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JCL0010.1177/0021989417718378The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureSatyanarayana

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The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

The political and aesthetic 2019, Vol. 54(1) 9­–24

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DOI: 10.1177/0021989417718378
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K. Satyanarayana
EFL University, Hyderabad, India

Abstract
This article attempts to offer a critique of cultural critic D. R. Nagaraj’s theoretical approach to
the analysis of contemporary Dalit literature. According to Nagaraj, contemporary Dalit literature
is a literature of decultured Dalits which articulates rights and entitlements in liberal polity.
Rejecting claims of a separate aesthetics for Dalit literature, he locates Dalit literary contributions
in the broad sphere of Indian culture and argues for a new aesthetics for Indian culture. His
aim is to recover from the Indian tradition the civilizational contribution of Dalit writers, such
as folk and oral cultural forms. This framework undermines the theoretical innovation and
aesthetic significance of contemporary Dalit literature. Proposing Dalit literature as a form of
contemporary politics in the sphere of modern Indian literary culture, Marathi Dalit critic and
writer Baburao Bagul presents Dalit literature as a modern, written, and Ambedkarite tradition
that reconfigured modernity, invented new modes of writing, and imagined Dalit as a generic
identity, lived experience, and perspective in modern Indian literary history. Dalit literature is
human and democratic, Bagul argues, as it draws on the humanist legacy of Buddha, Christ, Phule,
Ambedkar, and also the Western Enlightenment. A reading of some Dalit texts, following the
discussion of Bagul, illustrates the limitations of Nagaraj’s approach.

Keywords
modernity, realism, Dalit, civilization, human, identity, Ambedkar

My attempt in this introductory essay is to appreciate the theoretical innovation and cur-
rent significance of contemporary Dalit literature through a brief overview of some semi-
nal contemporary approaches (Nagaraj, 1993/2010; Bagul, 1992) to the study of Dalit
writing. According to cultural critic D. R. Nagaraj (1954–1998), Dalit literature is

Corresponding author:
K. Satyanarayana, Department of Cultural Studies, EFL University, Hyderabad, Telangana, 500007, India.
Email: [email protected]
10 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54(1)

a literature of decultured Dalits and it articulates rights and entitlements in the liberal
polity. Nagaraj chooses to locate Dalit literary contribution in the broad sphere of Indian
culture, and argues for recovering the civilizational contribution of Dalit writers from the
Indian tradition, such as folk and oral resources. Proposing Dalit literature as a form of
contemporary politics in the sphere of Indian literary culture, Marathi Dalit critic and
writer Baburao Bagul presents Dalit literature as a modern, written, and Ambedkarite
tradition that reconfigured modernity, invented new modes of writing, and imagined
Dalit as an identity, experience, and perspective in modern Indian literary history. Dalit
literature is human and democratic, Bagul argues, as it draws on the humanist legacy of
Buddha, Christ, Phule, Ambedkar, and also the Western Enlightenment. This article
offers a critique of Nagaraj’s framework and attempts to understand the significance of
contemporary Dalit literature with reference to specific examples of Dalit writing.
D. R. Nagaraj’s The Flaming Feet (1993/2010) is widely read as a theoretical study
that outlined a framework for analysing Dalit literature and culture. A brief overview of
Nagaraj’s framework is worth rehearsing here. Nagaraj describes Kannada Dalit litera-
ture as “an expression of Ambedkarite cultural politics” (1993/2010: 187). Nagaraj char-
acterizes the contemporary Dalit movement as an Ambedkarite movement inspired by
Western ideas of social justice, mobility, and cultural protest. This movement for self-
respect is conceptualized in terms of civil rights, equal opportunities in economic mat-
ters, and social intercourse in a modern liberal democracy. Nagaraj argues that this
Ambedkarite project is part of the Western project of modernity that set up liberal democ-
racy as the ideal form of society.
Nagaraj further suggests that Dalit politics of identity is a product of colonial moder-
nity. Ambedkar exclusively focused on organizing untouchables into a political force
with a distinct identity. The Dalit movement characterized “the entire history of the
Dalits as a tale of humiliation and violence, both physical and mental” (1993/2010: 105).
This reading of history rejects completely “the traditional Dalit self which is steeped, by
and large, in the Hindu ethos” (1993/2010: 222). Nagaraj is referring here to Ambedkar’s
view that Dalits (untouchables) are not members of the Hindu religious community.
They are the lowest social group in the hierarchical caste order of the Hindu religion.
They have no right to enter the Hindu temples. Therefore, Dalits are a separate social
group. This Ambedkarite assertion of a distinct identity, and the rejection of the Hindu
cultural heritage leads to what Nagaraj calls “self-minoritisation” and “self-closure” of
Dalits (1993/2010: 115). Following this process, Nagaraj identifies two perspectives on
Dalit culture: the integrationist and the exclusivist. The integrationists highlight “the
organic and consensual links of Dalits with caste Hindu society” and the exclusivists
focus attention on the autonomous cultural universe of Dalits (1993/2010: 201). The
Dalit movement, according to Nagaraj, usually tends to support the exclusivist view.
Nagaraj reproduces a standard description of Ambedkarite politics here. B. R.
Ambedkar (1891−1956) was a Western-educated scholar, activist, and political thinker.
Born in an untouchable family, he personally experienced untouchability and caste dis-
crimination. He was trained in the liberal intellectual and political tradition of the West,
and was highly critical of traditional Indian society and its Hindu religious culture. He
was one of the first political thinkers to describe the caste system as a form of graded
inequality and argued for its annihilation in order to build a democratic society. He was
Satyanarayana 11

a pioneer of the Dalit movement and the Dalit critique of Indian society. Therefore, the
pan-Indian Dalit movement is often called the Ambedkarite movement and its politics
Ambedkarite politics. The concepts of human dignity, equality, and freedom are central
to Ambedkarite politics. As a chairman of the drafting committee of the Indian
Constitution, Ambedkar was successful in achieving the status of a minority social group
for the untouchables (the legal term is “scheduled castes”) in the parliamentary democ-
racy that was set up in India. This standard biography of Ambedkar is revised by re-
reading his campaigns and struggles against untouchability and his application of abstract
liberal thought in the concrete Indian situation. It is rightly observed that “the ideologi-
cal–theoretical liberalism that he imbibed from distinguished liberal Western academic
institutions […] came into conflict with his experience and understanding of the socio-
political realities on the ground in India” (Rao, 1993: 34). Nagaraj locates Ambedkar’s
thought in its context of origin but not in its context of practice and revision. Dalit writ-
ing is yet another rewriting and reinterpretation of Ambedkar’s ideas. Ambedkar and
Dalit writers were highly critical of the slowness of the process of modernization of
Indian society, especially in the cultural domain. Put differently, Dalit critique highlights
both the promise and the limitations of modernity in India.
Nagaraj suggests that the Dalit literary movement is informed by Western cultural and
political ideas. Locating Dalit literature in the broad field of Indian culture, Nagaraj argues
that the Ambedkarite trend in Dalit literature repudiates “the culture” of the traditional
village society. He identifies two modes of Dalit literature in the Kannada Dalit literary
movement: one, the school of social rage and two, the school of spiritual quest. The domi-
nant trend in the Kannada Dalit literary movement is the mode of social rage that focuses
on “the experiences of anger, agony and revolutionary hope” (1993/2010: 220). This is a
typical Ambedkarite mode. The second school of spiritual quest attempts to understand
deprivation and Dalit identity in terms of “metaphysical dismay over the nature of human
relationship. The ethos of the portrayal of life is not informed by anger and agony, but by
a celebration of the joys of life and its possibilities, which also include the will to change”
(1993/2010: 221). The school of social rage, Nagaraj observes, employs realism as a
mode of writing. Realism represents the rationalist and empirical world view of the mod-
ern middle class in the Indian context (1993/2010: 229). Therefore, in Nagaraj’s view, the
realist mode is not the most appropriate mode through which to portray “the collective
psyche and world view of the lower castes” (1993/2010: 229). The school of social rage,
with its realist mode, totally rejects “the traditional Dalit self which is steeped by and large
in the Hindu ethos”, whereas the school of spiritual quest attempts to explore “the sym-
bolic and religious life of lower castes from a positive perspective” (1993/2010: 222).
Nagaraj cites Kusumabale (1996), a novel written by Devanoor Mahadeva, a Dalit and a
Gandhian, as an example of the school of spiritual quest.
The school of spiritual quest represents the Gandhian mode of the mutual transforma-
tion of the Hindu self and the Dalit self. Nagaraj valorizes the “village centred vision of
Gandhiji” as the site of authentic Indian identity (1993/2010: 58). While recognizing the
advances made by the Dalits in the spheres that had been exclusively upper caste in
“societal administration and political management” (1993/2010: 161), he suggests that
upward mobility of a certain section within the Dalits also created “willful amnesia
regarding one’s own past” (1993/2010: 33). In Nagaraj’s view, village India (he calls it
12 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54(1)

“the traditional village society”, “Indian rural society”, “the caste Hindu society”, and so
on) and its “organic community” is a site for the resolution of the conflicts generated by
the institutions and the culture of modernity (1993/2010: 125−45). It is evident that the
normative “human” (“a common humanity”, “shared humanity”) figure of Nagaraj’s
new project is the composite Hindu self, which is a collective self-inclusive of the upper-
caste person, the Dalit, and other lower-caste identities (1993/2010: 35). According to
Nagaraj, this is a Gandhian mode of theorization or a school of multiple interactions.
Nagaraj further suggests a shift from an identity politics towards a civilizational poli-
tics, and from a politics of exclusivity towards a politics of affirmation. He proposes to
read Dalit literature in the sphere of Indian culture. In order to bring out the liberatory
function of Dalit literature, there is a need to develop “a new aesthetics” for “Indian
culture as a whole” (1993/2010: 195). He identifies “the notion of hierarchized binaries”
in Indian culture that shaped Indian literary theory. These binary oppositions between the
classical and the folk, the religious and the secular, and the upper castes and the lower
castes should be dissolved to arrive at the totality of culture, says Nagaraj (1993/2010:
90–91). Gandhian formulation of Indian civilization seems to offer a possibility to under-
stand culture as a whole.
Nagaraj believes that Dalits have made a major contribution to civilizational politics
rather than contemporary politics. They have inherited arts, crafts, oral, and performative
traditions and enriched Indian civilization. Nagaraj’s nationalist framework is attractive in
so far as he is situating Dalit literature in the debates on Indian civilization.1 Dalit litera-
ture of the spiritual quest school is recognized as being refined and is assigned the status
of civilizational culture. In other words, Dalit literature is a heritage of humanity in the
ancient Indian past. The valorization of Dalit literary culture as cultural heritage has sev-
eral implications. The contemporary challenges of Dalit literature in the modern public
sphere (namely, to critique Indian literary history as upper caste and Hindu, to write in
contemporary, cutting-edge forms of literature, to claim a distinct and separate identity,
and so on) are relegated to the distant past. The notion of culture as heritage and the shared
life and practices of Indians do not allow the cultural conflict between the untouchables
and the upper-caste Hindus to be raised and debated. In fact, the notion of Indian civiliza-
tion was posited by Gandhi and other nationalists for the purpose of claiming the exist-
ence of a cultural community in the distant past undivided by religion, caste, linguistic,
and other cultural divisions among Indians. This view of civilization emphasizes continu-
ity of cultural traditions and assimilation of diverse ideas, practices, and changes into the
Indian great tradition. Nagaraj’s classification of Dalit literary culture as part of Indian
culture obscures the cultural conflict and the literary assertion engendered by Dalit writ-
ers. In the name of Indian culture, Nagaraj is arguing for inclusion of Dalit culture as a
continuity with Hindu culture. In other words, the significance of Dalit literary interven-
tion in contemporary India is totally disregarded or considered limited. I will have occa-
sion to highlight the contribution of Dalit writers in the last section of this essay.
In the above analysis, “Hindu” is deployed as a broad cultural term, which refers to
the syncretic culture or civilization of India. It is assumed that Dalits have inherited
Hinduism’s rich and diverse cultural tradition. For that reason, a recovery of these cul-
tural resources by itself would bestow dignity to Dalit communities. In contrast, Dalit
literature is modern and contemporary in its outlook and it posits Indian culture as a
Satyanarayana 13

domain of conflict. It constructs an exclusive identity and invents its own legacy of
Christianity and Buddhism. Nagaraj fails to appreciate and analyse the historical and
cultural significance of Dalit self-literary assertion. In fact, he undermines the signifi-
cance of the Dalit critique of the caste system and the construction of Dalit identity by
suggesting that Dalit identity is a simple caste identity to claim citizenship and entitle-
ments. In such a caricature, the agendas of the Dalit literary and cultural movements and
the perspectives of Dalits are rejected as Western or modern and, therefore, limited. Dalit
critiques of Hinduism and Indian society are not paid any attention. Ambedkar
(1936/1979), Phule (1873/1991), and Marathi Dalit writers (Dangle, 1992) have criti-
cized Hindu culture for its hierarchy, violence, and insistence on divine retribution, as
well as suggesting approaches to recover the anti-caste cultural and intellectual past of
the Dalits. Nagaraj’s critique of modern Dalit literature is biased and simplistic as it
reduces contemporary Dalit literature to merely a derivative discourse of Western forms
of modernity. His framework is not useful for appreciating and analysing the significance
of modern Dalit literature and its engagement with modernity — both colonial and Indian
national modernity. I wish to bring Dalit critic Baburao Bagul’s approach to Dalit litera-
ture in conversation with Nagaraj’s to further substantiate my criticism.

Indian literary culture as Hindu

Marathi Dalit critic and writer Baburao Bagul (1930–2008) argues that the problem of
representation of the Dalit figure (“the Ambedkarite hero”) has deep roots in the estab-
lished culture of India: the Hindu values of fatalism, rebirth, and divine retribution
(Bagul, 1992: 285). He reviews the religious (Sanskrit and “saint” literature) as well as
the secular writing of Hindu authors. Bagul argues that the religious literature depicted
the life of the two ruling varnas: the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. Here Bagul is refer-
ring to the social stratification of ancient Indian society. According to classical Hindu
texts, the social classes were divided into four varnas: the Brahmins (priests), the
Kshatriayas (rulers), the Vaishyas (merchants), and the Shudras (labourers). In this divine
order, the untouchables, who were known as Ati-shudras, were not included. With the
advent of British rule, the same elite varnas discussed social themes such as the social
evils of Hinduism and the lives and problems of Hindu women. In this period, the liberal
ideas of both the colonial state and attendant social reform movements provided a con-
genial environment for the portrayal of the subordinated varnas in literature. Modern
Indian literature was appearing in the public sphere following the model of English lit-
erature that portrayed the lives of the poor and the weakest. The modern poets and writ-
ers depicted the life of Indian women (mostly upper caste) subjugated by the Indian
cultural tradition. But these writers, who were committed to social reform and enlighten-
ment, denied the Shudras and the Ati-shudras a place in literature. The Indian national
movement also failed to transform dominant Hindu cultural values as it was not allowed
“to develop into a struggle for social, political, and economic and cultural reform”
(Bagul, 1992: 284). On the contrary, the national movement was changed into “a form of
historical, mythological movement and ancestor worship” (Bagul, 1992: 282). In Bagul’s
view, Dalit cultural traditions are suppressed and made invisible in the nationalist notion
of India as an ancient civilization with its cultural unity located in Hindu mythology,
14 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54(1)

classical Sanskrit literature, sages, and saints. Bagul’s critique of nationalism is based on
Ambedkar’s analysis of the Indian national movement. Ambedkar and several other
commentators observed that the Indian National Congress accorded primacy to the polit-
ical programme of achieving Swaraj, or self-rule. The social reform agenda was viewed
as causing internal divisions among Indians (Ambedkar, 1945/1991). Bagul reiterates
this point. The nationalist elite relegated the Dalit and other social movements to a sec-
ondary status by dividing struggles into political and social movements. They suppressed
and sidelined the social movements and philosophies of Phule and Ambedkar from the
standpoint of an entrenched Indian culture. Therefore, Bagul observes that modern
Indian literature was a product of the nationalist ideology and, as such, the subordinated
castes did not figure in this literature.
Bagul’s (1992: 289) assessment of modern Indian literary culture as Hindu has several
implications. It is not only Hindu in the sense that it is produced by Hindu writers, but
also the subjects of this literature are the elite Hindu varnas. The subordinated castes are
entirely invisible in this literary culture. Drawing on Ambedkar’s ideas, Bagul suggests
that “Dalit Literature is but Human Literature”. This formulation is significant as this
elaborates the meaning of Dalit as “human” and counterposes this category of “human”
to Hindu (Bagul, 1992: 289). This meaning of Dalit is in sharp contrast to the dominant
view of the untouchable, as Bagul puts it, as “someone who is mean, despicable, con-
temptible and sinful due to his deeds in his past life”; someone who is seen as “poor,
humiliated and without history” (1992: 289). In contrast, the Dalit is a self-conscious,
autonomous, and assertive individual (the Ambedkarite hero, if you like) who rejects his
or her fatalist existence with its demeaning names, occupations, and practices and
demands self-respect, equality, and freedom. The new identity — Dalit — offers a posi-
tive self-definition and rejects stigmatized, dehumanized, and humiliating identities. To
put it differently, Dalit is the new human and therefore, Dalit literature is revolutionary
and transformative. It is important to note that the new human is not synonymous with
the citizen. The new human is the common man in Buddhism following the ideals of
anti-spiritualism, atheism, and rationalism. The contribution of modern Dalit literature is
to retrieve the human figure by reconfiguring modernity. In this sense, Dalit literature is
anti-establishment and it is capable of shaping a new India.
Bagul suggests that colonial modernity and its normative values gave rise to an
awakening of the subaltern castes, creating the right conditions for a critical assess-
ment of Hinduism and the role of caste in Indian society. In this historical context,
Dalit literature emerged as a response to the denial of place to the Dalits in Indian lit-
erature. In Bagul’s view, Dalit literature is an alternative form of writing within the
larger domain of Indian literary history. It is a modern, written, and Ambedkarite tradi-
tion and it poses a challenge to modern Indian literary history and culture. In contrast
to Nagaraj’s Indian nationalist legacy, Bagul traces the literary traditions of the
untouchables back to Buddha and Christ, those crucial symbols of humanism, and also
to the ideals of Western Enlightenment. It is precisely because of the conditions cre-
ated by the colonial intervention, the Western literary tradition, Ambedkar’s liberal
thought, and the Dalit struggles, that Dalit writers developed a distinct perspective and
discovered the untouchable heroes, themes, and thoughts from the philosophies of
Phule and Ambedkar, Bagul suggests (1992: 285).
Satyanarayana 15

The Dalit critique

Drawing on Bagul’s seminal critique of Dalit writing, I argue that Dalit writers did not
reject modernity but reconfigured it. Nagaraj’s strategy of a binary opposition between
Indian Tradition and modernity allows him to advance criticisms of contemporary Dalit
literature and its representations. A reading of contemporary Dalit literature reveals that
Dalit writers are invested in modernity as a promise and possibility while remaining con-
scious of its contradictions. It is important to note that these authors critically engage with
the project of modernity, its modes of writing and identifications. I will attempt a close
analysis of Dalit literature in order to understand its theoretical and political significance.
My discussion is structured around those three issues — modernity, realism, and Dalit
identity — that Nagaraj identified as key flashpoints in Dalit literary debate. I take my
examples from two dossiers of south Indian Dalit literature: No Alphabet in Sight and
Steel Nibs Are Sprouting (Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011, 2013).2 These dossiers of Dalit
writing are collected and edited selections from four south Indian languages: Tamil,
Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu, contain a wide variety of documents such as poetry,
fiction, cultural critique, political speech, intellectual biographies, and critical essays from
the ground. These volumes are called “dossiers” so as to draw attention to this diversity of
genres and modes of Dalit writing. Extracts from the writings of 86 Dalit writers, includ-
ing well-known authors such as Bama, Cho. Dharman, Raj Gauthaman, K. A. Gunasekaran,
Imayam, N. D. Rajkumar, Sivakami, Sukirtharani, C. Ayyappan, S. Joseph, Sanal Mohan,
M. R. Renukumar, Siddalingaiah, Devanoora Mahadeva, Aravind Malagatti, G. Kalayana
Rao, Kalekuri Prasad, Gogu Shyamala, and Yendluri Sudhakar, are part of the dossiers.
The volumes mark the moment of arrival of Dalit writers, poets, and intellectuals in the
public domain who represent a post-Ambedkarite generation. This literary upsurge in the
1990s coincided with the emergence of the Dalit movement and the resurfacing of caste
at the national level.3 In the two dossiers, we find that literature and cultural critique are
two major modes of Dalit writing. It has been argued that Dalit writers make untouchable
life not just noticeable “but also meaningful, accountable to dalits, and ethically compel-
ling for everyone” (Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 55). As the prominent Dalit writer
Imayam observes: “Good literature takes a person to silence. Political writing has a goal,
target, literature does not. Literature’s task is not to provide information; it should be to
create life”. He further asks: “What have dalit writers given to dalit life?” (qtd. in
Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 59). In other words, creative representation should ena-
ble life. In fact, some of the contemporary Dalit writers have contributed to reimagining
and recreating Dalit life in all its richness and complexity.

Reconfiguring modernity
Dalit writers have a strategic relationship with modernity both as a promise and a pre-
dicament. They do not totally reject or accept modernity as it is but negotiate with it in a
given situation. A close reading of some Dalit texts reveals how modernity is both a site
of transformation and reification of caste identities. To illustrate my point, I offer a read-
ing of S. Joseph’s poem “Identity Card” (2011) and Gogu Shyamala’s short story “Raw
Wound” from the dossiers of south Indian Dalit writing.
16 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54(1)

Joseph is a Malayalam Dalit poet who has published four anthologies of poetry. He is
critical of modern Malayalam poetry for its failure to give expression to Dalit experiences.
As he puts it: “Traditional poetry achieved its form and metre by forgetting certain experi-
ences and people […] New poetry is discovering those forgotten figures” (qtd. in
Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2013: 453). Joseph’s poem “Identity Card” represents this new
poetry in Malayalam. The poem unfurls the story of two young lovers and evokes how their
intimacy and friendship is broken when the boy’s untouchable caste identity is revealed:

In my student days
a girl came laughing.
Our hands met mixing
Her rice and fish curry.
On a bench we became
A Hindu-Christian family.

I whiled away my time

reading Neruda’s poetry;
and meanwhile I misplaced
my Identity Card.

She said,
Returning my card:
“the account of your stipend
is entered there in red.”

These days I never look at

a boy and a girl lost in themselves.
They will depart after a while.
I won’t be surprised even if they unite.
Their Identity Cards
No markings in red.

(Joseph, 2011: 454−55)

The protagonist assumes that he can be a citizen as well as aspiring to poetry and love. The
college-going boy and girl meet and become friends; they share a bench, food, and inti-
macy. Differences of religion do not matter in this relationship. The misplaced identity
card breaks this relationship. The identity card is an official document to verify the caste
identity of the student so as to sanction the stipend to the scheduled caste students.4 The
boy’s caste is unknown until the misplaced identity card is found by the girl. This moment
makes the boy’s caste status public. However, the girl’s caste, which is upper caste, is
invisible in these modern locations. Thus undeceived, the girl leaves, the boy learns about
his stigmatized identity, while this revelation of identity breaks the relationship. It is the
Satyanarayana 17

college space that brings the boy and girl together and it is the state-issued identity card
that plays the role of fixing the caste identity of the boy. Interestingly, the college also
turns out to be a site of self-identification for the boy as a Dalit and thus a site of produc-
tion of Dalit poetry. The poem presents both the promise of modernity and the contradic-
tions of modernity. Put another way, Dalit literature takes up the task of unmasking the
caste identities of the secular upper castes while asserting Dalit identity in the public
sphere. This is the project of a reconfiguration of modernity.5
Gogu Shyamala, an activist and Dalit feminist writer, began her research and writing
career in the late 1990s. Her short stories in Telugu focus on the strategies of resistance
Dalits devise to cope with the problems of caste discrimination and sexual exploitation.
Shyamala’s story “Raw Wound” offers a Dalit perspective on the problems of inhabiting
both the traditional and modern worlds (Shyamala, 2013). The Dalit family of Balappa
is living a life of their own and they desire to get their daughter educated. But the village
landlord decides to make the girl child a jogini. The traditional custom of jogini involves
a marriage of a young Dalit girl to God. She would be sexually used and exploited by
the village patel (head) and priests. This ritual practice of jogini is justified as a custom
to ward off the evil spirits for the good of the village. The struggle of the Dalit family
against the religious ritual of dedication of the lower-caste girls to the Hindu Gods is the
theme of the story. I read this story as a narrative of Dalit struggle that rejects the tradi-
tional village life for its brutal caste oppression and finds a place to live a life of dignity
in the town.
Balappa is a farmer who lives with his mother Sangamma, wife Anathamma, two
sons, and a young daughter named Syamamma. The story is set in Balappa’s village,
which is dominated by the upper-caste Reddy landlords. Balappa works on his land
and cultivates the jowar crop, while his wife is a daily labourer, and his daughter
Syamamma attends school. His two sons are bonded labourers attached to the farm of
a landlord. Balappa learns of the sarpanch and other landlords’ decision to declare
Syamamma as a jogini of the village. Shocked and upset by this decision, Balappa and
his family choose under cover of secrecy to send Syamamma to the social welfare
hostel in Tandur, a nearby town. There, the warden assures the family that in case of
any trouble she would help file a police case against the landlords as the practice of
jogini is banned by the government. The sarpanch Anatha Reddy gets very angry when
he learns that Syamamma is admitted to a hostel and his orders are disobeyed. He sum-
mons Balappa and beats him up. Balappa falls unconscious on the road, awakening
later to find his wife and mother weeping by his side. After some time, village elders,
the sarpanch, and the sub-inspector come to the haystack where Balappa is laid up with
his injuries. They order Balappa’s family to leave the village, getting them to sign
papers transferring property as the family refused to accept the dedication of Syamamma
to be a jogini. Balappa gives up his land and house and leaves the village to live a life
as a labourer in the town. The family hopes that Syamamma will become an important
officer in the government one day.
The story is about a Dalit father who is determined to save his daughter from a life of
bondage and sexual subjugation to be imposed by the upper-caste Hindus in the name of
customary practice. Both the village and the town are governed by the bureaucracy of the
Indian government. But the representatives of modernity: the sarpanch, the police
18 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54(1)

inspector, and the revenue accountant, act together to enforce the banned custom. Instead
of enforcing the legal ban on discriminatory and dehumanizing customs, the sarpanch and
the police inspector try to forcibly implement the custom of jogini. The sarpanch
announces: “Our word is law”, and no one can change one’s destiny (Shyamala, 2013:
721). Balappa refuses to accept this Hindu feudal theory of fatalism and sends his daugh-
ter Syamamma to school. The social welfare hostel and the school, both modern institu-
tions in the town, offer a space for Syamamma so that she could break free from a life of
caste slavery.
Does the desire for modernity (education, urban life) lure Dalits away from beautiful
nature, agricultural fields, and the community life of the village? Why can the Dalits not
enjoy the joys and pleasures of village life? The first scene in the story, wherein Balappa
is at work ploughing the field, offers us a detailed description of how he prepares his land
for cultivation. He is presented as a farmer working hard in his field. Syamamma carries
food to her father and happily plays in the field.
The young girl is alert and enjoys nature: the sky and the moon, the frogs, snakes, the
Mampuru lotus lake, the fresh aroma of flowers, the green scent of jowar leaves, and the
sweet scent of soft moist mud: her journeys from the hostel take her through fields full
of jowar plants and melon creepers. These detailed descriptions of the beauty of village
life allows us to conclude that Dalit characters in the story are conscious of their intimate
relationship with nature and are aware of the pleasures of village life. Balappa wants to
live in his village and also educate his daughter in the town. But the village is a space
divided by caste hierarchy and controlled by the upper castes such as the village’s
Reddys, the Brahmins, and the Komatis. Dalits have no free access to cultural and eco-
nomic resources and have no right to live as independent individuals. Therefore, this
story makes a strong statement that the Dalit desire for a life of dignity and equality is the
primary motive for accepting modern culture and its institutions. The view that Dalits
emulate Western modern culture and are suffering from cultural amnesia actually trivial-
izes the Dalit struggles for self-respect. A reading of this story as a narrative of atrocity
and, therefore, primarily a representation of the agony of a Dalit family is to misread its
critique of traditional culture.

Revising social realism

It is often observed that realism is the most important mode for writers in radical literary
movements. However, according to Nagaraj, “[r]ealism can only, in our context, reflect
and accommodate the rationalist and empirical worldviews of the modern middle class”
(1993/2010: 229). Nagaraj holds that realism does not create space for folk and other
modes of narration; he therefore positions it as an inappropriate literary mode for Dalit
authors, stating that “the lower caste cosmologies do not make a modern novel possible”
(Nagaraj, 1993/2010: 230). Recent studies have established that Dalit writers have not
accepted realism in its Western form but have instead critically engaged with this mode
of writing (Brueck, 2014; Gajarawala, 2013). Toral Gajarawala argues that Dalit litera-
ture forms part of the lineage of social realism but that Dalit writers revise realism’s
history of representational failures (Gajarawala, 2013). She embarks on a new reading of
Premchand, one of the foremost Hindi writers of the early twentieth century, as a case
Satyanarayana 19

study through which to examine the limits of the realist mode of representation.
Premchand, the first President of the Progressive Writers’ Association, depicted the life
of the peasants, workers, women, and the lower castes in his fiction and other writing.
Dalit writers criticized Premchand’s influential and widely-read fiction in the 1990s, and
it is in this context that Gajarawala attempts to reassess Premchand’s representation of
Dalit and other marginalized people. Indian writers such as Premchand, she observes,
democratized the literary space and portrayed the oppressed and poor, such as peasants,
workers, and women. It is the intersection of the social realist mode and the social reform
movements that enabled the representation in fiction of lower castes such as the Chamars.
Subaltern caste characters are presented as social types along with the zamindars or land-
owners, money lenders, and other character types. Such representations in the realist
novel, Gajarawala argues, consolidate upper-caste identity by depicting lower-caste
characters as victims who deserve readers’ sympathy. In Premchand, lower-caste charac-
ters are contained as socio-economic aggregates and their exploitation is economic and
sexual. The caste identity of this literary Dalit is erased. This erasure of caste as a system
worthy of analysis, Gajarawala suggests, is one of the limitations of social realist fiction
in Hindi. Dalit writers revised social realism and moved away from “the abstract catego-
ries of Labour, Nation, and the Universal, and towards a language of specification, dis-
tinction, non-transferability, and exceptionalism” (2013: 191). As Gajarawala (2013:
189) points out, Dalit writers accordingly cultivate a realism that revises the portrayal of
characters either as literary types or binary opposites and represents Dalits as vocal and
assertive characters located in a specific social context.
Nagaraj’s criticism that the social realist mode allows no space for lower-caste cos-
mologies and folk tradition is valid. But his observation that Dalit writers write from
within the Western mode of realism is open to debate. Gajarawala (2013) analysed
Hindi Dalit fiction to demonstrate how Dalit writers revised social realism and invented
new modes of articulation. In the dossiers of South Indian Dalit writing (Satyanarayana
and Tharu, 2011 and 2013), several examples emerge of Dalit texts that critically engage
with the realist mode of narration. One such example is Sivakami’s Author’s Notes
(2011), a sequel to her own novel The Grip of Change (2006). It is a critical commen-
tary on the realist representation in the novel. Sivakami began her career as a civil serv-
ant and took up writing with her first Tamil novel Pazhayani Kazhidalum in 1988,
which is translated into English as The Grip of Change. She is an acclaimed Tamil
novelist, and her fiction puts forward a critique of mainstream feminism from a Dalit
woman’s perspective. In The Grip of Change, Sivakami portrays the life of Kathamuthu,
a loved and respected Dalit leader. The novel is a fictional account of the life of the
author’s father, Kathamuthu, and the story is told from the point of view of Gowri, a
young girl in Kathamuthu’s family. The narrative focuses on the shifts and changes tak-
ing place in Kathamuthu’s life. He is a strong leader of the Parayar community and he
defends the poor untouchables in the village. He takes on an upper-caste woman as his
second wife. In the course of the novel, widowed Dalit woman, Thangam, comes to
Kathamuthu for help after being repeatedly raped and exploited by the upper-caste land-
lord. Kathamuthu supports Thangam in her struggle against the landlord and her in-
laws, but appropriates her body and money, forcing her to join his polygamous family.
Kathamuthu is portrayed as a womanizer, a patriarchal father, and autocratic husband.
20 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54(1)

He is also a manipulative politician who settles disputes outside court in return for com-
pensation. Through the character of Kathamuthu, the novel portrays the Dalit commu-
nity as corrupt, immoral, and manipulative. Some critics and Dalit activists criticized
Sivakami for presenting a biased view of Dalit leaders and, by extension, the Dalit
community as a whole.
Sivakami took the criticism seriously and chose to revisit the village and the novel.
Her critical reflections on the mode of narration and politics of representation, entitled
Author’s Notes, are published as an appendix to the novel. In this narrative, she confesses
that she omitted certain facts about her father’s life. He was a hard worker, advocated
manual labour, encouraged women’s education and employment, and helped the poor
and needy. He was daring and committed in opposing the upper castes in the area. The
author Sivakami self-critically describes her portrayal of Kathamuthu as “an effigy”
(Sivakami, 2011: 302). The failure is not a simple distortion of certain facts in
Kathamuthu’s life, and nor is it a reflection of Sivakami’s dishonesty; instead, it is a
byproduct of the realist mode of narration that attends to empirical details and rational
observations without commentary and interpretation. The perception of Kathamuthu as
he is known and seen, Sivakami realizes, is nothing but an expression of her “conscious,
educated, logical mind” (Sivakami, 2011: 304). In other words, as Sivakami puts it:
“Nothing in the novel was untrue. But the novel itself was false” (2011: 303). The writ-
ing of Dalit life into fiction poses a complex set of challenges; commentators frequently
remark that it is not enough that one is born in a Dalit family to be a Dalit writer. Both
the entrenched foundations of realism and an educated subjectivity can be obstacles in
describing Dalit life (Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 58). In The Grip of Change,
Sivakami unintentionally reproduces upper-caste stereotypes of the corrupt, authoritar-
ian, and unethical Dalit character.
Tamil Dalit writer Azagiya Periyavan extends this critique of realist portrayal of Dalit
life in his short story “Stench”. In this story, Pamandi, a young Dalit boy who lives in a
hostel, does not like his house and surroundings (Periyavan, 2011). He develops a strong
sense of repulsion against the stench in his colony, and nor does he like the touch of his
father, rough from working in the tannery. One day the boy has to go to the tannery to
collect some money from his father, and the alienated protagonist is shocked by the
man’s appearance:

He could not bear to see what was before him; his father, a stinking man, in a whole environment
of stench […] He realized in that second that it was he himself who had become a stinking
thing. (Periyavan, 2011: 237)

This is the moment when the boy begins to perceive himself as an abject, foul-smelling
thing and his entire conception of “stench” changes. The mainstream meaning of “stench”
is not simply foul smell. It is a metaphorical “stench” that is attributed to some social
groups to classify them as “impure” and untouchable. The boy’s rejection of the given
meaning of “stench” via touching his father is the story’s moment of epiphany. This bril-
liant story of self-reflection is at once a critique of realist descriptions of the Dalit colony
and the tannery, and of the educated boy’s perspective. The meaning of the Dalit self is
not visible unless one is re-educated. It is as though “one must wade through the stench,
Satyanarayana 21

bend to touch to be reborn, bend to touch the depths of revulsion, in order to be reborn
with a father and a heritage” (Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 57).

Dalit as identification
Nagaraj suggests that Dalit is an identity belonging to a political community comprising
untouchable castes. Following strategies of self-minoritization and self-enclosure,
Ambedkar consolidated Dalit identity (Nagaraj, 1993/2010: 115). This identity is con-
structed drawing on selective social experiences (self-pity and anger) for bringing together
the numerically large untouchable castes. It is an emulation of the Brahmin identity forged
in the colonial period by the strategies of colonial enumeration and caste-based mobiliza-
tion of communities (1993/2010: 207). Nagaraj summarizes the situation: “The intricate
structure of lower castes, with their local specificity and divergent cultural memories,
came to be simplified for the purpose of building larger alliance [sic] across cultural strati-
fication, enabling caste sabhas to build larger coalitions” (1993/2010: 95). The rise of
caste groups as interest groups is one example of this kind of alliance, Nagaraj opines.
In Nagaraj’s theorization, Dalit is a simplified caste identity used for bargaining wel-
fare entitlements and other concessions from the liberal democratic state. From a Dalit
standpoint, my other key critic Bagul (1992) reimagines Dalit as a human figure and
elaborates on the meaning of the term. He explores the legacy of Western Enlightenment,
as well as invoking the residues of Buddha’s and Christ’s humanism to define the cate-
gory of Dalit. He criticizes and rejects the Hindu identity that denies humanity and dig-
nity to the untouchables. That is why Dalit is a category of political identification rather
than a mere scheduled caste identity. Gopal Guru (1998: 17) observes that Dalit is a
pedagogic category grounded in the material and social experiences of the untouchable
community. It is constructed in the struggles of the untouchables for human dignity and
equality. Clarifying further the political and cultural significance of the category of Dalit,
Guru argues:

The category does not exist a priori, either for computing or for electoral arithmetic, but has to
be discursively constituted across the social and ideological spaces through constant and
sincere negotiation with other vibrant and sensitive categories and their supportive ideological
frameworks. (1998: 17)

Moreover, it offers a perspective to view power structures in the domain of culture. He

rejects Ashis Nandy’s view that Dalit is a category constructed by the middle class and
that it is defined in prescriptive terms.
Dalit is portrayed by Dalit writers as a new human being who is conscious of his/her
caste and dehumanized status. Rejecting the ascribed identities, Dalit characters assert their
self-worth and dignity. Marathi Dalit literature in the 1960s first presented an assertive,
self-conscious, and autonomous Dalit character. The early Ambedkarite hero repudiated
the Hindu religious and cultural life that subjugated and stigmatized untouchables as col-
lective slaves. Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke (2008) and other Marathi Dalit auto-
biographies thematize the struggles of the untouchables and the rise of the Ambedkarite/
Dalit. Recent autobiographies like Bama’s Karukku (2000) and Siddalingaiah’s Ooru Keri
22 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54(1)

(2006) document the life of the educated and middle-class untouchable figures who dis-
cover their Dalit selves and relate and assert their experiences of untouchability and caste
discrimination. Dalit here is a category of community identification to the alienated and
urbanized untouchables. In Kannada Dalit writing, Satyanarayana and Tharu point out,
“Dalit is an experience, a cultural and philosophical way of life, a lived knowledge of injus-
tice rather than contemporary politics” (2013: 27). Devanoora Mahadeva’s early stories
and his short novel Odalala are examples of this trend.
According to Tamil Dalit writer Cho. Dharman, untouchables are depicted as “wooden
dolls[s] without life” (qtd. in Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 102). He further observes
that “the depiction has been one-dimensional — dalits appear wearing clothes, stinking,
easily falling among people given to violence; they are illiterate, coolies without prop-
erty, submissive, people who struggle only for food and wage” (qtd. in Satyanarayana
and Tharu, 2011: 102). This is the view shared by Marxist writers and even some Dalit
writers. Dharman wants to portray “the multidimensional dalit, his soul/being/essence”
(Satyanarayana and Tharu, 2011: 102). Dalit here is an interpretation and a perspective.

Conclusion
The above analysis of two critics — Nagaraj and Bagul — and my reading of some
Dalit texts bring several questions to the fore. Nagaraj proposes a singular notion of
culture as a complex of classical, folk, and popular cultures. Drawing on Gandhi’s con-
cept of Indian civilization as syncretic and assimilative, Nagaraj displaces Dalit writing
from its contemporary context and locates it as a trend that affirms the civilizational
continuity in the Indian tradition. In this framing, Ambedkarite Dalit literature is pre-
sented as a literature of self-pity and anger. This view is a crude caricature of contem-
porary Dalit literature and effectively underplays the conflicts and power relations that
play out in the domain of culture. Bagul’s reading of Indian literary history and culture
reveals how Dalit life and experiences are made invisible in the Indian tradition.
External interventions in the form of colonial rule and Ambedkar’s liberal thought cre-
ate a new context for the emergence of Dalit literature. Bagul situates this rise of an
alternative and oppositional cultural trend in the humanist and democratic socialist tra-
dition of Western Enlightenment thought, and the anti-caste intellectual tradition of
Buddha, Phule, and Ambedkar.
A reading of some Dalit texts brings out several dimensions into the open beyond the
stereotypical view of Dalit literature. A new Dalit perspective enables Dalit writers to
accept the formal promise of modernity and then proceed further to negotiate for a life of
dignity in the institutional and cultural domain of modernity. In a similar way, Dalit writ-
ers have not totally rejected the realist mode of narration but have improvised and inno-
vated it in order to represent Dalit life in a complex manner. In this improvisation of
literary aesthetics and modes of writing, Dalit writers have drawn on their rich heritage
of oral, folk, and performance traditions so as to effectively and creatively represent
Dalit life. G. Kalyana Rao’s Untouchable Spring (2010) and Cho. Dharman’s Koogai:
The Owl (2015) are two recent examples in this trend.
Nagaraj sets up a false opposition between civilizational politics and contemporary
politics of Dalit literature. It is only through an appreciation of the significance of
Satyanarayana 23

contemporary Dalit literature that one can go back and make a serious attempt to recover
the Dalits’ cultural contribution. The idea of Dalit as a distinctively modern perspective
has been recently reshaped and it enables us to think of the cultural memories of the past
as well as the contemporary experiences of the Dalits and the lower castes. Any approach
that assumes that there is an easy access to the pre-modern culture without being medi-
ated by modernity would end up producing a nativist cultural and literary history. In this
history, the political and aesthetic significance of contemporary Dalit literature is ren-
dered negligible.

Acknowledgements
The first draft of this paper was presented as a keynote lecture at the international conference
“Contemporary Approaches to the Analysis of Dalit Literature”, held at Nottingham Trent
University, UK, 23−24 June 2014. I thank Nicole Thiara, Judith Misrahi-Barak, and all the partici-
pants for their comments and suggestions. A revised version of the paper was presented at a sym-
posium on “Injustice and the Self in Dalit Writing” at Manipal University on 13−14 August 2016.
I thank Gopal Guru, Gayathri Prabhu, and all the other participants for their criticisms and observa-
tions. However, I am solely responsible for the views expressed in this paper.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. The political views of Gandhi, Tagore, and other Indian nationalist leaders on the idea of
Indian civilization are documented in a study by Bhattacharya (2011). The academic debate
on Indian civilization was initiated by American anthropologist Robert Redfield in his project
for the study of civilizations at Chicago. Milton Singer, Redfield’s associate, conducted the
study on India. Singer argued that the Great Indian Tradition was a continuous cultural tradi-
tion with Little traditions present in the villages, regions, and traditional communities (see
Singer, 1971). The singular notion of Indian civilization was contested by other scholars such
as A. K. Ramanujan who observed that Indian cultural traditions in India are plural and often
in conflict with each other (see Ramanujan, 1999: 8).
2. All the Dalit texts discussed in this essay are translated into English from Indian languages.
See references for details.
3. See the “Introduction” in Satyanarayana and Tharu (2011: 4–20) for a detailed account of the
political and cultural context for the rise of Dalit writing.
4. Scheduled caste students receive a stipend sanctioned by the state and central governments
in India as a social welfare measure to extend financial support to socially disadvantaged
students. These students are required to produce official certificates of their caste status when
they go to claim the stipend.
5. See the “Introduction” in Satyanarayana and Tharu (2011: 1–3) for a detailed analysis of the poem.

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