Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature

THIS CHAPTER returns to the specter of Munshi Premchand in the Hindi Dalit counterpublic sphere and considers the ways in which members of the groups discussed in chapter 1 have engaged in public criticism of Premchand’s works representing Dalit characters. Foremost among these has been his famous short story “Kafan” (“The Shroud,” 1936). The Dalit debate over this story illlustrates two fundamental aspects of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic. First, it serves as a case in point of the kind of radical re-reading of mainstream Dalit literary criticism that constitutes the political “difference” of the Dalit literary perspective. Second, the particularly contentious topic of “Kafan” among Dalit writers also serves to highlight many of the fissures within the Dalit counterpublic sphere, most prominently along gender lines, and demonstrates that there is no single Dalit point of view.

What is significant about the ongoing debates over Premchand and his treatment of Dalit issues and characters is that they reveal the construction and negotiation of multiple counterpublic identities within a single space. The debates over Premchand and “Kafan” use the iconic author and his writing as a jumping-off point to negotiate disparate sub-identities and agendas within the Dalit counterpublic sphere that fracture along multiple fault lines, particularly that of gender. Though “Kafan” is widely appreciated in the Indian literary mainstream as a particularly sensitive portrayal of the societal degradation of Dalits, contemporary Dalit critics rethink the story’s significance through the lens of Dalit chetnā. The growing articulation of a Dalit feminist rhetorical identity is also refracted in continued debates over “Kafan,” as are the responsibilities all Dalit writers shoulder in representing the “reality” of Dalit life and imagining the utopian possibilities of a transformed social order.

“Kafan” is one of several Premchand stories that sympathetically considers Dalit social degradation in rural Indian society, an innovation for modern Indian literature in the early decades of the twentieth century. Such stories by Premchand, none quite so controversial, include “Sadgati,” “Ghāsvāli,” “Dūdh kā Dām” (discussed in the Introduction), and “Ṭhākur kā Kuāṁ.”¹ “Kafan” is about two Dalit characters, Ghisu and Madhav, a father and son, both from the Chamar caste. When the story opens, Ghisu and Madhav are sitting outside their small hut eating roasted potatoes and trying to ignore the screams of Madhav’s wife inside who is dying in childbirth. Neither will go inside to see her, out of a certain amount of shame, and each also fears that the other will guzzle down more than his fair share of potatoes. Finally, bellies full, they lie down to sleep in front of the dying fire. Premchand explains that the two are known as the laziest people in the village, that in their pursuit of doing as little work as possible, they live on the edge of starvation. Premchand writes,

A society in which those who labored night and day were not in much better shape than these two; a society in which compared to the peasants, those who knew how to exploit the peasants’ weaknesses were much better off—in such a society, the birth of this kind of mentality was no cause for surprise. We’ll say that compared to the peasants, Ghisu was more insightful; and instead of joining the mindless group of peasants, he had joined the group of clever, scheming tricksters. Though indeed, he wasn’t skillful in following the rules and customs of the tricksters. Thus while other members of his group became chiefs and headmen of villages, at him the whole village wagged its finger. But still, he did have the consolation that if he was in bad shape, at least he wasn’t forced to do the back-breaking labor of the peasants, and others didn’t take improper advantage of his simplicity and voicelessness.²

It is impossible to overstate the prominence of Premchand in north Indian literary and cultural imagination. Significantly, he was the first noteworthy, modern Hindi writer to represent low caste and low-class characters in his writings. He is thus heralded not only for the influence of his realist style on modern Hindi and Urdu prose writing but also for the social conscience evident in many of his literary works. According to Indian literary historian Sisir Kumar Das, “Premchand is the greatest artist of the suffering of untouchables, not only because of his great anxiety for the century-long oppression of the Harijans, but for his uncanny sense of realism with which he presents the characters belonging to the oppressed group, free from all sentimentality and pious idealism.”³ Francesca Orsini suggests in a collection of Premchand’s writings in English translation, “His strong social conscience and radical politics, which brought him closer and closer to socialism, were rooted in an utterly secular and inclusive view of the Indian nation, which makes him a particularly valuable and rare role model these days.”⁴ Some more cautiously suggest, however, that Premchand’s attitude toward Dalits was steeped in Gandhian rhetoric, decrying the contemporary deterioration of social relations between castes rather than challenging the caste system itself. Further, while Premchand did address the plight of Dalits in his fiction in his career, it was from a sympathetic, rather than revolutionary, perspective.⁵

Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, in his extensive study of the representation of Dalits in Premchand’s writings, extols Premchand’s “idealism” in presenting Dalit characters who are more honest and upstanding than his upper-caste characters. But Upadhyay also points out that Premchand wrote from a Hindu reformist and socialist-Marxist point of view, ignoring lower caste protest movements and having himself little direct experience with Dalits.⁶ He looks at “Kafan,” one of the last stories Premchand published, as an aberration from his usual critiques of caste, reading the complete dehumanization of the main characters in the story as a particularly pointed critique of society’s disposal of them. He writes, “[They] … exist completely outside society except for the purpose of bare survival. Besides this, they do not have any need for society, as the latter does not have any need for them. They are fully outcast.”⁷

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

Although Premchand, as one of the few important Hindi authors of the twentieth century to actually address caste and untouchability in his writings, has always been under the critical gaze of the Dalit counterpublic, the BDSA’s burning of his novel Raṅgbhūmi renewed many of the old Premchand debates and made them urgent once again. The book burning, in all its attention-grabbing intent, made the counterpublic debates about Premchand visible in the mainstream public sphere, and many Dalit writers found themselves at pains to contribute to the counterpublic’s positioning vis-a-vis the literary icon. In the months after the book burning, Dalit writers and literary critics hashed out the significance of their critical stance towards Premchand and consequently the standards by which they differentiate between Dalit and non-Dalit literature. Many Dalit writers condemned Premchand’s depiction of the two Chamar characters in “Kafan” as such heartless and lazy drunks, paying little attention to the critique of institutionalized inequality that produces such characters, a critique that is clear in Premchand’s story. For example, BDSA president Sumanakshar comments in the prominent Delhi-based Hindi Dalit literary journal Apekṣā,

In six lakh villages in the country today you can go into any Dalit settlement and not find a single man with such a lack of sympathy. On the contrary the members of their families show more love and compassion to one another than upper caste families. True love in mutual relations only really occurs among Dalits so why would Premchand make such a characterization of them in “Kafan”? Only so that he could win the praises of the upper caste Brahmins and have them call his work “literature.” Premchand indeed won the praises of the Brahmins and was bestowed with the rank of emperor for his literature which displays Dalits as loveless, soulless, base characters.⁹

This kind of critique—suggesting that all Dalits by nature are inherently more humanist and compassionate than members of the upper castes—seems at first easy to dismiss as purely ideological, neither literary nor realistic. Indeed, this kind of blatant stereotyping is sometimes typical of subaltern political discourses, an obvious, and perhaps overdone, corrective to long histories of demeaning rhetoric directed toward marginal communities that has strengthened and protected the hierarchical status quo. Barbara Harlow has highlighted such aggrandizement of the benevolent nature of oppressed communities by their leaders in Resistance Literature. Here she quotes Maxime Rodinson from his book People Without a Country: the Kurds and Kurdistan:

Kancha Ilaiah, Telugu Dalit activist and intellectual, often provides categorical descriptions of the differences between Dalit and “Hindu” societies that appear grounded in a similarly simplified ideology. For example, he writes about Dalits in his influential Why I am not a Hindu, “In these societies, hegemonic relations in the forms that are visible among the Hindus are absent…. Among the Hindus the man-woman relationship is conditioned by manipulation and deceptivity [sic]. Dalitbahujan relationships on the other hand are based on openness.”¹¹ Author Meera Nanda, in a recent review of Ilaiah’s latest book, Post-Hindu India, expresses frustration with this kind of categorical statement, “The wild generalisations that abound in this and Why I am not a Hindu could have easily been avoided had Ilaiah bothered to check his raw feelings against the available sociological and anthropological data. For all his insistence that Dalit-Bahujans and Adivasis are the custodians of scientific temper, Ilaiah himself does not exhibit a great deal of social scientific methodology in his writings.”¹²

But when we put Sumanakshar’s seemingly similar critique into the context of an emerging Dalit critical discourse, his claims begin to take on more weight. Sumanakshar charges Premchand with creating negative Dalit characters to win the praise of an elite Brahmin readership who would exult in finding confirmation of their opinion of Dalits as slovenly, inhuman creatures. For Sumanakshar, such debased characters are not “realistic,” and his notion of realism is inextricable from the exigencies of honor and forthrightness embodied in the concept of Dalit chetnā. His notion of realism is deeply entwined with an idealistic perspective of Dalit society as ultimately humane and compassionate, and Sumanakshar believes that any “realistic” Dalit character would be representative of that ideal. He regards Premchand’s depiction of Ghisu and Madhav as devious and selfish characters, and therefore as false and inauthentic representatives of a Dalit community under vicious attack by a non-Dalit writer interested in catering to the casteist ideology of the dominant public.

Sumanakshar and others weave their ideological critique into a novel discourse of aesthetic critique. “Authentic” realism is defined in Dalit readings of Premchand by the critical lens of Dalit chetnā. The first line of Sharankumar Limbale’s Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature reads, “By Dalit literature I mean writing about Dalits by Dalit writers with a Dalit consciousness.” He goes on to define Dalit consciousness: “The Dalit consciousness in Dalit literature is the revolutionary mentality connected with struggle. Ambedkarite thought is the inspiration for this consciousness. Dalit consciousness makes slaves conscious of their slavery. Dalit consciousness is an important seed for Dalit literature, it is separate and distinct from the consciousness of other writers. Dalit literature is demarcated as unique because of this consciousness.”¹³ Omprakash Valmiki writes of Dalit consciousness in his book, Dalit Sāhitya kā Saundaryashāstra (Aesthetics of Dalit Literature), “Dalit chetnā is deeply concerned with the question, ‘Who am I? What is my identity?’ The strength of character of Dalit authors comes from these questions.”¹⁴ Dalit chetnā is based on the liberation ideology of Ambedkar, expressed in a text in which a Dalit character is fully cognizant of the religious and political origins of his exploited social status, and rather than succumbing to acceptance, he is enlivened by a desire to struggle for freedom, not just for himself, but for his whole community.¹⁵ This spirit of impassioned struggle for the collective good is regarded by Dalit writers as an ideal message. It is a loyal expression of the Ambedkarite message of the human dignity of Dalits. It is Dalit experience rendered realistically, but for many Dalit writers, then, the question of whether the Dalit experience has been depicted realistically is also dependent upon how honorably the Dalit character is portrayed.

According to some, a lack of Dalit chetnā can come from confusion between caste and class-related oppression. Omprakash Valmiki (1950–2013), one of the most celebrated contemporary Hindi Dalit writers, also finds fault with Premchand’s characterization of the Dalit men in “Kafan,” suggesting in his article “Premchand: Sandarbh Dalit Vimarsh” (“Premchand: Context of the Dalit Debate”) that the author wrongly conflates Dalits with farmers and peasants who face economic exploitation but who do not suffer from specific problems of caste inequality. Valmiki writes,

On one hand in his works he writes about the goal of changing one’s heart, on the other hand he also reprimands Dalits for drinking alcohol and eating the meat of dead animals. The characters of Ghisu and Madhav in his story “Kafan” are Chamars, but the story does not raise any issue that is related to the problems of Chamars or Dalits. There is only a detailed depiction of their idleness and heartlessness. Even leftist critics believe this story of Premchand’s to be his best and most artistic. Many critics say that Ghisu and Madhav are representative of the agricultural class that is known as the lumpen proletariat.¹⁶

The charge here—that Premchand ignores the caste-related abuses faced by Dalits in a Marxist-leftist outlook on Indian society—is not uncommon among Dalit writers and critics. Valmiki argues further, “Not just Premchand, but several Hindi writers, thinkers, and critics put all farmers, laborers, and Dalits in the same box when they think about them. But all these people do not have the same problems; caste is purely a religious and social issue, one that influences every other aspect of life. In Premchand’s works, this is a point of confusion. He sees this from a stance of idealism and reformism.”¹⁷ The reformism that Valmiki denigrates here is the process of “sanskritization,” suggested by Premchand’s exhortations (as read by Valmiki) to Dalits to stop consuming alcohol and meat. This idea of social reform, common in the nationalist era but rejected by Ambedkar, places the responsibility of the abjectness of Dalits squarely at their own feet as a result of their own “dirty” habits and further suggests that by emulating Brahminical caste practices they could raise themselves out of destitution. Like Sumanakshar, Valmiki sees an unfair attack on all of Dalit society in the representation of the characters of Ghisu and Madhav. Unlike Sumanakshar, however, Valmiki suggests this is due to Premchand’s misguided belief in the primacy of poverty over untouchability as the reason for Ghisu and Madhav’s depravity. In these critiques it becomes clear that the boundaries of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic are located squarely in the interpretive framework of caste, and Dalit critics are careful to mark their ideological difference from Marxist thinkers. Caste and its attendant problems, are, in their thinking, entirely separate from economic inequality, which is a symptom of social oppression rather than its cause. Premchand is relegated to the margins of the counterpublic space by figures such as Valmiki, then, for failing to recognize the primacy of caste over class in the Dalit worldview.

Similarly, the point comes up again and again in Dalit counterpublic discourse that, in matters of social reform, Premchand was a follower of Gandhi, not Ambedkar. This is significant for Dalit writers who claim that Dalit consciousness was inspired solely by Ambedkar and who view Gandhi as a traitor to Dalits in the name of national unity. The disagreement between Ambedkar and Gandhi over separate electorates for Dalits, Gandhi’s fast in opposition, and the ultimate resolution in the form of the Pune Pact arise regularly as examples of Premchand’s infidelity to Dalits, as he wrote at the time in support of Gandhi.¹⁸ Valmiki writes,

When Gandhi did his fast unto the death over the question of separate electorates in Yarvada Jail, Premchand wrote continuously on this subject. But he too saw these problems with exactly the same perspective as Gandhi-ji, he too shared in the same opinion with every Hindu author, politician, and thinker. He too exhorted Dalits to put faith in nationalism (rāṣṭrīya-dharm), despite the hellish lives they lived, attacks they suffered, and inferior lives full of insult they were forced to face.¹⁹

Mohandas Naimishray, another of Hindi Dalit literature’s most widely respected and translated authors, adds, “Was Premchand a storyteller with a Dalit consciousness? The concept of Dalit consciousness is so well-defined that it is not possible to attribute it to Premchand. He was a Kayasth by birth and Dalits cannot be blind to this fact…. During Ambedkar’s Mahar movement when the Manusmṛti was burned, Premchand kept silent and this is sufficient basis to say that he was not a Dalit writer.”²⁰ For Valmiki and Naimishray, Premchand’s political affiliations and public expression outside of literature are intrinsic to his ability to understand and convey a sense of Dalit consciousness. For Valmiki, it is the problem of Premchand’s vociferous support of Gandhi in the matter of nationalist politics that precludes him from being considered a representative of Dalit interests in literature. For Naimishray, it is the very nature of his caste identity and lack of affiliation with Ambedkar’s infamous counterpublic performance of burning the Manusmṛti, the obvious inspiration for the more recent BDSA performance, that makes Premchand incapable of expressing Dalit consciousness in any of his works.

True to the form of counterpublic discourse, however, there is another side to the literary and ideological debate over Premchand, one that suggests Hindi Dalit writers need to rethink the ways they evaluate literature. Anita Bharti, Dalit feminist writer and activist and secretary of the DLS, critiques the reactionary responses of members of the Dalit community, such as the BDSA, who refuse to acknowledge Premchand as a forebear of Dalit literature. She writes in defense of Premchand as a singular luminary among other Hindi writers,

Why do Dalit writers oppose Premchand? On one hand they believe that besides “Kafan” his stories “Ṭhākur kā Kuāṁ,” “Pus kī Rāt,” “Sadgati,” and “Ghāsvālī” to be great Dalit stories, but on the other hand, on the subject of “Kafan” they label him with epithets like “anti-Dalit” and “non-Dalit”. If we were to make a comparison between Premchand’s Dalit characters and the Dalit characters of other Hindi writers, then we can decidedly conclude that Premchand’s characters are much more prominent, argumentative, fearless, rebellious, and willing to clash with Brahminism.²¹

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

Other writers, some non-Dalit but writing from the platform of the Dalit counterpublic, have warned against defining Dalit literary reception along caste lines to the mission of promoting Dalit literature in the broader public sphere. Literary critic Mohammad Azhar Dherivala, in the Dalit journal Apekṣā, suggests that an expansion of the definition of Dalit consciousness could in fact uncover supportive representations of Dalits in Indian literature going back long before Ambedkar.

Dherivala’s plea for Dalit writers to rethink Dalit consciousness beyond those who are Dalit by birth represents the liberal, inclusive side of an ongoing, deep-seated debate in the Hindi Dalit counterpublic. Can only Dalits exhibit Dalit consciousness? Should a specific caste identity be required to voice the narrative of caste-related suffering? These are fundamental questions about who has the ultimate authority to speak, not only as an individual but also as a representative of the community.

Several Dalit writers recognize this need for debating and rethinking these questions and for the contemporaneous re-reading of texts in order to continuously reconstruct the counterpublic space so carefully carved out by Hindi Dalit writers and readers. Jaiprakash Kardam, eminent Hindi Dalit literary critic, author, and editor of the journal Dalit Sāhitya, writes, “To raise questions or to record difference of opinion not only is a man’s democratic right, but is also a signifier of intellectual progressivism. No man or opinion is immune to questioning. Even if someone is to raise questions about Premchand, this should be viewed as a productive thing. Raising questions about something is not the same as insulting it.”²⁴ And Anita Bharti, although staunchly against the burning of Raṅgbhūmi as a careless, reactionary, media-grabbing event, and as a critic who has written many times in defense of Premchand as a Dalit writer, also resolutely defends the right to criticize Premchand and other mainstream writers in Dalit counterpublic discourse. She maintains, however, that these criticisms should be thoughtful rather than reactionary.

Today Premchand is a political topic. If a Dalit writer wants to discuss Premchand’s perspective on Dalits (dalit pakṣ), then what is wrong with that? Can’t a non-Dalit writer raise questions about Dalit literature, its subject matter, its philosophy, and its aesthetic standard? How is this different—both the thought and the paper on which it is written are mine. Several non-Dalit writers who are blindly reverential (andhabhakt) to Premchand condemn any “Premchand detractor” (“Premchand virodhī”). It seems to them that being against Premchand is somehow the Dalits’ first priority.²⁵

Thus the “problem” of Premchand has long been a subject of discussion in the Hindi Dalit literary counterpublic. When the BDSA, on July 31, 2004, burned Premchand’s Rangbhūmi in an open square in the heart of New Delhi, these issues were brought into greater focus in the print media of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic in the years that followed. An event that the mainstream media briefly seized upon and quickly rejected as a protest by a marginal community has sustained an overwhelming presence in Hindi Dalit counterpublic discourse. In an article published in the March 2005 special issue of Apekṣā, an issue entirely dedicated to Premchand and the debate over Raṅgbhūmi, critic Ish Ganganiya summarizes the different interests implicated in this debate.

There has been no shroud (kafan) for the saga of Premchand since July 31, 2004 when Raṅgbhūmi’s funeral pyre burned. As a result, in the halls of Dalits and non-Dalits, as though between the pen-soldiers that have drawn their swords,²⁶ a sequence of demonstrations of power have begun, by means of discussions on literary stages, meetings, and letters and magazines. There are no signs that this back and forth will be finished in the near future. The simple reason for this is that the producers of Ambedkarite (Dalit) literature, want to establish their own culture and protect the social, economic, and cultural benefits of downtrodden, backward society. They are therefore firmly resolved and compelled to perform a re-reading of traditional literature and history….”²⁷

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

In his book, Dharamveer makes the following surprising interpretive claim about “Kafan”:

The whole story would become newly clear if Premchand would have written in the final line of the story this reality of Dalit life that Buddhiya was pregnant with the zamīndār’s child. That he had raped Buddhiya in the field. Then, those words would shed light on the story like a lamp and we would understand everything. That even while Ghisu and Madhav wished to be able to do more, in fact they could only resist by refusing to call the child their own. Who will admit that this is the real pain of Dalits? A Dalit or a non-Dalit? This is the reality of Dalit exploitation and oppression that so often their offspring are not actually their own. Compared to this kind of exploitation, the economic exploitation of Dalits seems so small!²⁹

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

Dharamveer’s interpretation of the story, and his extension of that interpretation into a commentary on the intersection of caste and gender in the construction of oppressive social hierarchies, in some ways echoes the feminist claim that the key “difference” in Dalit women’s experience and identity from both that of Dalit men and that of other women is the constant threat of sexual violence. In these discussions, violence has emerged as the lynchpin around which both the experience and enforcement of gendered and caste identities revolve. For example, Kannabiran and Kannabiran argue that caste and gender cannot be disassociated as “twin mediators of oppression,” the logic of sexual violence being central to each. Citing numerous high profile cases of sexual assault against Dalit women by upper-caste men, they point to the “mediation of inter-caste relations through a redefinition of gendered spaces,” or in other words, the ways in which upper-caste men appropriate Dalit women’s bodies as a way to emasculate and control Dalit men. If the “‘manhood’ of a caste is defined both by the degree of control men exercise over women and the degree of passivity of women in the caste,” then, logically, “the structure of relations in caste society castrates [the Dalit man] through the expropriation of his women.” An attack on a Dalit woman is an attack on her entire community, “an assertion of power over all women [and men] in her caste.”³¹ According to Ruth Manorama, founder and president of the National Federation of Dalit Women,

Ideas of collective violence, customary access, and expropriation of women’s bodies are what undergird the logic of what is described in chapter 7 as the “Dalit rape script.” It is around the societally enforced logic of this rape script that the Dalit feminist standpoint is constructed. Yet while the understanding of sexual violence as constitutive of Dalit women’s subjectivities has emerged as common currency in scholarly and activist agendas, the appropriation of such an argument by a male Dalit critic like Dharamveer and his reading of “Kafan” through such an interpretive lens has caused consternation within the Hindi Dalit literary sphere.

Several Dalit feminist responses to Dharamveer’s argument, published in Strī Naitiktā kā Tālibānīkaraṇ (The Talibanisation of Feminist Ethics), a 2007 special issue of the Delhi-based Dalit and Adivasi literary magazine Yuddhrat Ām Ādmi (“The Struggling Common Man,” pub. Ramnika Foundation), suggest the necessity of reconsidering the notion that the singular differentiating experience of Dalit women’s lives is sexual violence, or the threat of sexual violence. The critique of Dharamveer’s proposed rescripting of Premchand’s story and its ramifications for the identity formation of women in Dalit society demonstrates the ways in which a new wave of Dalit feminist discourse is working to alter the terms of the social script, one which determines (as Dharamveer has done) that sexual violence against Dalit women is determinative and constitutive of oppressive caste hierarchies.

The fundamental argument of the feminist contributors to this volume is that despite the reality of Dalit women’s victimization by the social scripts of caste, gender, and sexual violence, Dalit literature needs to serve as a medium whereby the dignity of Dalit women is restored. Therefore, Dalit women writers such as Anita Bharti, Kusum Meghwal, Pushpa Vivek and others raise significant questions about the “obsession” of many Dalit writers with narratives of the rape and sexual exploitation of Dalit women. They argue that the narrative representation by Dalit women of their own lives is “much more expansive. It’s about their education, labor, organization of community rights etc … sexual exploitation is not the only problem facing Dalit women.”³³

Finally, what happens when, as in the case of Dharamveer, the discursive constructions of Dalit consciousness and the articulation of the “difference” of Dalit women colludes to rob Dalit women of agency outside of that of allegorical victim of caste oppression? According to Anita Bharti,

How many Dalit writers do we have in front of us now who provide dignity to Dalit women and give importance to their lives? There are certainly exceptions, but we can count them with our fingers. Usually, in trying to pointlessly become an “icon” of Dalit literature, they just call [Dalit women] names like Buddhiyā, devdāsī, rakhail. Those who graciously don’t do this, slap those who do on their backs.³⁴

Such a critique also suggests the frustration among many Dalit women writers with the condescending reactions toward their own political and literary aspirations. In an open letter to Dharamveer in this same volume, Pushpa Vivek asserts, “Today’s women are educated and have come to understand their rights. Whenever a Dalit woman tries to exercise her own authority over those rights, then our own male Dalit authors ridicule her and throw stumbling blocks in her path, because they cannot stomach the idea of advancing women to the equal status of men.”³⁵ She cites Dharamveer’s condemnation of Anita Bharti. In his book, Dharamveer writes,

I find it even worse when some Dalit woman protects a non-Dalit man, whether it’s Anita Bharti or someone else. Anita Bharti praises an adulterous man like Premchand…. Does Anita Bharti want to end up like Buddhiya? I don’t think the poor woman was at fault but there is a major problem with Bharti’s thinking. When the Dalit woman was sexually assaulted, the home was violated. Then the zamīndār’s seed took hold in the belly of the Chamar….³⁶

According to Dharamveer, the Dalit problem is not tied to poverty or inequality, but to the sexual misappropriation of Dalit women: “The issue is not limited to poverty—the issue is not poverty at all—it’s the enslavement of the sexuality of Dalit women.”³⁷

According to Vimal Thorat, whose editorial opens the volume, the “new version” of “Kafan” that Dharamveer came up with to restore the honor of Ghisu and Madhav (in giving them a righteous reason for letting young Buddhiya languish and finally die) does so only at the expense of Buddhiya herself.³⁸ She argues that this kind of automatic reliance on the abuse and stigmatization of women results from a misogynist perspective (based on a reverence of the infamous classical text, the Manusmṛti, that condemns both Dalits and women to abject existences). In a sarcastic piece (she regularly refers to Dharamveer as “Dharmguru”) in which she condemns Dharamveer and other male writers who support him for themselves ironically adopting a brahmanical attitude toward Dalit women, she suggests that the bigotry toward sexually abused women that results in this sort of interpretation is no different than the bigotry manifested towards both women and Dalits in Manu’s ancient treatise.

Bharti too recognizes the real life experience of gendered violence that marks Dalit womanhood, “Even today Dalit women are pronounced witches or demonesses and killed with sticks and stones. They have sticks thrust in their vaginas as punishment.”³⁹ But she and others also read Dharamveer’s analysis as enacting a similar kind of virtual attack against women, fetishizing and exploiting this violence to aggrandize themselves and limit the imaginative possibilities of Dalit women’s literary roles. The rancor of their various critiques aside, these feminist critics charge that Dharamveer’s manipulation of the rape script in his attempt to critique and re-script Premchand’s story from the critical position of Dalit chetnā reifies Dalit women’s bodies as merely marginal, hyper-symbolic sites where allegories of caste oppression are performed. Dalit feminist literary critics thus demonstrate the inability of either of these communities to fully represent their identities and life experiences and advocate for the wresting back of their personhood from its passive exploitation in power struggles between men.

The construction of discourse, both celebratory and critical, around cultural symbols is a practice that intimately engages the representative symbol and its constitutive public in a reflexive process of construction and re-construction. In the forward to the English translation of Amrit Rai’s biography of Munshi Premchand, Alok Rai discusses the dialectical relationship between an author and “the social order in which he achieves resonance and cultural centrality.”⁴⁰ In this dialectical relationship texts determine contexts and vice versa, therefore “… if the social order, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways, ‘determines’ the truly creative author, it is a measure of that ‘creativity’ that a social order, particularly in its less available and relatively recessive aspects, becomes knowable through the works of such authors.” He asserts further, “… one may ‘read’ the social order through the texts of an author, particularly one who reaches cultural centrality.”⁴¹ It is important here to consider the reflexivity between social context, or in this case a social movement, and its authors.