Flowering of Dalits

DALIT literature began to be mainstreamed in India with the appearance of the English translations of Marathi Dalit writing. An Anthology of Dalit Literature, edited by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot, and Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature, originally published in three volumes and later collected in a single volume, edited by Arjun Dangle (both published in 1992, the latter reissued recently in a new edition by Orient BlackSwan), were perhaps the first books that popularised the genre throughout India.

Not that there was no Dalit writing earlier: the origins of Dalit writing can be traced back to Buddhist literature; Dalit Bhakti poets like Gora, Raidas, Chokha Mela and Karmamela; and the Tamil Siddhas, or Chittars (6th to 13th centuries C.E.), many of whom must have been Dalits going by hagiographical accounts like Periyapuranam(12th century). But it was after the democratic and egalitarian thinkers such as Sree Narayana Guru, Jyotiba Phule, B.R. Ambedkar, Iyothee Thass, Sahodaran Ayyappan, Ayyankali, Poykayil Appachan and others cogently articulated the sources and modes of caste oppression that modern Dalit writing as a distinct genre began to emerge in Indian languages.

The Dalit Panthers of Maharashtra (formed in 1972) and the writers like Baburao Bagul and Namdeo Dhasal who spearheaded the movement gave an impetus to Dalit writing in Marathi following Ambedkar’s famous statement addressed to Gandhi, “Mahatma, I have no country.” The rest of the story, from the publication of Dhasal’s Golpitha (1972) onwards, is history. Now we have a significant corpus of Dalit literature in several of the Indian languages like Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Odiya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, and representative works from these are getting translated into other languages, including English.Over the past one decade or so, more than five anthologies and quite a few autobiographies and works of fiction besides theoretical works and works by individuals, including Dhasal, have been published in English by various mainstream and alternative publishing houses in India. While I hope to discuss some of these in future, let me confine myself here to the two volumes of writings from South India published recently:The Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Dalit Writing, edited by M. Dasan, V. Pratibha, Pradeepan Pampirikunnu and C.S. Chandrika, and The Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing, edited by Ravikumar and R. Azhagarasan (OUP, 2012), the first two volumes in a whole series of similar anthologies under preparation. (Let me not fail to mention here No Alphabet in Sight, another anthology of new Dalit writing from South India, edited by K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu and published by Penguin Books in 2011 whose first dossier too had carried translations from Tamil and Malayalam. The Penguin and OUP anthologies complement each other.)

The editors of The Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Dalit Writing have an important message for readers in their prefatory note: “Readers will discover the limitations of their reading practices as they encounter the emotional, intellectual and aesthetic demands of this collection and might feel uncomfortable at the challenge it poses as they realise their complicity with the status quo. These selections will also bring the mainstream critics and reviewers face to face with their own prejudices, who, insufficiently equipped to understand or accept the truth of Dalit experiences and perspectives, often label this body of writings ‘bitter’, ‘biased’, ‘militant,’ ‘angry’, etc., and might, therefore, have dismissed it as not serious literary writing.”

Dalit literature has indeed created its own alternative aesthetic by redrawing the map of literature, by discovering and exploring a whole new continent of experience that had so far been left to darkness and silence, by helping literature overcome stagnation through a cleansing renewal, by disturbing the sterile complacency of the dominant social groups, and by challenging their set mores and fixed modes of looking at reality, their stale habits of ordering knowledge, beauty and power and their established literary canons, bringing to focus neglected, suppressed or marginalised aspects of experience, vision, language and reality and forcing the community to refashion its tools and observe itself critically from fresh and different angles.

Dalit poetry, for example, challenges the assumptions and injunctions of classical poetics by breaking its rules of “propriety”, “balance”, “restraint” and “understatement”. Dalit literature also questions the middle-class notions of linguistic “decency” by using words that classical aesthetics would consider “uncouth” (chyutasamskara ), “rustic” (gramya) or “obscene” (asleela).

Both the anthologies carry exhaustive introductions that trace the origins of Dalit writing in the respective languages and put this non-canonical body of writing in its social, historical and cultural contexts and provide readers with a conceptual framework that is sure to help them appreciate the discourse better. They contain selections from both creative and critical genres and reveal the range of concerns, forms, styles and perspectives encompassed by the standardising term “Dalit writing” that often conceals its thematic and idiomatic diversity.

The term “Dalit” began to be used in Kerala only in the 1970s chiefly as the hegemonic discourse of the Kerala renaissance, despite its reformative zeal, succeeded in camouflaging the specificity of Dalit discourse and its difference from the dominant discourse of the time. It is to be noted here that the gaps and silences of the discourse of the Kerala renaissance began to be discovered and critiqued by subaltern intellectuals only in the last one decade or two when the famous “Kerala Model” of development also found its astute critics.

Dalits and tribal people had been excluded from the idea of Malayali identity as even the historic Malayali Memorial, the mass petition submitted to the Maharaja of Travancore in 1891, did not demand jobs only for these sections. The class discourse too was used to render invisible the “cultural, symbolic and social capital” that their elite caste status had conferred on them. Many of the upper-caste reformers who pioneered the renaissance were progressive within their community but reactionary outside it.

Their idea of emancipation was confined to their own respective communities. It was this context that forced Dalit organisations like the Sadhujana Paripalana Yogam to claim a distinct political space within the scenario of the emerging colonial modernity, leading to the struggles for the rights to education, hygiene, land and modern citizenship itself. Ayyankali, who wore clean clothes and a turban like the aristocrats and followed their physical postures, provided historical agency to the Dalits and turned the Dalit body into a site of resistance to feudal servitude and the Dalits’ labour and identity into negotiating signifiers. His anti-caste approach displeased the leaders of post-Independence parliamentary politics, but he would be the last to collaborate.

Other movements followed, throwing up leaders like Poikayil Appachan, Pampadi John Joseph, K.P. Vallon and organisations, including the radical SEEDIAN (Socially, Educationally and Economically Depressed Indian Ancient Natives) of the 1970s and the current DHRM (Dalit Human Rights Movement). The most important struggles in Kerala, like those in Muthanga and Chengara in the last decades, were led by Dalits and Adivasis who found that they had no seats in the international socialist feast and that the Marxist scheme of the class struggle might never fully grasp the complex cultural issues of anti-caste struggles.