Dalit Text

Aesthetics and Politics Re-imagined

Judith Misrahi-Barak, K. Satyanarayana, Nicole Thiara, Judith Misrahi-Barak, K. Satyanarayana, Nicole Thiara

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367218416
• eBook ISBN: 9781000006964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Literature

This book, companion to the much-acclaimed Dalit Literatures in India, examines questions of aesthetics and literary representation in a wide range of Dalit literary texts. It looks at how Dalit literature, born from the struggle against social and political injustice, invokes the rich and complex legacy of oral, folk and performative traditions of marginalised voices. The essays and interviews systematically explore a range of literary forms, from autobiographies, memoirs and other testimonial narratives, to poems, novels or short stories, foregrounding the diversity of Dalit creation. Showcasing the interplay between the aesthetic and political for a genre of writing that has 'change' as its goal, the volume aims to make Dalit writing more accessible to a wider public, for the Dalit voices to be heard and understood. The volume also shows how the genre has revolutionised the concept of what literature is supposed to mean and define.

Effervescent first-person accounts, socially militant activism and sharp critiques of a little-explored literary terrain make this essential reading for scholars and researchers of social exclusion and discrimination studies, literature (especially comparative literature), translation studies, politics, human rights and culture studies.

1
Introduction

Aesthetics and politics re-imagined

Judith Misrahi-Barak, K. Satyanarayana and Nicole Thiara

This volume of essays and interviews has grown out of the conferences and events organised by the research network ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’, which was created by Judith Misrahi-Barak and Nicole Thiara and received funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for two years between May 2014 and June 2016. This funding was granted to create a platform for the international and cross-disciplinary discussion of Dalit literature. It seemed remarkable and problematic at the time that Dalit literature was almost invisible outside of India, given that it is such a significant literary movement and important political phenomenon that has been redefining the literary landscape in India. Few scholars outside of India study Dalit literature and it is still quite unusual to come across university modules that teach Dalit literature in Western academia, even if things are changing. This neglect is all the more surprising, perhaps, considering how crucial the concept of subalternity is in postcolonial studies. The apparent interest in silenced and oppressed people in postcolonial studies sits uneasily with the relative marginalisation of Dalit literature in this discipline. It is therefore important that postcolonial studies engage with this emerging field in order to remain relevant and avoid inadvertently contributing to the silencing of this important and radical literature.

The research network was created in the context of an apparent lack of an international forum in which Dalit literature could be discussed. Though Dalit literature was widely debated within India and Dalit literary organisations, we considered it important to provide a wider platform for the discussion of Dalit literature and its analysis in order to complement regional and national discussions of this body of work. In the process, we also hoped to raise the international profile of Dalit literature since many of these texts will speak to other literary contexts and readerships. Caste, caste discrimination and the struggle against it are in many ways the defining features of Dalit literature but this does not mean that these topics will not find resonance in struggles against injustice and discrimination elsewhere.

The first conference was held at Nicole Thiara’s home institution, Nottingham Trent University, in June 2014, followed by a symposium at the University of Leicester and a conference at Judith Misrahi-Barak’s home institution, the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, in October 2014 with the support of the research centre EMMA (‘Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone’). In July 2015, we held the first international conference dedicated to the significance and challenges surrounding translation and Dalit literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, hosted by the British Centre for Literary Translation. The final two conferences were held in India: the conference at Savitribai Phule Pune University focused on gender, and the workshop at the University of Delhi on questions surrounding the publication and dissemination of Dalit literature. For the selection of presenters and keynote speakers, recommendations by the network’s advisory board helped ensure that the academic quality and the originality and urgency of research topics were carefully considered; members of the advisory board included Laura Brueck, Toral Jatin Gajarawala, Aniket Jaaware, Sharan Kumar Limbale, Sanal Mohan, Pramod K. Nayar, Anupama Rao, K. Satyanarayana and John Zavos. A prominent aim of the network events was to engage as wide an audience as possible. We therefore held public readings of Dalit literature and film screenings, including Jayan K. Cherian’s feature film Papilio Buddha, in Montpellier, Norwich and Nottingham. An outward-facing website¹ was created, and the network’s YouTube channel ‘Dalit Voice and Vision’² now hosts recordings of the network’s events as well as new interviews and events. This volume is a reflection of these specific academic and public events and aims to follow up on what has been initiated by the network. Even if they are only a selection, the articles featured here speak to a more general desire to contribute to a conversation leading to a deeper understanding of the aesthetic and political implications of Dalit writing.

Dalit literature in India is written by a generation of militant Dalits with a Dalit consciousness. It explores the world with insights that came from the writers who belonged to the untouchable community and had first-hand experience of Dalit life. Dalit life experience, insights and aspirations inform and shape Dalit literature. A new critical perspective, namely, a Dalit perspective, is at the heart of this new literary movement. The key term ‘Dalit’ is a self-identity of the castes formerly designated as untouchable and refers to the untouchables who demand to be treated with dignity and respect. The Hindu society and its literature, Dalit critic Baburao Bagul points out, denied the status of human being to the untouchable, who is described as ‘someone who is mean, despicable, contemptible and sinful due to his deeds in his past life’.³ In contrast to this derogatory view of the untouchable, ‘Dalit’ is a political self-identification that rejects these predestined and imposed identities. It contests the ideology that degrades and dehumanises the untouchables. Dalit consciousness and the assertion of identity constitute the new perspective, the Dalit perspective, which changed the common understanding of untouchability, caste and Indian society as a whole. According to the old approach, caste is viewed as a problem of the untouchable social groups and it is a social problem of the past (ancient Hindu society).⁴ The Dalit perspective redefines caste as a contemporary form of social and cultural inequality and power relations that affects the whole of Indian society. It is this perspective and the understanding that the Dalit writers bring to literature that makes it Dalit literature.⁵

Dalit literature is ultimately a literary expression of the Dalit movements in India and it contributes to shaping those struggles. It began in Maharashtra in the 1960s and spread to all regions of India. It is a pan-Indian literary movement today in many regional languages in India. The historical conditions of Dalit literature determined its early concerns such as human dignity, self-respect and equality. Early Dalit literature portrayed the anger, rage and protest against the caste society and therefore, it is widely read as a literature of Dalit protest against injustice. The representation of Dalit life in literature is seen as an explicit political act and, therefore, Dalit literature is viewed as political literature. No doubt, Dalit literature is a sociological and political record of Dalit struggles and, as such, it is a significant development. But this excessive emphasis on the sociological significance of Dalit literature relegated it to the social and political domain. Some Dalit critics argue that Dalit literature is a distinct literature with its own aesthetics and politics. In both these readings, Dalit literature is either a sociological reflection of caste society or an exclusive literary expression of Dalits. These approaches undermine the significance of Dalit literary intervention as mainstream modern Indian literature. In the early phase of Dalit literature, the questions of literary representation and aesthetics of Dalit literature were hardly attended to despite the fact that Marathi Dalit writers already raised the question of ‘how to combine creativity with thought’ and how ‘to render more effective the feelings of suffering’ in the 1960s.⁶

Sharan Kumar Limbale, the Marathi Dalit writer and critic, elaborates on the aesthetics of Dalit literature in his classic study Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature.⁷ His critique of mainstream aesthetics and proposals for alternative Dalit aesthetics are based on a critical review of literary and cultural debates in the Marathi literary culture. He observes that the framework of classical Indian aesthetics applied to the study of Indian literatures is not appropriate for the reading of Dalit literature. In his view, Indian literatures glorify pleasure derived from beauty (emotions and feelings) and they are addressed to the pleasure-seeking aesthete. Neither the individual-centred modern Western literature (self-contained, timeless and universal), nor the devotional literature share any similarities with Dalit literature. Therefore, Limbale argues that Dalit writers rejected traditional aesthetics of both India and the West and constructed separate aesthetics of their own. He highlights the distinctive features of Dalit literature thus: Dalit literature upholds equality, freedom and justice; it emphasises the centrality of the human being and society and therefore it is revolutionary. Suffering and revolutionary awakening is the basis of Dalit literature. As the concept of beauty is based on the prevailing ideas in a given society, Dalit writers invented their own aesthetics from Dalit life and Ambedkarite ideas. Limbale is successful in outlining a critique of mainstream aesthetics, but the new aesthetic framework of Dalit literature is sketchy, suggestive and rhetorical. Limbale’s Akkarmashi and several other Marathi Dalit texts stand testimony to this view. This study has not been given the attention it deserves.

The crucial difference between emotionalist writing, which is written by non-Dalits about Dalits, and Dalit writing, according to D. R. Nagaraj, a well-known cultural critic, is that in the former, the states of mind (such as pity, anger and melancholy) constitute the major material for a work of art and in the latter, ‘quotidian things’ are elevated to

the status of metaphors of social change… . The totality of objects is rarely re-created [in the former], whereas in the latter the states of mind are woven with concrete objects of life: the abstract and the concrete are organically linked to each other.⁸

He further observes that the Western modes of narrative and aesthetic strategies, particularly realism, cannot represent the life of the untouchables and other lower castes (Nagaraj, 229). For example, Devanuru Mahadeva’s novel Kusumabale breaks the models of the European novel, creating a new narrative, kathakava (narrative verse), and powerfully conceives reality at multiple levels by re-examining many secular and rationalist belief systems. It is the genius of Dalit literature to bring ‘the abstract and the concrete together’ (Nagaraj, 220). This volume has some examples of this writing.

Nagaraj further suggests that there is a need to develop ‘a new aesthetics’ for ‘Indian culture as a whole’ (Nagaraj, 195). Rejecting certain Western aesthetic strategies, he proposes a return to the lower caste cosmologies to recreate an autonomous aesthetic regime for Dalit literature. The problem with Nararaj’s proposed project is that it does not acknowledge and criticise the Sanskrit and Brahminical cosmologies and myths of Indian civilisation, and the critical role played by Western modern literary aesthetic that gave voice, however limited, to the untouchables during the colonial period. Many Dalit writers share the view that Dalits have their own cultural heritage of artistic creativity in the form of arts, crafts, oral, myths and performative traditions and have enriched Indian civilisation. It is not easy and simple to develop a new aesthetics without a thorough critique of the elite and upper-caste literary and cultural traditions. There has been some critical writing to map the aesthetic strategies of Dalit writers in recent times.⁹

Contemporary Dalit writers experiment with a variety of literary forms, narrative modes and artistic techniques in their writing. The literary features of Dalit literature cannot be briefly summarised but they have in common that they cannot leave the reader indifferent. Dalit texts take the reader to task, confront them with ethical questions and rule out passive consumption. Dalit literary texts also stun the reader with the sheer audacity with which they subvert and interrogate literary conventions, be it through radical narrative fragmentation, the redefinition of literary genre, experimentation of perspective or a revision of narrative modes of realism and magic realism. Cho. Dharman’s novel Koogai, which is discussed in this volume, is a case in point.

No Alphabet in Sight (2011), Steel Nibs Are Sprouting (2013), edited by K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu, as well as the Oxford anthologies of Tamil and Malayalam Dalit literatures, and other anthologies, have showcased contemporary Dalit literature and facilitated a global conversation. They have been indispensable to raise the awareness that there was a Dalit literature out there, to facilitate access to the texts, or excerpts of those texts and to provide context. It is only thanks to such anthologies that a wide selection of Dalit texts could be circulated and read, in and outside India. Yet they did not include material that paid critical attention to the significance of formal and aesthetic aspects of Dalit literature.

A new stage was then reached, with the need for Dalit texts to be critically read and academically assessed, facing the challenge of bringing them to a more global stage while always remembering they were coming from an extremely specific political, cultural, religious and social context. It was to bridge this gap that the volume Dalit Literatures in India (Routledge 2015) was put together and edited by Joshil K. Abraham and Judith Misrahi-Barak, laying some foundations for the critical evaluation of Dalit literature. It was the first major initiative to compile an edited volume of critical essays on Dalit literature, which were specifically written for the volume. These essays brought together Indian scholars based in India and in the diaspora, and Western scholars, showing a strong aspiration to present these literatures to a wider public beyond differences in approach, focus and method. While focusing on the literary and aesthetic aspects of Dalit literature that articulated a new political vision, they were directed at two very different academic contexts in which Dalit literature is read, taught and studied: one in India and one outside India. In one context, readers consider themselves familiar with, and knowledgeable on, Dalit literature, and in the other context, readers, more often than not, discover it for the first time. Both readerships need critical tools to be able to contextualise the literature, read it more astutely, analyse it and possibly teach it. Dalit Studies (Duke University Press, 2016) is another recent volume of essays, edited by K. Satyanarayana and Ramnarayan S. Rawat, that traces the history of Dalit emancipatory activism from colonial to present times, and offers a Dalit critique of the historical and sociological study of India. Some essays on Dalit literature in the volume highlight the political questions and debates within the Dalit literary movement from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The present collection of critical essays is a continuation of these first initiatives. The contributors are this time all Indian scholars based in India or in the diaspora. We would lie if we said this had been intentional from the start but it may be significant that this is what has happened. In fact, whether the contributors are all Indian or international as well, may reflect a tension between two different approaches. One approach would emphasise the necessity to globalise the Dalit stage and perimeter while another would insist on the necessity to spearhead the study of Dalit literature within India and in South Asia before exporting it abroad, on the basis that the specificity is such that it cannot be translated into other languages and cultures. The response may, of course, lie somewhere in between or in a combined approach: it should be possible to adopt a perspective that would be complex, multifaceted, and more inclusive than exclusive.

The volume pays particular attention to the questions of aesthetics and literary representation with reference to a wide range of Dalit literary texts. The essays developed out of papers given at the various network conferences described above, but they have all been carefully peer-reviewed, selected and revised to highlight key concerns in the contemporary analysis of Dalit literature. They...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: aesthetics and politics re-imagined
• Part I Speaking out
• Part II Writing from within: genre and gender
• Part III Reading across
• Part IV Looking through
• Bibliography