghanshyam Shah (New Delhi: Sage, 2001), 44–73. While Adivasis face specific economic problems related to the appropriation of once-communal lands, Dalits and Adivasis face similar social and political marginalization in India and are frequently grouped together under the category “Scheduled Castes and Tribes.” Chandra Bhan Prasad, “A New Order for Today,” The Pioneer (September 27, 2005). Prasad is the first Dalit to have a regular column in an English-language publication in India. He started his weekly column, “Dalit Diary,” in the English daily, The Pioneer, in 1999. The Delhi-based nonprofit publishing house Navayana (“focusing on caste from an anti-caste perspective,” according to the publisher’s website) has sought to address the dearth of caste diversity in media and publishing industries in India by sponsoring “Avarna fellowships” that support Dalit and Adivasi students in the pursuit of education and training in media and publishing. According to their website, “Like other private sectors in India, publishing too has been the preserve of the social elite. Dalits and Adivasis hence go almost unrepresented in this field. For many Dalits/Adivasis, publishing does not even seem to be a career option. Navayana, with the Avarna fellowship, seeks to address this anomaly” (http:// navayana.org/?p=1025). For more on Dalits in journalism, see also Mohandas Naimishray’s two-volume Dalit Patrakāritā (Delhi: Shri Natraj Prakashan, 2008). See, for example, Indian Literature 42, 185 (1998): 12–50; 43:193 (1999): 5–9 and 15–49; 45:201 (2001): 9–71. Also Samkālīn Bhāratīya Sāhitya (May–June 1999): 91–95. My interview with K. Satchidanandan, March 1, 2005.

91860 1. the hIndI dalIt counterpublIc 26. The group’s original mission was explained to me by Sudesh Tanwar, former general secretary of the DLS, in an interview on August 24, 2004. Translation mine. 27. Vimal Thorat, “Dalit strīke tihare shoṣaṇ ko sāhitya mein uṭhaya jānā chāhiye,” Haṁs 19 (2004): 229. Translation mine. 28. Some of the Dalit writing that contests the “master narrative” of Dalit literature, such as modernist and feminist writing, will be discussed in chapters 6 and 7. 29. “Jan-Sattā aur Vimarsh,” Haṁs 19:1, August 2004. This issue of Haṁs was guest-edited by two active Dalit writers and DLS members, Dr. Sheoraj Singh “Bechain” and Ajay Navaria. 30. This interview took place in the offices of Haṁs, in Daryaganj, Delhi, on September 3, 2004. 31. “Nayī nazar kī nayī nazariyā,” Haṁs 24:1, August 2009. 32. This concept is subsumed within the larger theoretical concept of “Dalit chetnā,” which is a fundamental component of the growing body of Dalit literary aesthetic theory. This concept is discussed in great detail in chapter 2. 33. The focus on Dalit Studies at IGNOU was given a boost by the addition of Ambedkar scholar Gail Omvedt as the B. R. Ambedkar chair on social change and development in 2009. A new postgraduate program on the philosophy of Dr. Ambedkar was inaugurated at IGNOU in July 2010. 34. In late February 2004, scholars Gail Omvedt, G. Aloysius, and P. G. Jogdand and Dalit writers Omprakash Valmiki and Sheoraj Singh “Bechain” among others came together for the “National Seminar on Dalit Studies and Higher Education: Exploring Content Material for a New Discipline.” See program and paper abstracts at http:// www.deshkalindia.com/pdf/Bodh%20Gaya%20brochure.pdf. The proceeds of this conference later resulted in the publication of a book, Kumar and Kumar, eds., Dalit Studies in Higher Education: Vision and Challenges (Delhi: Deshkal, 2005). 35. Published originally under the name “Ahalya” in Haṁs, December 2002, 32–35. 36. Sharankumar Limbale,Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, trans. Alok Mukherjee (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), 19. 37. Interview in Haṁs 19, 1(August 2004): 228. Translation mine. 38. This was a common sentiment among Dalit women writers I interviewed. For an example of the fierce disapprobation Dalit women writers can face for articulating their gender-based discontent, see Dr. Dharamveer’s scathing critique of Dalit woman writer Kausalya Baisantri: “‘Dohrā Abhishāp’ Kitnā Dohrā? Ek Dinosaur Aurat” (“‘A Double Curse’: How Is it Double? A Dinosaur Woman”) in Haṁs 19, 1 (August 2004): 66–71. 39. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics (Abbreviated Version),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, 4 (2002a): 420. 40. See especially Thorat, “Dalit strī ke tihare shoṣaṇ ko sāhitya meṁ uṭhāya jānā chāhiye,” 228–231. 41. Chandrabhan Prasad, Dalit Diary: 1999–2003. Reflections on Apartheid in India (Chennai: Navayana, 2005). 42. Rajni Tilak, Padchāp (Delhi: CADAM, 2000), 15. Translation mine. 43. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), 22. 44. As Ghyanshyam Shah explains, “The word Dalit is a common usage in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, and many other Indian languages, meaning the poor and oppressed persons. However, it has now acquired a new cultural context relating to Dalitness,

2. the problem of premchand 91870 Dalit literature, and the Dalit movement” (Shah 2001, 195–196). James Massey contends that it is the Dalit Panthers, a militant arm of the Dalit movement that flourished in the early 1970s, who “gave currency to the term ‘dalit’ as a constant reminder of their age-old oppression, denoting both their state of deprivation and the people who are oppressed” (Massey 1991, 9).

2. the problem of premchand 1. Though none of these stories have been so skewered in the Dalit counterpublic as “Kafan,” Ajay Navaria takes on the task of reimagining them all by investing each of the Dalit characters from these stories with more anger, determination, and courage than Premchand in his single story “Uttar kathā,” translated into English by this author and published as “Hello, Premchand!” in Unclaimed Terrain: Stories by Ajay Navaria (Delhi: Navayana, 2013). 2. This translation of “The Shroud” was provided by Frances Pritchett on her website hosted by Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/ pritchett/00urdu/kafan/index.html 3. Sisir Kumar Das, ‪A History of Indian Literature 1911–1956‬: ‪Struggle for Freedom: Triumph and Tragedy‬ (Delhi: Sāhitya Akādmī, 1995), 319. 4. OUP, ed. The Oxford India Premchand, with an Introduction by Francesca Orsini (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), xxvi. 5. Geetanjali Pandey, Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Premchand (Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 112–124. 6. Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, “Representing the Underdogs: Dalits in the Literature of Premchand,” Studies in History 18 (February 2002): 71. 7. Upadhyay, “Representing the Underdogs,” 79. 8. Pandey, Between Two Worlds, 123. 9. Sohanpal Sumanakshar, “‘Raṅgbhūmi’ ko ‘Jaṅgbhūmi’ banāne ke liye zimmedār kaun?” Apekṣā (January–March 2005): 18. Translation mine. 10. Quoted in Harlow, Resistance Literature, 29. 11. Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy (Kolkata: Samya, 1996), 33–34. 12. Meera Nanda,.“Are We Post-Hindu Yet?” Himal 23, no. 5 (May 2010). 13. Limbale, Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, 1, 32. 14. Omprakash Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya Kā Saundaryashāstra (Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2001): 28–29. Translation mine. 15. According to Dalit author and critic Sheoraj Singh “Bechain,” “What one expects to find in the consciousness of a Dalit character with respect to the caste system is rage, anger with respect to inequality—but these are missing in Premchand’s characters. Any character who lives in anticipation of kindness, sympathy, generosity, and pity, cannot be a Dalit. He must also have a consciousness of his rights.” Quoted in Alok Rai, “Poetic and Social Justice: Some Reflections on the Premchand-Dalit Controversy” in Justice: Political, Social, Juridical, ed. Rajeev Bhargava, Michael Dusche, and Helmut Reifeld (New Delhi: Sage, 2008), 164.

91880 2. the problem of premchand 16. Valmiki, “Premchand: Sandarbh Dalit Vimarsh,” Tīsrā Pakṣ, 14–15 (2004): 28. Translation mine. 17. Ibid. Translation mine. 18. Passed on September 24, 1932, the Pune Pact instituted reserved seats for Untouchables within the general electorate. This is still widely regarded in the Dalit community as a significant defeat for Ambedkar, who had advocated for separate electorates for Untouchables, at the hands of Gandhi and the casteist interests of the Congress Party. 19. Valmiki, “Premchand: Sandarbh Dalit Vimarsh,” 28. Translation mine. 20. Quoted in Valmiki, “Premchand: Sandarbh Dalit Vimarsh,” 28. Translation and emphasis mine. 21. Anita Bharti, “‘Kafan’ aur Dalit Strī-Vimarsh,” Sandhān (2004): 210. Translation mine. 22. Ibid. Translation mine. 23. Mohammad Azhar Dherivala, “‘Ṭhakūr kā kuāṁ’: Dalit chetnā kā dastāvez,” Apekṣā (2004): 16. Translation mine. 24. Jaiprakash Kardam, “Sāhitya meṁ doglāpan nahīṁ chalegā,” Apekṣā (2005): 88. Translation mine. 25. Anita Bharti, “Raṅgbhūmi-dahan aur asmitā kā prashn,” Apekṣā (January–March 2005): 63. Translation mine. 26. This is a reference to Amrit Rai’s biography of Premchand, whose title, in English, translates to “Soldier of the Pen.” 27. Ish Ganganiya, “‘Raṅgbhūmi’, Gandhi, aur Ambedkarvādī-vimarsh,” Apekṣā (2005): 25. Translation mine. 28. This dialectic is considered in significantly more detail in chapter 7. 29. Dharamveer, Premchand: Sāmant Kā Munshi (Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2005): 17. Translation mine. 30. Dharamveer, Premchand, 29. Translation mine. 31. Vasanth Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran. “Caste and Gender: Understanding the Dynamics of Power and Violence” in Gender and Caste, ed. Anupama Rao (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003): 60–63. 32. “Background Information on Dalit Women in India”—Right Livelihood Award, 2006. http://www.rightlivelihood.org/manorama_publications.html 33. Anita Bharti, “Anyāy ke khilāf—laṛnā hī naitiktā hai,” Yuddhrat Ām ĀdmĪ 87 (special issue 2007): 17. Translation mine. 34. Ibid. Translation mine. 35. Pushpa Vivek, “Dalit striyāṁ sabak sikhāne kā hauslā rakhtī haiṁ,” Yuddhrat Ām ĀdmĪ 87 (special issue 2007): 41. Translation mine. 36. Dharamveer, Premchand, 16. Translation mine. 37. Ibid. Translation mine. 38. Vimal Thorat, “Manusmṛti kā tālibānī vistār,” Yuddhrat Ām ĀdmĪ 87 (special issue 2007): 12–15. 39. Bharti, “Anyāy ke khilāf,” 17. Translation mine. 40. Amrit Rai, Premchand: His Life and Times, trans. Harish Trivedi with an introduction by Alok Rai (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). 41. Rai, Premchand, vii-viii.

3. hIndI dalIt lIter ary crItIcIsm 91890

3. hIndI dalIt lIterary crItIcIsm 1. Toral Gajarawala describes this oppositional dialectical engagement of Dalit literature with non-Dalit literature as an “antigenealogy” (2013, 4). 2. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987): 28. 3. Harlow, Resistance Literature, 22. 4. The book is listed as “forthcoming” in the Indian Sahitya Akademi’s catalog. The text I consult here is a manuscript given to me by Mohandas Naimishray in 2005. 5. Omprakash Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya kā Saundaryashāstra (Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2001), 15. 6. Sharankumar Limbale., Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies, and Considerations, trans. Alok Mukherjee (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), 35. 7. Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya, 24. Translation mine. 8. Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya, 30. Translation mine. 9. Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya, 31. Ram Chandra Shukla (1884–1941), also known respectfully as Acharya Shukla, is widely considered the first historian of Hindi literature from the medieval period to the modern. His most famous work is Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās (Varanasi: Kāshī Nāgarī Prachāriṇi Sabhā, 1929). 10. Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya, 50. 11. Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 330–63. 12. The Subaltern Studies Group is a group of scholars who emerged in the 1980s with a focus on narrating a colonial history (particularly of South Asia) from below. 13. For elaborations on this project, see Guha 1982 and Chatterjee 1989. 14. S. Anand, Touchable Tales (Chennai: Navayana, 2003), 17. 15. Spivak, “Subaltern Studies,” 342. 16. For a thorough description of the development of the term Dalit in Marathi and its various meanings depending on the political perspective of the speaker, see Zelliot (1998, 268–269). 17. Arun Prabha Mukherjee, “Introduction,” in Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xix. 18. Harijan means “person of God” and was Gandhi’s alternative to “untouchable”. 19. Spivak, Subaltern Studies, 342. 20. According to Gopal Guru, a Dalit Brahmin is “…a modernist Dalit who has developed a detached, disengaged view of his/her community and turned his/her back on it” (2000, 127). 21. Arjun Dangle, ed., Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1992), 249–250. 22. Ibid., 250. 23. See Basu 2002. 24. This remains a common sentiment even among contemporary Hindi Dalit authors with whom I have spoken over the years. 25. Two special issues of the Hindi Dalit literary magazine Apekṣā are devoted to the two major bhakti poets held in especially high regard by contemporary Dalit writers:

91900 3. hIndI dalIt lIter ary crItIcIsm

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

Kabir and Ravidas. See Tej Singh, Apekṣā: Kabīr par Kendrit. 2 (January–March 2003) and Apekṣā: Sant Ravidās par Kendrit. 3 (April–June 2003). See also Dharmavir 1997. See Hawley 2005, 23. See B. R. Ambedkar, “Annihilation of Caste,” in The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar, ed. Valerian Rodrigues (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Also see Hawley (2005, 276) and Naimishray, forthcoming, 21. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 21. See Bharti 2003, 11–16; See also Purushottam Agrawal, “In Search of Ramanand: The Guru of Kabir and Others,” in Ishita Banerjee-Dube and Saurabh Dube, eds., Ancient to Modern: Religion, Power, and Community in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). Namwar Singh, “Dalit Sāhitya-Paramparā meṁ Kabīr,” Apekṣā 2 (2003): 24. Badri Narayan and A. R. Misra, eds., Multiple Marginalities: An Anthology of Identified Dalit Writings (Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 9. Tej Singh, “Dalit punarjāgran aur Ravidās,” Apekṣā 3 (2003): 2–8. Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 201–202. Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution, 203. Badri Narayan and A. R. Misra, eds., Multiple Marginalities: An Anthology of Identified Dalit Writings (Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 18. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 47, 50. According to Jaffrelot, this poem was not read publicly until 1927, the same year that Ambedkar burned the Manusmṛti at Mahad (Jaffrelot 2003, 203). Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 58. In a similar vein, it has been suggested that Premchand may have been inspired to write his short story “Ṭhākur kā Kuāṁ” (“The Thakur’s Well”) by the 1914 Bhojpuri poem “Acchūt kī Shikāyat” (“An Untouchable’s Complaint”) by north Indian poet Hira Dom (Pandey 2003). Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 52. Tej Singh, “Jankavi Bīhārī Lāl Harit,” Apekṣā 9 (2004): 5–6. Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution, 203–204. Naimishray; Navaria 2004; Narayan and Mishra 2004; Pandey 2003. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 46. Narayan and Mishra, Multiple Marginalities, 16. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 45–47. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 16. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 60. Feminist Dalit writer Anita Bharti, formerly of the Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh and Center for Alternative Dalit Media (CADAM), has spearheaded this effort to recover Harit’s work and reestablish the significance of his legacy in contemporary Hindi Dalit literary histories. See Bharti 2004: 91–95. Tej Singh, “Jankavi Bīhārī Lāl Harit,” Apekṣā 9 (2004): 4. Ish Kumar Ganganiya, “Ambedkarvādī Rāh ke Musāfir—Jankavi Bīhārī Lāl Harit,” Apekṣā 9 (2004): 67–73. Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya, 29. See Chandra Bahn Prasad, Dalit Diary, 1999–2003: Reflections on Apartheid in India (Chennai: Navayana, 2004).

4. Good dalIts and bad br ahmIns 91910

4. Good dalIts and bad brahmIns 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

See Dangle 1992; Dhasal 2006. Besides the description of these networks in part I, also see Narayan 2008. For details on the processes of promoting Dalit literature see Narayan 2008. Toral Gajarawala (2013) and Debjani Ganguly (2009) have recently offered important correctives to the dearth of literary treatment of Dalit literature. However, to reiterate a passage quoted in chapter 1: “the reality of Dalit literature is distinct, and so is the language of this reality. It is the uncouth-impolite language of Dalits. It is the spoken language of Dalits. This language does not recognize cultivated gestures and grammar. Standard language has a class. Dalit writers have rejected the class of this standard language. Dalit writers have rejected [the] validation of standard language by the cultured classes because it is arrogant.” Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, trans. Alok Mukherjee (Orient Longman, 2004), 33. Joseph Macwan, The Stepchild (Angaliyat), trans. Rita Kothari (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), xviii. Digish Mehta, “Differing Contexts: The Theme of Oppression in Indian Literatures,” New Comparison, no. 7 (1989): 79–87. Arun Mukherjee, “The Emergence of Dalit Writing,” The Toronto Review (1998): 34. Arun Prabha Mukherjee, “Introduction,” in Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xl. Mukherjee, “Introduction,” xliv. On Ambedkar, see Jondhale and Beltz 2004, Omvedt 2004, Rodrigues 2002, and Zelliot 1996. The clearest articulation of these ideas can be found in his 1936 essay, “The Annihilation of Caste” (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1979). A fully annotated version of the essay, hosted by Columbia University, can be found here: http:// ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/index.html. Valerian Rodrigues, ed., The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 27. Shalini Ramachandran, “‘Poisoned Bread’: Protest in Dalit Short Stories,” in Race and Class 45, no. 4 (2004): 30. For more details on the literary significance of Premchand, see Orsini 2004. On the Progressive Writers Association, see Gopal 2005. Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (London: Routledge, 2005), 96. Gopal, Literary Radicalism, 118. See Gajarawala 2013 for a more thorough comparison of Dalit realism to other traditions of realist literary representation in South Asian literature. Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (Raniket: Permanent Black and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 491. Ajay Navaria, “Dalit sāhitya kā vigat aur vartamān,” Prārambh (Dalit Sāhitya Visheshank) 1, no. 3 (2004): 44.

91920 4. Good dalIts and bad br ahmIns 21. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 22. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 20. 23. The corrupt and greedy moneylender has long figured in Indian literature and film as representative of the entrenched nature of the rural Indian feudalism of the past. For examples, see Premchand’s 1936 novel Godān (The Gift of a Cow) and Mehboob Khan’s classic 1957 film, Mother India. 24. Omprakash Valmiki, “Pacchīs Chaukā Ḍeṛh Sau,” in Salām (Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2000), 80. This and all other translated passages from the two stories discussed in this chapter are my own. 25. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 81. 26. Pam Morris, “Realism,” in The New Critical Idiom, ed. John Drakakis (New York: Routledge, 2003), 103–4. 27. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 78. 28. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 79–80. 29. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 35. 30. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 78. 31. Compare this, for example, with the bare wrists, bereft of bangles, signifying the widow Mangali’s vulnerability to the designs of an upper-caste labor boss, depicted in a short story by Kusum Meghwal, “Mangali” (“Viyogi,” 1997), and with Siddharth’s mobile phone in the story “Upmahādvīp” (“Subcontinent”) by Ajay Navaria (2006), to which he holds tight as a metonymic representation of his middle-class status in urban Delhi. These two stories are discussed in some detail in chapters 7 and 6, respectively. 32. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 78. 33. Rosie Thomas, “Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality in Hindi Film,” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 159–160. 34. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 79. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. There is a predominance in Dalit stories of descriptions of violence on the body serving as metaphors for emotional reactions. I want to thank Allison Busch for this insight. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 35. 40. Jaiprakash Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” in Talāsh (Delhi: Vikram Prakashan, 2005), 128–131. 41. Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” 129. 42. Ibid. 43. Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” 130. 44. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 36. 45. Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” 129–130. 46. Kathryn Hansen has written about the use of rural dialects to localize Hindi narration in the work of Pharnishwarnath Renu. See Kathryn Hansen, “Renu’s Regionalism: Language and Form,” Journal of Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (1981). 47. Fernando Franco, Jyotsna Macwan, and Suguna Ramanathan, The Silken Swing: The Cultural Universe of Dalit Women (Calcutta: Stree, 2000), 130.

5. dIalect and dIaloGue In the marGIns 91930 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” 131. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 35. Quoted in Morris, “Realism,” 105–6. Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” 131. Ibid. Charles E. May, “Reality in the Modern Short Story,” Style 27, no. 3 (1993): 372. May, “Reality,” 373.

5. dIalect and dIaloGue In the marGIns 1. In 2013, Ajay Navaria was again invited to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival, this time in recognition of his newly translated short story collection, Unclaimed Terrain: Stories by Ajay Navaria, translated by Laura Brueck (Delhi: Navayana 2013). 2. Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies, and Considerations, trans. Alok Mukherjee, Modern Indian Writing in Translation. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004): 33. 3. Namdeo Dhasal, Poet of the Underworld: Poems 1972–2006, selected, introduced, and translated by Dilip Chitre (Delhi: Navayana, 2007): 12. 4. Dhasal, Poet of the Underworld, 100. 5. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998): 288. 6. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 290. 7. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 291. 8. Arun Kamble, “Which Language Should I Speak?” in Arjun Dangle, ed., Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 1992): 54. 9. Kathryn Hansen, “Renu’s Regionalism: Language and Form,” The Journal of Asian Studies 40:2 (1981): 276. 10. Hansen, “Renu’s Regionalism,” 277–278. 11. Surajpal Chauhan, “Tillu kā Potā,” in Hari Kab Āyegā? (Delhi: Samayik Prakashan, 1999): 24–26. 12. Chauhan, “Tillu kā Potā,” 25. 13. Ibid. This and all other translations from the stories discussed in this chapter are my own. 14. Chauhan, “Tillu kā Potā,” 26. 15. Omprakash Valmiki, “Salām” in Salām (Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2000): 10. 16. Valmiki, “Salām,” 11. 17. Ibid. 18. Valmiki, “Salām,” 12. 19. Naresh K. Jain, who has recently translated several of Valmiki’s stories, including “Salām,” in a collection called Amma and Other Stories (Delhi: Manohar, 2008) chooses to render the dialectal marking of the shopkeeper’s speech by altering the spellings of some English words, such as “taim” for time, and “baaman” for Brahmin. 20. Valmiki, “Salām,” 13.

91940 5. dIalect and dIaloGue In the marGIns 21. Omprakash Valmiki, “Pacchīs Chaukā Deṛh Sau,” in Salām (Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2000): 79. 22. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 84. 23. Susheela Thakbhaure, “Badlā” in Saṅgharsh (Nagpur, Sharad Prakāshan, 2006): 51–63. 24. Thakbhaure, “Badlā,” 56. 25. Thakbhaure, “Badlā,” 60. 26. Thakbhaure, “Badlā,” 63. 27. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 295. Emphasis mine. 28. Ajay Navaria, “Upmāhadvīp,” Hans 19, no. 1 (August 2004): 173–78. 29. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 174. All words that appear in English in the Hindi original are italicized in the translation. 30. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 299. 31. Ajay Navaria, “Yes Sir” in Yes Sir (New Delhi: Samayik Prakashan, 2012): 181–192. 32. Navaria, “Yes Sir,” 182.

6. alIenatIon and loss In the dalIt experIence of modernIty 1. Ajay Navaria, “Bali,” Kathādesh (July 2004): 52–59. 2. Udhar Ke Log (The People Over There) (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2008); Paṭkathā aur Anya Kahāniyāṁ, (Patkatha and Other Stories) (Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2006) and Yes Sir (New Delhi: Samayik Prakashan, 2012). Several stories from both collections were translated and published in the collection Unclaimed Terrain, trans. Laura Brueck (Delhi: Navayana, 2013). Navaria explains the meaning of paṭkathā as a “script of three generations of a Dalit family in India” (e-mail correspondence, July 6, 2012). 3. “Sattā Vimarsh Aur Dalit,” Haṁs (special issue) 19, no. 1 (2004), and “Nayī Nazar kī Nayīṁ Nazariyāṁ,” Haṁs (Special Issue) 24, no. 1 (2009). 4. Navaria, Paṭkathā, 5. This and all other quoted passages in this chapter are my own translations. 5. Navaria, Paṭkathā, 6. 6. According to Navaria, “Es Dhamm Sanantano” is a Buddhist phrase in Pali that means “This is eternal truth.” Later, Hindus articulated it as sanātan dharm. 7. William Monroe, Power to Hurt: Virtues of Alienation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 121. 8. M. S. S. Pandian, “One Step Outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and Public Sphere,” Economic and Political Weekly (May 4, 2002): 1738. 9. Aditya Nigam, “Secularism, Modernity, Nation: Epistemology of the Dalit Critique,” Economic and Political Weekly (November 25, 2000): 4256–4268. 10. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 130. 11. Gopal Guru, “Dalits in Pursuit of Modernity,” in India: Another Millennium? ed. Romila Thapar (New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 2000), 123.

6. alIenatIon and loss In the dalIt experIence 91950 12. Shalini Ramachandran, “‘Poisoned Bread’: Protest in Dalit Short Stories,” Race and Class 45, no. 4 (2004): 31. 13. S. Anand, “Sanskrit, English, and Dalits,” Economic and Political Weekly (July 24 1999): 2055. 14. For example, Guru writes of the colonial period, “The imperialists and the native capitalists used the purity-pollution ideology to ghettoize the Dalit workers in Dalit chawls, and to restrict them to manual jobs in industry, or those connected to sanitation. Similarly, upper-caste workers denied Dalit workers access to certain sections of the mill to jobs offered better payment. The interests of both the uppercaste workers and the native capitalists put modernity/tradition in a symbiotic relationship, leading to untouchability being reproduced both in the factories and in the working class localities” (2000, 124). 15. See also an analysis of Bagul’s text and its metaphorical significance as the story of a Dalit “in search of a new city” in Abhay Kumar Dube, “Nāye Shahar kī Talāsh,” in Dube, ed., Ādhuniktā ke Āīne meṁ Dalit (Delhi: CSDS/Vani Prakashan, 2002). 16. S. P. Punalekar, “Dalit Literature and Dalit Identity,” in Dalit Identity and Politics, ed. Ghyanshyam Shah (Delhi: Sage, 2001). 17. Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi: Manohar, 1996). 18. Quoted in Zelliot, Untouchable to Dalit, 277. 19. Vidyut Bhagwat, “Bombay in Dalit Literature,” in Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, ed. Sujata and Alice Thorner Patel (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1995), 115. 20. Rita Kothari, “Short Story in Gujarati Dalit Literature,” Economic and Political Weekly (November 10 2001): 4311. 21. Ibid. 22. Ajay Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” Haṁs 19, 1 (August 2004): 174. This translation and those of all other excerpts of the stories discussed in this chapter are my own. 23. This particular scene is considered in detail in the following chapter, which discusses literary representations of rape in Dalit narratives. 24. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 177. 25. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 174. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Monroe, Power to Hurt, 5. 29. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 177. 30. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 1. 31. Ashis Nandy, An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 12. 32. Guru, “Dalits in Pursuit,” 125. 33. Williams, The Country and the City, 46. 34. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 173. 35. Navaria, “Bali,” 21. 36. Navaria, “Bali,” 23. 37. Navaria,“Bali,” 18–35. 38. Navaria,“Bali,” 22.

91960 6. alIenatIon and loss In the dalIt experIence 39. Sukeshi Kamra, Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End of the Raj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002), 182. 40. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 174. 41. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 176. 42. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 110. 43. Shalini Ramachandran, “‘Poisoned Bread’: Protest in Dalit Short Stories,” Race and Class 45, 4 (2004): 36, 44. Ajay Navaria, “Es dhamm sanantano,” Haṁs, December 2003 (55–58). 45. Navaria, “Es dhamm sanantano,” 55. 46. Ibid. 47. Navaria, “Es dhamm sanantano,” 56. 48. Ibid. 49. Navaria, “Es dhamm sanantano,” 57. 50. Ibid. 51. Aditya Nigam, “Secularism, Modernity, Nation: Epistemology of the Dalit Critique,” Economic and Political Weekly (November 25, 2000): 4258. 52. Quoted in Gail Omvedt, Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India (New Delhi: Viking, 2004), 1. 53. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004): 9. 54. Ibid. 55. David Harvey has suggested, “The development of rational forms of social organization and rational modes of thought promised liberation from the irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition, release from the arbitrary use of power as well as from the dark side of our own human natures” (1989, 12). 56. Nigam, “Secularism, Modernity, Nation,” 4262. 57. Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 131. 58. Monroe, Power to Hurt, 64–65. 59. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 30. 60. Nigam, “Secularism, Modernity, Nation,” 4258. 61. Monroe, Power to Hurt, 68.

7. re-scrIptInG rape 1. As Priyamvada Gopal has argued about Shekhar Kapur’s 1994 film Bandit Queen in “Of Victims and Vigilantes,” in Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India, ed. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999): 293–331. 2. Sharmila Rege, “A Dalit Feminist Standpoint,” Seminar, no. 471 (1998): 47–52. 3. Anupama Rao, ed. Gender and Caste. Vol. 1, Issues in Contemorary Indian Feminism (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003): 2. 4. Vasanth Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran, “Caste and Gender: Understanding the Dynamics of Power and Violence,” in Gender and Caste, ed. Anupama Rao (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003), 60–63.

7. re-scrIptInG r ape 91970 5. Sharmila Rege, “Caste and Gender: The Violence Against Women in India,” in Dalit Women in India: Issues and Perspectives, ed. Prahlad Jogdand (New Delhi: Gyan, 1995), 29–30. 6. Quoted in a document (“Background Information on Dalit Women in India”) prepared and presented by Ruth Manorama upon her receipt of the Right Livelihood Award in 2006 in Stockholm, Sweden (http://www.rightlivelihood.org/ fileadmin/Files/PDF/Literature_Recipients/Manorama/Background_Manorama. pdf). Emphasis mine. 7. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1993), 78. 8. Anupama Rao, Gender and Caste, 229. 9. Anupama Rao, The Caste Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 10. Rao, The Caste Question, 221–222. 11. Rao, The Caste Question, 229. 12. Rao, The Caste Question, 222, 234. 13. Rao, The Caste Question, 236. 14. Anand Teltumbde, Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (Delhi: Navayana, 2009). 15. Teltumbde, Khairlanji, 31. 16. Teltumbde, Khairlanji, 46–47, 61. 17. On September 24, 2008, a judicial verdict was passed that pronounced a death sentence for six people involved in the attack and a life term for two more. Although this was heralded as an historic verdict in defense of a crime against Dalits, the judge adjudicating the case refused to file it under the Prevention of Atrocities Act (1989), thus erasing its “meaning” as a caste-based crime. According to S. Anand, “in treating it as just another criminal act and by offering death for death, the judgment decontextualises one of the most horrific caste crimes in postindependence India, and gives us the vicarious pleasure of avenging the brutal killing of the Bhotmanges. By making many feel that those convicted ‘deserve to be hanged’, the verdict manages to successfully mask caste realities. It reduces both the crime and the punishment to abstract ‘human rage’ stripped of all social and political underpinnings” (The Hindu, Oct. 5, 2008) 18. Teltumbde, Khairlanji, 97–98. This is, of course, brought into further relief by the public uproar surrounding the gang-rape of a young woman on December 16, 2012, in Delhi. In part because the normative caste and class structure of the attack was reversed, the brutal case galvanized tens of thousands of women in Delhi to take to the streets in protest. According to Shefali Chandra, quoted in the International Business Times on January 5, 2013 (“Delhi Gang-Rape Protests: What About the Sex Crimes Against Untouchable Women?” by Palash R. Ghosh): “Their mobility, and presence as laborers, has signaled sexual availability,” she said. “Moreover, caste hierarchies themselves have always relied on staking distinctions between the women whose sexuality was secured (the upper-caste, chaste, wife/widow) on the one hand, and the women who were sexually available on the other. The entire edifice of caste required this.” 19. Statistics reported in “The situation of Dalit women—formerly known as untouchables/scheduled castes,” presented before the Committee on Development of the European Parliament by Ruth Manorama, National Convenor of the National

91980 7. re-scrIptInG r ape

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Federation of Dalit Women on December 18, 2006 (http://www.europarl.europa. eu/comparl/deve/meetings_hr/20061218/manorama.pdf). Quoted in a Human Rights Watch report: “Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s ‘Untouchables’” (March 1999), http://www.hrw.org/en/node/24487. Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Butler and Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992): 391. Marcus, “Fighting Bodies,” 392–393. Nancy L. Paxton explores rape as “the master trope of colonial discourse” from both the epistemic level of Orientalist textual domination of the colony and also the common narrative trope in the post-1857 British novel of the British colonial woman raped by the native “Caliban.” In her book, Paxton considers “all the scripts related to rape that were in wide circulation between 1830 and 1947 to account for the dominance, after 1857, of the particular rape script of white women threatened with rape by Indian men” (Paxton, 15). Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined, 64. Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined, 72. In addition to Gopal 2004, see Shohini Ghosh, “Deviant Pleasures and Disorderly Women: The Representation of the Female Outlaw in Bandit Queen and ‘Anjaam,’” in Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains, ed. Ratna Kapur (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996); Madhu Kishwar, “The Bandit Queen” Manushi (September–October 1994): 34–37; and Arundhati Roy, “The Great Indian Rape Trick,” Sunday (August 26–September 3, 1994) 58–64. Indira Jaisingh recounts Roy’s and her interactions with Phoolan after the film’s release on July 26, 2001 (http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/jul/26spec.htm). Gopal, “Of Victims and Vigilantes,” 297–298. Gopal, “Of Victims and Vigilantes,” 307–308. Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women, 77. Quoted in Rao, Gender and Caste, 230. Mohandas Naimishray, “Apnā Gāṁ,” in Ãwāzeṁ (Delhi: Samta Prakashan, 1998): 31–63. Naimishray, “Apnā Gāṁ,” 31. This and all other translations of passages from the stories discussed in this chapter are my own. Ibid. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 56. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 61. Naimishray, “Apnā Gāṁ,” 32. Naimishray, “Apnā Gāṁ,” 33. Ibid. Navaria, Upmahādvīp, 176. For consideration of the confluence of gender, caste, and race in the NFDW’s participation in the 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban, see Kannabiran (2006), Thorat (2004), and Vishweswaran (2010). Kusum Meghwal, “Mangali.” In Dalit Mahilā Kathākāroṁ kī Charchit Kahāniyāṁ, ed. Kusum Viyogi (Delhi: Sāhitya Nidhi, 1997), 34. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, “Real and Imagined Goddesses: A Debate,” in Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen M. Erndl (New York University Press, 2000), 269.

conclusIon 91990 44. Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy (Kolkata: Samya, 1999), 73. 45. Badri Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity, and politics (Calcutta: Sage, 2006), 28. 46. Sunder Rajan, “Real and Imagined Goddesses,” 270, 272. 47. Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu, 96–97. 48. In her study of narratives of shaktī in Rajasthan, “Gender, Violence, and Power: Rajasthani Stories of Shakti,” in Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories, ed. Nita Kumar (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 26–48, Ann Grodzins Gold suggests the seamless association of femininity and power. Gold relates several versions of popular Rajasthani tellings of Shakti tales in which the goddess emasculates the men around her through acts of literal or physical castration. Gold suggests of Indian goddess tales, “They unite positive and negative evaluations of female power as creative and destructive. Particularly vivid is the way each story differently confounds prescriptions for female modesty, confinement, and deference according to which most rural North Indian women live their lives” (1994, 42). 49. Kusum Meghwal, “Aṅgārā,” in Dalit Kahānī Sanchayan, ed. Ramnika Gupta (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2003), 144. 50. Meghwal, “Aṅgārā,” 145. 51. According to Wendy Hesford’s reading of American women’s testimonials of rape, “The realist narrative purportedly captures a historical truth, whereas the fantasy presumably reveals a psychological truth. The presumption informing both narratives, however, is that by rendering bodily pain and trauma tellable the survivor can undo the grasp of the perpetrator and reestablish the social dimension of the self lost in the midst of violation. The revenge fantasy could be seen as the equivalent of the talking cure—a speech act, which, like the unconscious testimony of a dream presumably gives access to a psychic reality, in this case the trauma of rape” (194). See Wendy Hesford, “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation,” College English 62, no. 2 (1999): 192–221.

conclusIon 1. A notable exception to this general state of affairs is the high public profile of the Tamil woman writer Bama. Three of her Tamil books (Karukku, Macmillan, 2001; Sangati, Oxford University Press, 2005; Harum-Scarum Saar and Other Stories, Women Unlimited, 2007) have been translated into English to wide national and international recognition. 2. Toral Jatin Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions, Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 200. 3. Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions, 201.

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INDex

abuse. See rape; rape narratives; sexual abuse and violence, against Dalit women Achhutanand, Swami, 64, 71–73; poetry of, 72 “Achhūt kī Shikāyat” (“An Untouchable’s Complaint”) (Dom), 73 Achhūtoṁ kā Paigambar (Messenger of the Untouchables), 74–75 Ādi-Hindu Society, 71 aesthetic of revulsion. See bibhatsa rasa Aesthetics of Dalit Literature (Valmiki), 63 Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature (Limbale), 8 affiliative secular order, 61 AIPWA. See All India Progressive Writers Association alienation and loss, in Dalit literature: as critique of modernity, 127–28, 152; definition of, 152; journey from village to city and, 136–43; in Navaria’s works, 122, 125–27; in urban spaces, 128–31 All India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA), 23 Ambedkar, B. R., 24, 65, 79, 135, 182n10; casteless society for, 86; conversion to Buddhism, 83; as counterpublic symbol, 184n15; literature as social activism for, 79; modernity for, 150; narrative of Dalit history, 150–51; public response to works of, 51; rejection of Hinduism, 83

Anand, Mulk Raj, 11 Anand, S., 10–11, 67, 129, 197n17 “Aṅgārā” (Meghwal), 174–76 anti-genealogy, 189n1 Apekṣā, 33, 46, 75, 179 Art and Social Life (Plekhanov), 135 Atishudras, as caste, 81 authenticity: of Dalit identity, 2; in Hindi Dalit literature, 10–11, 32, 48 Baby Kamble, 169 “Badbū” (Chauhan), 37–38 “Badlā” (“Revenge”) (Thakbhaure), 113–16 Bagul, Baburao, 129–30 Bakhtin, M. M., 100; analysis of prose, 102; on social stratification, 102 Bama, 169, 199n1 The Bandit Queen, 161 Bazaar Hindustani, 104–5 BDSA. See Bharatiya Dalit Sahitya Akademi Bearing Witness (Kamra), 143 Bhagwat, Vidyut, 130 bhakti poets, 64, 70–71; jankavi, 74–75; renaissance of, 71. See also Achhutanand, Swami; Achhūtoṁ kā Paigambar; Harit, Biharilal; Kabir; Ravidas Bharatiya Dalit Sahitya Akademi (Indian Dalit Literary Academy, BDSA), 1, 23– 24, 26–32; awards by, 28; founding of, 27; as microcosm of counterpublic, 29; as public group, 27; public response to Raṅgbhūmi, 1–3, 23, 53

92120 index Bharti, Anita, 34, 39, 51, 52–53, 190n49; Dharamveer condemnation of, 58; response to sexual violence in Dalit literature, 57; violence as marker of womanhood, 58–59 Bharti, Kanwal, 70, 74 bibhatsa rasa (aesthetic of revulsion), 101 Brahmin. See Dalit Brahmin Brooks, Peter, 89 Buddhism: Ambedkar’s conversion to, 83; resurgence of, 70 CADAM. See Center for Alternative Dalit Media Calhoun, Craig, 25 caste: Atishudras, 81; Chamars, 181n4; Dalit chetnā, 49; Dalit identity and, 3; in Dalit literature, 121, 126–27; DLS and, 39; historical political influence of, 181n2; through language, in Dalit literature, 121; manhood of, 155; as mediator of oppression, 56; political representation and, 151; in rape narratives, 161; scheduled, 42; Shudras, 81; untouchables as, 6, 13, 45 caste atrocity, 157 The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Rao), 6, 156–57 Center for Alternative Dalit Media (CADAM), 190n49 Chamar caste, 181n4 Chatterjee, Partha, 24, 150 Chauhan, Surajpal, 14, 37–38, 104; use of speech by, 105–7 Chitre, Dilip, 101 colonialism, rape and, 198n23 consciousness. See Dalit chetnā; jan-chetnā counterpublics: alternative categories of, 26; Ambedkar as symbol, 184n15; BDSA as, 29; Dalit chetnā and, 52; Hindi Dalit literature as, 4, 30–31, 80; liberal, 52; Premchand and, 59. See also Dalit identity The Country and the City (Williams), 137 “Cruelty” (Chitre), 101 cultural performance, 182n8

Dabral, Manglesh, 34 Dalit bourgeoisie, 76 Dalit Brahmin, 68–69, 84–86; “saṁskārit,” 148 Dalit chetnā (Dalit consciousness), 46–54; as aesthetic component, 65; caste and class-related oppression, 49; Dalit identity and, 68; definition of, 65; dialectical speech and, 110–16, 121; essentialism and, 66–69, 76; foundations of, 48–49; language and, 121; liberal counterpublics and, 52; in literary criticism, 61–66; as mode of deconstruction, 65, 75–76; origins of, 61; renunciation of Hindu identity, 73; stereotypes of, 47; task of, 68 The Dalit Class in Hindi Novels (Megwhal), 170 Dalit identity: authenticity of, 2; Brahmins and, 68–69, 84–86; caste terminology for, 3; categorization of, 68; Chamars caste, 181n4; chetnā and, 68; through Dalit literature, 84; exclusion from mainstream society, 32; good Dalits, 84–86; historical development of, 181n6; in “Kafan,” 55; meaning of, 186n44; moral integrity as part of, 84–85; oppression of women and, 41; personhood and, 14; politicization of, 6; purity-pollution ideology and, 195n14; reconstruction of, in resistance literature, 63; re-imagining of, by Navaria, 187n1; as shared, 28; in urban spaces, 128–31, 136–43. See also Dalit literature; sexual abuse and violence, against Dalit women; untouchables, as caste Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh (Dalit Writers Forum, DLS), 24, 32–40; caste issues and, 39; founding of, 34; gender makeup in, 39; goals of, 34; mission of, 33; purpose of, 33–34, 36 Dalit literature: anti-genealogical engagement with, 189n1; authenticity of, 10–11, 32; authentic realism in, 48; caste in, 121, 126–27; compared to mainstream literature, 8; as

index 92130 counterpublic, 4, 30–31, 80; critique of modernity in, 127–28, 149–52; as cultural performance, 3–4; Dalit identity through, 84; Dalit Sāhitya, 82, 180; in different languages, 79; female writers in, 39; first-person narration in, 105; foundation of aesthetic, 38; goddess tropes in, 173; good Dalit and bad Brahmin as theme, 84–99; Gujarati, 130; heterogeneity in, 33; heteroglossia in, 105, 116–20; in Hindi, 79, 82, 84; history of, 64, 69–75; internationalization of, 182n11; interventions of, 5; Jaipur Literature Festival, 124, 193n1; life narratives, 6–7; literary theory for, 7–8; as literature of action, 64; mainstream acceptance of, 54; Marathi Dalit literature, 70, 79; meaning of, 5–15; melodramatic realism in, 84–86, 89, 91, 94–95; memory as theme, 143–49; moral universe in, 86, 92; narrative strategies in, 80–83; Navayana publishing house, 185n23; oppression themes in, 81; origins of, 63; personhood as theme in, 14; political imperatives of, 64; rape narratives in, 156–62; reclamation of, 64; recognition of, 100; rejection of standard language within, 101, 103–4; representations of reality in, 38; scope of, 9, 41; sexual abuse of Dalit women in, 57; social divisions within, 81–82; as social liberation, 62, 79; socio-political impact of, 8–9; standard language for, 8; in Tamil, 79; third-person narration in, 105; translation history for, into english, 5–6. See also alienation and loss, in Dalit literature; Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh; dialectical speech styles, in Dalit literature; Raṅgbhūmi; specific works Dalit Panthers, 68, 70; Dalit Panther Manifesto, 9; in Marathi Dalit literature, 129 Dalit Sāhitya, 82, 180 Dalit Sāhityā Akādemī, 170

Dalit women: access to, by uppercaste males, 156; agency of, 57; in Apekṣā, 33, 46, 75, 179; bodies of, as mute, 156; caste atrocity towards, 157; cinematic treatments of, 173; defamation of, by Dalit males, 51; goddess worship and, 173, 199n48; as impure, 156; lack of authority for, 157; oppression of, in Dalit culture, 41; as writers, in Hindi Dalit literature, 39. See also feminism, Dalit women and; rape; rape narratives; sexual abuse and violence, against Dalit women Dalit Writers Forum. See Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh Dalit Writing in Hindi (Naimishray), 63 Dangle, Arjun, 5, 10, 68–69, 128 Das, Kumar, 45 “Deliverance” (Premchand), 14 Devi, Bhanwari, 159 Devi, Phoolan, 161, 163 Dharamveer, 54–59, 70; condemnation of Bharti, 58; feminist response to, 56–57; on sexual exploitation of Dalit women, 55 Dhasal, Namdeo, 70, 101, 130 Dherivala, Mohammad Azhar, 52 dialectical speech styles, in Dalit literature: in Chauhan works, 105–7; Dalit chetnā and, 110–16, 121; in high Hindi, 126; rural, 192n46; in Thakbhaure works, 113–16; in “25 Fours are 150,” 110–16; in Valmiki works, 107–16 Dikshit, Sheila, 31 DLS. See Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh Dom, Hira, 64, 73–74; genealogical credentials for, 74 Dwivedi, Mahabir Prasad, 73 essentialism: Dalit chetnā and, 66–69, 76; strategic, 66–67 “eternal Law” (“Es Dhamm Sanantano”) (Navaria), 125, 145–49; fractured language in, 146; memory as theme in, 148–49; “saṁskārit” in, 148

92140 index feminism, Dalit women and: Dharamveer’s response to, 56–57; in Premchand: sāmant kā Munshi, 54–55; rape scripts, 160. See also Dalit women Fox, L. Chris, 11 Fraser, Nancy, 4, 26, 30 Gajarawala, Toral, 179–80, 182n12, 189n1, 191n4 Gandhi, Mohandas, 50–51 Ganganiya, Ish, 53–54 Ganguly, Debjani, 13–14, 191n4 gender: in DLS, 39; as mediator of oppression, 56, 155. See also Dalit women Gender and Caste (Rao), 155 goddess worship, 173, 199n48 The God of Small Things (Roy), 11, 67 Gold, Ann Grodzins, 199n48 Golpīṭha (Dhasal), 70, 130 Gopal, Priyamvada, 161 Guha, Ranajit, 68 Gujarati Dalit literature, 130 Gupta, Prakash Chandra, 23 Gupta, Ramnika, 32, 38–39 Gupta, Trisha, 9 Guru, Gopal, 127–29 Habermas, Jürgen, 24–26 Hansen, Kathryn, 104, 192n46 Harit, Biharilal, 74–75 Harlow, Barbara, 42, 61–63 Hauser, Gerard, 26, 28 Hesford, Wendy, 199n51 heteroglossia, 105; manipulation of, through prose fiction, 116–20 high Hindi, as language style, 126 Hindi, Dalit literature in, 79, 82, 84; aesthetic notions of speech, 126; Shukla as historian, 189n9 Hindī Dalit Sāhitya (Naimishray), 70 The Hindi Public Sphere (Orsini), 25–26 Hindu identity, Dalit chetnā and, 73 Hinduism, rejection of, 83 A History of Hindi Literature (Jindal), 23 identity. See Dalit identity Ilaiah, Kancha, 47, 173

Indian Dalit Literary Academy. See Bharatiya Dalit Sahitya Akademi Indian identity: in public sphere, 24–25; in secular India, 24 Indian Social Institute (ISI), 34 India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi (Sen), 161 institutional rape, 156 ISI. See Indian Social Institute Jaffrelot, Christophe, 71 Jaipur Literature Festival, 124, 193n1 Jaisingh, Indira, 161 Jameson, Frederic, 127, 152 jan-chetnā (mass consciousness), 34 jankavi (people’s poet), 74–75; definition of, 75 “January Night” (Premchand), 14 “Jevhā Mi Jāt Chorlī Hotī” (When I Had Concealed My Caste) (Bagul), 129–30 Jhadav, Narendra, 11 Jindal, K. P., 23 Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (Valmiki), 7, 13–14, 82 journey from village to city, as literary theme, 136–43; in “Sacrifice,” 138–143; as self-transformation metaphor, 136–37 Juṛte Dāyitvā (Meghwal), 170 Kabir, 64, 70–71, 184n15 “Kafan” (Premchand), 43–45, 54–55; Dalit identity in, 55 Kamble, Arun, 103 Kamra, Sukeshi, 143 Kannabiran, Kalpana, 155 Kannabiran, Vasanth, 155 Kapur, Shekhar, 161 Kardam, Jaiprakash, 34, 52, 82; literary strategies for, 80; “The Staff,” 80, 92–98 Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (Teltumbde), 158–59 “Khairlanji” massacre, 154 Khaṛī Bolī Hindī, 104 Kothari, Rita, 81, 130–31 Kumar, Shatrughan, 34 language, in literature: Bazaar Hindustani, 104–5; caste society and, 121; Dalit chetnā and, 121; diversity of, 100;

index 92150 in “eternal Law,” 146; through heteroglossia, 105, 116–20; high Hindi, 126; Khaṛī Bolī Hindī, 104; manipulation of, 80; multiple worldviews as influence on, 102; as oral universe, 104; rejection of, in Dalit literature, 101, 103–4; role in Marathi Dalit literature, 101; selective Englishes, 116–20; social stratification and, 102, 118; in “Subcontinent,” 133–34. See also Hindi, Dalit literature in; Marathi Dalit literature; Tamil Dalit literature Lāṭhī (“The Staff”) (Kardam), 80, 92–98; melodrama in, 94–95; metonymic interpretation in, 96–97; narrative strategy in, 96–97 life narratives, in Dalit literature, 6–7 Limbale, Sharankumar, 8, 10, 38, 48, 63, 101 literary criticism: as affiliative secular order, 61; Dalit chetnā in, 61–66; goals of, 61; history of, 61; resistance literature and, 62 literary theory, for Dalit literature, 7–8 Macwan, Joseph, 81 “Mangali” (Meghwal), 171–74, 192n31 Manorama, Ruth, 56, 156, 197n19 Manto, Sa’adat Hasan, 85 Manusmṛiti, 24, 184n3; public burning of, 51, 72 Marathi Dalit literature: Dalit Panthers, 129; role of language in, 79, 101; urban spaces in, 129–30 Marcus, Sharon, 160 mass consciousness. See jan-chetnā Meghwal, Kusum, 9, 155; “Angārā,” 174–76; “Mangali,” 171–74, 192n31; rape narratives, 170; response to sexual violence in Dalit literature, 57; revenge narratives, 174–76 Mehta, Digish, 10, 81 melodramatic realism, 84–86; in “The Staff,” 94–95; in “25 Fours are 150,” 89, 91 memory, as literary theme, 143–49; in “eternal Law,” 148–49; narrative, 143–44; in “Subcontinent,” 143–45; traumatic, 143–44

metonymy, in Dalit literature, 89, 96–97 Misra, A. R., 71 modernism, 152–53; definitions of, 152; modernity compared to, 152 modernity: alienation and loss as critique of, 127–28, 152; for Ambedkar, 150; in Dalit literature, 127–28, 149–52; in Navaria’s works, 128–29; Nigam critique of, 149–50 Monroe, William, 126; modernism for, 153 Mukherjee, Alok, 63–65 Mukherjee, Arun Prabha, 6, 81 Muktibodh, Sharatchandra, 10 Nāgphāni (Sonkar), 14 Naimishray, Mohandas, 50–51, 63–64; in Hindi Dalit literature, 70; “Our Village,” 163–69; reclamation of Dalit literature, 64 Nanda, Meera, 47 Nandy, Ashis, 137 Narayan, Badri, 71, 173 Naregal, Veena, 25 narration. See third-person narration narrative memory, as literary theme, 143–44 National Academy of Letters. See Sahitya Akademi National Council of educational Research and Training (NCERT), 1, 181n3 National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW), 155, 170 National Federation of Women, 56 Navaria, Ajay, 9, 13–14, 34, 35, 85, 100, 104; alienation and loss in works of, 122, 125–27; “eternal Law,” 125, 145–49; journey from village to city for, 136–43; literary history for, 123–24; literary influences of, 14; memory for, 143–49; modernity in works of, 128–29; narrative strategy of, 120; Paṭkathā and Other Stories, 124; reimagining of Dalit identity, 187n1; “Sacrifice,” 122, 125, 138–43; selective englishes by, 116–20; social stratification of language by, 118; “Subcontinent,” 117–19, 125, 131– 36, 143–46, 169, 192n31; urban spaces in works of, 129; “Yes, Sir,” 119–20

92160 index NCERT. See National Council of educational Research and Training Nigam, Aditya, 127; critique of modernity, 149–50 Nirmalā (Premchand), 1 Omvedt, Gail, 5 oppression: caste as mediator of, 155; in Dalit literature, 81; gender as mediator of, 56, 155 Orsini, Francesca, 25–26, 45 “Our Village” (Naimishray), 163–69 Pandey, Geetanjali, 46 Pandian, M. S. S., 127 Parsi theater, 85 Paṭkathā and Other Stories (Navaria), 124 Pawar, Urmila, 169 Paxton, Nancy, 198n23 people’s poet. See jankavi People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (Rodinson), 47 personhood, in Dalit literature, 14 Pezullo, Nancy, 182n8 Phule, Jotirao, 39, 150 Phule, Savitribai, 39 Plekhanov, Georgi, 135 poetry. See bhakti poets Poisoned Bread (Dangle), 5, 10, 128 Post-Hindu India (Ilaiah), 47 Prasad, Chandra Bhan, 33, 76, 185n23 Prasad, Guru, 27 Premchand, Munshi, 1, 13–14; as cultural symbol, 59–60, 181n1; Dalit counterpublic and, 59; “Deliverance,” 14; Gandhi as influence on, 50–51; idealism of, 45, 49; “January Night,” 14; “Kafan,” 43–45, 54; as literary icon, 4; narrative approach of, 12–15; Nirmala, 1; public banishment of, 2–3; PWA and, 181n1; reformism for, 49; “The Shroud,” 14, 170; social order for, 59; “The Thakur’s Well,” 14; treatment of untouchables, 45; untouchability in works of, 13. See also Raṅgbhūmi; specific works

Premchand: Munshi of Feudalism (Dharamveer), 54–59; feminism in, 54–55 Prevention of Atrocities Act. See Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Act “The Price of Milk” (Premchand), 13 “Prison” (Ramanan), 160 Progressive Writers Association (PWA), 85, 181n1 public sphere: european model, 25; Habermas on, 24–26; Indian identity in, 24–25; multiple concepts of, 26, 30. See also counterpublics Punalekar, S. P., 129–30 Pune Pact, 188n18 purity-pollution ideology, Dalit identity and, 195n14 PWA. See Progressive Writers Association Rai, Alok, 59 Rai, Amrit, 59 Rajasthan Dalit Literary Academy, 178 Ramachandran, Shalini, 84, 128 Ramanan, Anuradha, 160 Ramnika Foundation, 32 Raṅgbhūmi (Premchand): BDSA response to, 1–3, 53; public burning of, 1–2, 4, 23, 53 Rao, Anupama, 6, 154–57 rape: American testimonials, 199n51; colonialism and, 198n23; of Devi, 159; institutional, 156; legal prosecution of, 159, 197n17; NFDW and, 155, 170; under Prevention of Atrocities Act, 197n17; public protests against, 197n18; in “Subcontinent,” 169; under Untouchability Act, 157. See also sexual abuse and violence, against Dalit women rape narratives, 156–62; “Aṅgārā,” 174–76; caste oppression as part of, 161; colonialism as influence on, 198n23; by female writers, 169–76; by male writers, 162–69; “Mangali,” 171–74; by Meghwal, 170; “Our Village,” 163–69; public spaces in, 162–63; revenge narratives compared to, 161–62;

index 92170 as scripts, 160, 170; structural placement of sexual assault in, 165–66; Sunder Rajan on, 162–63 Ravidas, 64, 70–71 realism, as narrative mode, 98–99. See also melodramatic realism reformism, for Premchand, 49 Rege, Sharmila, 6, 156 rejection of low-caste practices. See “saṁskārit” Renu, Phanishwarnath, 104, 192n46 resistance literature: as access to history, 64; contested terrain in, 62; identity reconstruction in, 63; social and political transformation, 62–63 Resistance Literature (Harlow), 62–63 “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Critique of Actually existing Democracy” (Fraser), 30 revenge narratives: “Aṅgārā,” 174–76; rape narratives compared to, 161–62; textual strategies of representation in, 176; women’s bodies as catalysts for, 163 Riddles in Hinduism (Ambedkar), 135 Rodinson, Maxime, 47 Rodrigues, Valerian, 83 Roy, Arundhati, 11, 67, 161 rural dialectical speech styles, in Dalit literature, 192n46 “Sacrifice” (Navaria), 122, 125; journey from village to city as theme, 138–43 Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters), 34, 36 Samāj, Arya, 71 “saṁskārit” (rejection of low-caste practices), 148 Saraswatī, 73 Satchidanandan, K., 34 Scarry, elaine, 144 scheduled caste (SC), 42 Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1, 197n17 selective englishes, in Dalit literature: condescension in, 120; in Navaria’s works, 116–20

self-transformation, as metaphor, 136–37 Sen, Mala, 161 sexual abuse and violence, against Dalit women, 55–59; as collective violence, 56; “Khairlanji” massacre, 154; as marker of womanhood, 58–59; as obsession of male Dalit writers, 57; “Sirasgaon” incident, 154; by uppercaste males, 56. See also rape narratives Shah, Ghyanshyam, 186n44 “The Shroud” (Premchand), 14, 170 Shudras, as caste, 81 Shukla, Ram Chandra, 65, 189n9 Singh, Namwar, 71 Singh, Sheoraj, 187n15 Singh, Tej, 33, 71–72 “Sirasgaon” incident, 154 Sivakami, P., 9, 11, 100 Sonkar, Rupnarayan, 14 Souvenir (Ambedkar), 79 speech. See dialectical speech styles, in Dalit literature Spivak, Gayatri, 62, 66–68 “The Staff.” See Lāṭhī The Statesman, 2–3 The Stepchild (Macwan), 81 strategic essentialism, 66–67 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas), 24–25 Subaltern Studies, 67 “Subcontinent” (“Upmahādvīp”) (Navaria), 117–19, 125, 131–36, 192n31; descriptive language in, 133–34; fractured language in, 146; memory as theme in, 143–45; narrative structure, 131–32; rape in, 169 Sumanakshar, Sohanpal, 27 Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari, 156, 160–63; on goddess themes, 173; on rape narratives, 162–63 Susan, Trisha, 100 “Take a Look at This Woman” (Megwhal), 170 Talāsh (The Search) (Kardam), 82 The Talibanisation of Feminist Ethics, 56 Tamil Dalit literature, 79

92180 index Tehelka, 9 Teltumbde, Anand, 154, 158–59 Tendulkar, Vijay, 130 Thakbhaure, Susheela, 104; use of dialectical speech in works, 113–16 “The Thakur’s Well” (Premchand), 14 “They want to divide us” (Tilak), 41–42 third-person narration: in Dalit literature, 105; in “25 Fours are 150,” 112–13 Thomas, Rosie, 91 Thorat, Vimal, 36, 39, 58 Tilak, Rajni, 34, 39, 41–42 “Tillu’s Grandson” (Chauhan), 105–7 Tīraskṛt (Chauhan), 14 The Toronto Review, 81 Touchable Tales (Anand, S.), 11 Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature: Histories, Controversies, and Considerations (Limbale), 38, 48, 63 traumatic memory, as literary theme, 143–44 “25 Fours are 150” (Pachchīs Chaukā Deṛh Sau) (Valmiki), 80, 86–92; melodramatic realism in, 89, 91; metonymy in, 89; narrative focus of, 87; third-person narration in, 112–13; use of dialectical speech in, 110–16 Untouchability (Offences) Act, 157 Untouchable (Anand, M. R.), 11 Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (Gajarawala), 179, 182n12 untouchables, as caste: politicization of, 6; in Premchand works, 13, 45. See also Dalit identity

Updahyay, Shashi Bhushan, 13, 45 urban spaces: alienation and loss and, in Dalit literature, 128–31; journey from village to, 136–43; in Marathi Dalit literature, 129–30; in Navaria’s works, 129 Valmiki, Omprakash, 7, 9, 12–14, 34, 48–50, 63–65; autobiographical style, 81–82; literary strategies for, 80; narrative approach of, 12–13; role in Hindi Dalit literature, 70; “25 Fours are 150,” 80, 86–92, 110–16; use of speech by, 107–16 Varma, Nirmal, 104 violence. See sexual abuse and violence, against Dalit women Vivek, Pushpa, 57–58; response to sexual violence in Dalit literature, 57 Viyogi, Kusum, 34 Warner, Michael, 26 When Will Hari Come?, 105–6 “Which Language Should I Speak?” (Kamble), 103 Why I am Not a Hindu (Ilaiah), 47 Williams, Raymond, 137 women. See Dalit women Writing Caste/Writing Gender (Rege), 6 Yadav, Rajendra, 32, 35–36, 40 “Yes, Sir” (Navaria), 119–20 Zelliot, eleanor, 5, 130

SOUTH ASIA ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

ddd eDiteD by muzaFFar alam, robert golDman, anD gauri Viswanathan

Dipesh Chakrabarty, shelDon polloCk,

anD sanjay subrahmanyam, FounDing eDitors South Asia Across the Disciplines is a series devoted to publishing first books across a

wide range of South Asian studies, including art, history, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences. Series authors all share the

goal of opening up new archives and suggesting new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal.

Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration by Yigal Bronner (Columbia) The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab by Farina Mir (California) Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History by Andrew J. Nicholson (Columbia) The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place by Carla Bellamy (California) Secularizing Islamists? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’wa in Urban Pakistan by Humeira Iqtidar (Chicago) Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia by Ronit Ricci (Chicago) Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema by Sangita Gopal (Chicago) Unfinished Gestures: Devadāsīs, Memory, and Modernity in South India by Davesh Soneji (Chicago) Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India by Bhavani Raman (Chicago) The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam by A. Azfar Moin (Columbia) Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions by Christian K. Wedemeyer (Columbia)

The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa by Andrew Quintman (Columbia) Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists by Cabeiri deBergh Robinson (California) Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist Book Cult in South Asia by Jinah Kim (California) Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh by Lotte Hoek (Columbia) From Text to Tradition: The Naisadhīyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia by Deven M. Patel (Columbia) Democracy against Development: Lower Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India by Jeffrey Witsoe (Chicago)