Exploring Dalit Literature: A legacy of the Indian anti-caste movement

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In these words, Kalyani Thakur Charal explains why Dalit women writers are different, and how hard it has been for them to write and get published. Until a few decades ago, Dalit literature in Bengal was written mainly by men, who were disregarded by mainstream publishing and impelled to run their own publishing ventures, literary journals like Chaturtha Duniya, which also provided space for women.

Recognizing the political and social complexities where caste is invisibilized, Sayantan Dasgupta suggests that the anthology brings together ‘gender and caste as the point of entry, though class, too, figures as a core definig element in the chosen pieces, constructing a particular, complex and layered ;iterary landscape as a part of Bangla literature that generally seems to escape our eyes’.

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First published in the Odia in 1948, and translated for the first time here into English by Bikram Das, Gopinath Mohanty’s Harijan is one of the most original and radical Indian novels of the twentieth century. It brings to vivid life the story of a group of Mehentars living in a slum. Cleaning latrines with their bare hands is the only work that they can hope to find as their caste excludes them from every other occupation. The leader of this group is the middle-aged and foul-mouthed Jema who starts her day by gulping down a potful of liquor and smoking pinkas in order to deal with the stench of the excreta. One day, Jema comes down with a fever and is unable to go to work. Fourteen-year-old Puni offers to take her mother’s place. The next morning Puni wakes up early, bathes, puts on a clean sari, and dabs some cheap perfume on her skin. Stepping out of the hut excitedly, she picks up basket and broom. When she arrives at the first latrine, the stink hits her with the force of a hammer blow. She drops her basket and broom, turns around, and is trying to run away, when her friends stop her. ‘This is what you will have to do every day for the rest of your life! It is your fate!’ Avinash Babu lives in a palatial house next to the slum. He is planning to evict the Mehentars in order to develop the slum into a residential colony. One night, a fire breaks out and the entire slum is burned to the ground. The Mehentars leave the slum carrying their remaining possessions on their backs. They have nowhere to go but they are past all worries—they know that no matter where they go, they will still be cleaning excrement, for they are Harijans.

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The Fifth Veda is a collection of Dalit poems written by Satish Chandar. This has 36 poems, which were originally written in Telugu and translated into English by the author himself. The period in which he wrote these poems spanned across three decades (1989 – 2018). He wrote on various atrocities against Dalits like Tsundur massacre and happenings of caste discrimination such as Rohith Vemula’s suicide. The poems in the book have been categorized into classroom, love-marriage, village, land, language, worship, politics and race.

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Contemporary Dalit poetry in Malyalam as also in Marathi is vibrant with a variety of voices and divergent perspectives. The source of inspiration in Malayalam was the egalitarian writings of Narayana Guru, Kumaran Asan, Pandit Karuppan, and in Marathi, the first impetus came with the advent of leaders like Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar. The ‘I’ in Dalit poetry acts as an instrument in conveying the agony, pain and protest of the subalterns. Dalit voices, both in Malayalam and in Marathi, emphatically espouse a classless and casteless society.

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Koogai, the owl- huddled in its hollow with the sun overhead, it flies free when darkness descends Bird of the night- an abuse, a bad omen attacked and shunned by birds, by humans… Strong, but unaware of its immense power, Koogai, the owl- foolish or wise? Set in post-Independence Tamil Nadu’s era of agrarian and industrial change, Koogai reflects the nuances of an authentic contemporary myth leavened with irony and fierce humour. Empowering themselves with the image of the owl, a totem of self-respect and hope, men and women break free of old caste taboos only to find themselves entangled in the doublespeak of an egalitarian rhetoric

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Spotted goddesses is an ethnography of caste, gender and Dalit women’s leadership. Situated in transitional feminist discourses, this book is rooted in interactions and lived experiences of Dalit women in Tamil Nadu. Singh’s perspective as a Dalit woman provides an intersectional social analysis of power structures that sustain caste dominance in South India today. She describes strategies of social change in Dalit women’s activism as rooted in subversive applications of imposed identities of ‘difference’ thwarting social boundaries and punishment traditions. The core of this interdisciplinary work is Dalit women’s songs, oral and written testimonial narratives, including Singh’s personal story.

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Winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, 2018Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. Her family, belonging to the Mala caste, was educated in Warangal and Madras by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary – and yet how typical – her family history truly was. Determined to uncover that history, and understand the social and political forces that made it possible, she traveled back to India to record the testimonies of her mother, her uncles, and their friends. In Ants Among Elephants, she tells their story. A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up.

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Lines that cut to the very gut. Gogu Shyamala’s stories dissolve the borders of realism, allegory and political fable. Whether she is describing the setting sun, or the way people are gathered at a village Council like ‘thickly strewn grain on the threshing floor’, or a young woman astride her favorite buffalo, Shyamala walks us through a world that is at once particular and universal. An important book of Dalit literature.

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In Coming Out as Dalit, Dutt recounts the exhausting burden of living with the secret and how she was terrified of being found out. She talks about the tremendous feeling of empowerment she experienced when she finally stood up for herself and her community and shrugged off the fake upper-caste identity she’d had to construct for herself. As she began to understand the inequities of the caste system, she also had to deal with the crushing guilt of denying her history and the struggles of her grandparents and the many Dalit reformers who fought for equal rights. In this personal memoir that is also a narrative of the Dalits, she writes about the journey of coming to terms with her identity and takes us through the history of the Dalit movement, nd attempts to answer crucial questions about caste and privilege.

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The second of two volumes that document the upsurge of dalit writing in South India that began in the mid-1970s brings together in English translation forty-three writers, activists and public intellectuals from Kannada and Telugu. Their poetry, fiction, essays, critical commentary, self writing and research into mythopoeic pasts have changed the very idea of modern literature, culture and society. Each writer strikes a distinct political note that challenges received wisdom. Initially published in small, alternative journals and daily newspapers, this fulsome, ground hugging archive is a rare intellectual biography of the past half century record of the meanings of Ambedkar, Lohia and Marx in contemporary India and a mine of knowledge and insight into childhood, education, family, welfare, employment, work, the role of politics in dalit worlds. The array of dalit perspectives within these pages, sometimes in conversation, at other times clashing, provide texture and dynamism to what is possibly the most vital debate in the country today. Together, they tell the hidden story of India.

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A landmark publication in Marathi, Shahu Patole’s book Anna He Apoorna Brahma was the first ever to document Dalit food history through the culinary practices of two Maharashtrian communities–Mahar and Mang. Fashioned as a memoir with recipes, it explores the politics of maintaining social divisions through food along with a commentary on caste-based discrimination–what food is sattvic (pure) or rajasic (fit for a king), what is tamasic (sinful) and why.

Now translated as Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada, this book presents the poor man’s patchwork plate, one devoid of oil, ghee and milk, and comprising foods not known to savarna dictionaries. It also examines Hindu scriptures that prescribed what each varna should eat–and questions the idea that one becomes what one eats. From humble fare to festive feasts, the recipes carefully woven into the narrative show you the transformative power of food in connecting communities and preserving cultural identity – cementing an important place in Dalit literature.

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Upara: An Outsider, an autobiography written by Laxman Mane, is a path breaking work in the Marathi literature, for its lively depiction of the life of the downtrodden and forceful style, authenticity of experience and its strong plea for social justice. The book is rich with emotional experience at different levels. The love-hate relationship between the author and his father, between his mother and father, between father and relatives, the intense love between the author and his beloved, the mute suffering of both the lovers, the cruelties of life, humiliation and feelings of anger, forbearance, compassion—the intertwining of all these elements gives the work immense vitality.

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Silenced for centuries by caste prejudice and social oppression, the Dalits of Maharashtra have, in the last sixty years, found a powerful voice in Marathi literature. The revolutionary social movement launched by their leader, Dr Ambedkar, was paralleled by a wave of writing that exploded in poetry, prose, fiction and autobiography of a raw vigour, maturity, depth and richness of content and shocking in its exposition of the bitterness of their experiences. One is jolted too, by the quality of writing of a group denied access for long ages to any literary tradition. When published in 1992, Poisoned Bread was the first anthology of Dalit literature. The writers-more than eighty of them-presented here in English translations, are nearly all of the most prominent figures in Marathi Dalit literature, who have contributed to this unique literary phenomenon. This new edition includes an essay by Gail Omvedt, a distinguished scholar activist working with new social movements. Omvedt, who has been actively involved in anti-caste campaigns since the 1970s, lives and works in Maharashtra.

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Days Will Come Back is probably the first Punjabi Dalit poetry collection which has been translated into English. Poems in it are simmering with the smell of revolution that the soil of Punjab has begotten among many of its children. In this, the voice of a Dalit Punjabi is very distinctive and a refreshing change of narrative from the otherwise upper-caste dominant stories that emerge from the region.

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Spotted Goddesses is an ethnography of caste, gender and Dalit women’s leadership. Situated within the ambit of transnational feminisms, this book is rooted in interactions and lived experiences of Dalit women in Tamil Nadu. Singh’s intersectional perspective as a Dalit woman provides a consummate analysis of the power structures that shape the foundation of caste dominance in South India today. She describes strategies of social change in Dalit women’s activism as embedded in the urge to upend and subvert imposed identities of ‘difference’ in a mode of resistance which fearlessly thwarts social compartments and punishment traditions.

Built around a powerful core which is primarily shaped by Dalit women’s songs, and oral and written testimonial narratives, including Singh’s personal story, this interdisciplinary work is a searing vindication of Dalit women’s right to rise and rage against the shackles of Brahminical patriarchy.

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Bheda means a sense of difference, one that’s deeply ingrained in our society; the caste hegemony that has led to economic exploitation, cultural subjugation, social discrimination and political powerlessness of Dalits in Odisha over decades and is an important work in Dalit literature

“The entire village was in an uproar when the news spread that Laltu had beaten up Yuvaraj. How dare a Dom boy thrash the gauntia’s nephew, a Teli? The Telis set out to seek revenge by breaking Laltu’s limbs.Conscious of the plight of the Dalits and the lower castes and hoping to improve their lot, Laltu leads an uprising against the upper castes. Does he succeed? Or is he silenced and crushed by caste power?Set in a remote village in the Kalahandi district of Odisha, the story draws from the real, lived experiences of the region’s Dalits. Bheda, the first Odia Dalit novel, is not only a poignant tale of rebellion and betrayal, it is also a record of the caste atrocities and cultural politics that have defined India.”
Akhila Naik’s 90-page Bheda published in 2010 is considered to be the first Odia Dalit novel, and is centred around caste violence.

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A fine book of Dalit literature, The Lost Heroine is about a girl growing up in a district in Kerala, spinning idle dreams as she worked in the fields, Rosy had never been to the cinema. Her only brush with fame had been to act in the local Kakkarissi plays. So when Johnson Sir, her well-to-do neighbour, asked if she would like to play the role of heroine in a movie his friend Daniel was making, Rosy could scarcely believe it. In a matter of weeks, Rosy is transformed into Sarojini—the beautiful Nair girl who lived in a grand tharavad, wore mundus and blouses of the finest silk and gold jewellery from head to toe. Rosy’s dream world comes to an end when the last scene is shot. A harsh reality awaits her when the film is screened at the Capitol Theatre in Trivandrum. There is shock and horror in the audience as the film rolls. All hell breaks loose, and Rosy narrowly escapes death only to spend the rest of her life in anonymity. It is only in a forgotten roll of film that her story lives on. The story of Vighathakumaran (The Lost Child), the first film ever to be made in Malayalam, in the year 1928.

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Poised to inherit a huge tract of land gifted by the Nizam to his father, twenty-one-year-old Narsiah loses it to a feudal lord. This triggers his migration from Vangapally, his ancestral village in the Karimnagar District of Telangana the single most important event that would free his family and future generations from caste oppression. Years later, it saves his son Baliah from the fate reserved for most Dalits: a life of humiliation and bonded labour.

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On the evening of 5th January 2006, Bant Singh, a Dalit agrarian labourer and activist in Punjab’s Jhabar village, was ambushed and brutally beaten by upper-caste Jat men armed with iron rods and axes. He lost both his arms and a leg in the attack. It was punishment for having fought for justice for his minor daughter who had been gang-raped. But his spirit was not broken, and he continues to fight for equality and dignity for millions like him, inspiring them with his revolutionary songs and his courage.
Journalist and writer Nirupama Dutt tells Bant Singh’s story in this powerful book which is both the biography of an extraordinary human being and a comment on the deep fault lines in Punjabi and Indian society.

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