⁅ 6 ⁆  ALIENATION AND LOSS IN THE DALIT EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY

My beloved kid Piloo hanging upside down—it was a terrifying sight. Kaka had flayed his hide. In just a short while my leaping-jumping Piloo had been reduced to a pile of meat. Soon customers would buy his meat from the shop. Someone would buy his testicles, someone his head, and someone else his trotters. Some poor tanner’s wife would buy his entrails to satisfy her alcoholic husband’s desire and to fill her hungry children’s stomachs. No one would remember my bounding Piloo, my sweet kid goat.

—Ajay Navaria, “Bali”

 

THIS VIVID description of the butchering of a kid goat through a child’s eyes, and the growing awareness in this young boy’s consciousness of the gulf of meaning between the boisterous antics of a cuddly kid goat and the sum of its (body) parts in the meat market, comes from the story “Sacrifice” (“Bali”) by Delhi-based Dalit author Ajay Navaria.¹ In his participation in the killing and dismembering of his beloved kid, the boy undergoes his first experience of alienation, a narrative theme prevalent throughout Navaria’s fictional narratives. This traumatic moment is the beginning of a distancing of the protagonist from the “traditional” occupation of his family (butchering), and eventually a physical distancing from his family’s village and a social and psychological distancing from their ways of thinking and identifying themselves in society. The emotion of this passage underscores a salient theme: the emotional toll that this alienation (from home, family, and traditional belief systems and social practices) takes on the protagonist, who remains as scarred by this separation as he is liberated from the strictures of his “old” caste identity.

This chapter will push the discussions of previous chapters in a new direction. Navaria’s stories do indeed exhibit allegiance to the stylistics of Dalit consciousness, particularly in his transparent sermons about the injustices meted out to Dalits in feudal village society or about the gender equality among Dalit communities versus the cruel patriarchy of Brahminical society. However, there are also moments in each of his narratives where Navaria takes experimental steps; plays with time, space, and liminal transitions; and subtly challenges aesthetic and thematic norms of Dalit literature. This is achieved in large part by a narrative focus on the Dalit individual rather than on the community. Navaria’s characters are true, rounded characters, rather than archetypal stand-ins representing an entire community, and they often undergo emotional and psychological transformations in the course of the narrative. Navaria’s stories address the crisis of identity that befalls middle-class Dalits who have achieved a relative level of professional and material status in the modern Indian city. His characters are educated and politicized, comfortable speaking in the modern vernacular of the urban Indian, steeped in Ambedkarite religious and social theory, and patrons of the institutions of capitalist modernization, such as fast-food restaurants and mobile phone dealers. An ideological impulse is behind all of Navaria’s writing, a clarity of vision that shapes his short fiction and sets it at the forefront of contemporary Hindi literature. His resistant spirit draws the reader in—his strident critique of casteist social hierarchies and the clear-eyed perception of the violence these social hierarchies inflict on family relationships and individual psyches. Navaria stands alone in contemporary Hindi literature for his analytical, sensitive narrative treatment of the modern urban Dalit male.

Despite being himself a modern, educated, urban Dalit male, Navaria does not intend his stories to be interpreted as autobiographical, although they are clearly informed by his own experiences and experiments in self-understanding. Born in Kotla Mubarakpur in Delhi to a Rajasthani family (his grandfather moved from a rural village near Jaipur to Delhi in 1942, and such a move from village to city is one Navaria explores repeatedly in his stories), Navaria is one of the leading young writers on the Hindi Dalit literary scene, though to relegate his growing significance to the Dalit literary sphere alone belies the radical innovations his writings are introducing to Hindi literature in general. A professor of Hindu ethics at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, Navaria is the author of a published novel and two collections of short stories,² as well as several stories and critical essays that have been published in a wide variety of literary, academic, and activist journals. He regularly publishes new work in Hindi literary magazines, Dalit and otherwise, and has served as guest editor of the Hindi literary monthly Haṁs twice, once for a special Dalit issue and again for an issue focusing on young voices in Hindi literature.³ Navaria, along with stalwart Omprakash Valmiki, represented the Hindi Dalit literary sphere on a national stage for the first time at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2010 and participated in several panels in 2012.

Navaria’s richly imagined prose proves that literary aesthetics is central to contemporary Hindi Dalit literary production. We look to his stories to understand how Dalit authors wield aesthetic and stylistic tools in the construction of political consciousness. In his own self-analysis, Navaria aligns himself with a tradition of fearless writers who express their dreams and convictions even in the face of social approbation. He writes in his introduction to his first published book, the short-story collection Paṭkathā and Other Stories,

My stories are the creative works of my dreams. For your convenience you can call them stories, but to understand them fully, you can think of them as dreams. Can such dreams be dreamed in Indian culture and society and not be understood as anti-social and anti-religious? Should an author quit dreaming in fear of religious decrees or fatwas? Should he give it up? I have chosen courage for myself from our tradition of fearlessness.⁴

Yet, as committed as Navaria is to writing the truth of his dreams, he is also aware of the tension between social activism and the art of literature. He suggests that his stories are like “bridges,” passageways to new terrains of consciousness that he invites readers to cross with him. He does not force them, however, and leaves his more strident political messages for nonliterary realms.

A story for me is a bridge between the private and the public. The author crosses this bridge and invites others to come across it themselves as well. This minimal activism could irritate some, but on an artistic level a more activist stance than this would be the death of the work for me. The integrity of a work should not be compromised, maybe this is why I chose other areas for stronger social critique.⁵

Readers of Navaria’s fiction will nevertheless be hard pressed to ignore the socially progressive impulse behind his writing. But readers who are conversant with the thematic and stylistic standards of Dalit writing, as young as the genre is, will also recognize Navaria’s purposeful complication of ideas of heroism, innocence, enlightenment, progress, and the like that are increasingly understood as normative.

This chapter is concerned with three of Navaria’s short stories: “Subcontinent” (“Upmahādvīp,” 2004), “Sacrifice” (“Bali,” 2004), and “Eternal Law” (“Es Dhamm Sanantano,” 2003).⁶ The stories are unique in their theoretical considerations of alienation, as well as the physical and figurative distance between rural and urban Indian spaces. Furthermore, they evince conventions of literary modernism in order to effect a reconsideration of the promise of modernity and the secular foundations of the nation-state to deliver Dalits from marginalization.

The scope of the aesthetic strategies and multilayered thematic content of Navaria’s stories cannot be brought to light by relying on theoretical approaches from the scholars and writers discussed so far in this book, however. Rather, they require that we establish an alternative critical idiom and reading strategy that unpacks Navaria’s narrative strategies and establishes how his short fiction expands the normative themes and structures of Dalit literature. As previously discussed, these include the interweaving of conventions of realism and melodrama, a privileging of narratives of atrocities and injustices located in a rural or village context, differentiations of language and register to evoke differing levels of political consciousness, and a fidelity to Ambedkarite political philosophy in the construction of Dalit chetnā. Navaria’s texts instead are characterized by structural innovation, including obfuscating language that creates a sense of alienation, as well as regular constructions of flashbacks, sequences of both narrative and traumatic memory, and liminal temporalities.

Navaria’s stories can be read as narratives of alienation, accounts of complex negotiations with the modern, and meditations on the widening gap between urban and rural spaces and their attendant social and political ideologies in the Indian subcontinent. Navaria’s stories make it clear that the transition from village to city, from feudal caste hierarchies to the pseudo-equality of a secular modernity, is fraught with conflict. Significantly, this conflict is domestic and personal; it is manifested in intergenerational divisions, misunderstandings, and aggression, or with a pervasive sense of alienation from oneself, one’s community, and one’s environment. These stories are not cautionary tales about the dangers of leaving family, home, and tradition for a stake in the promise of casteless, classless, undifferentiated, and “universal” subjecthood of the modern nation–state, but rather are introspective meditations on the losses of self and community that necessarily come with doing so.

A consideration of some important discussions of modernism and alienation will provide a useful framework for understanding these themes in Navaria’s stories. Part one of this book characterized Dalit literature as a counterpublic sphere of writers, publishers, and readers who inhabit a space of alternative discourse that exists outside of the normative public sphere, a literary body defined by its oppositional, or marginal, relationship to a wider public. Discussions throughout part two have introduced the exhortations of a developing Dalit literary aesthetic and have suggested that some of the most important tenets of this aesthetic include addressing “distasteful” subject matter, such as the details of hereditary Dalit occupations like tanning and waste-collecting, evoking violent imagery of rape and assault, and narrating stories and testimonies of abjection in a vernacular language that could be considered an affront to classical Hindi aesthetic notions of literary speech, or “high Hindi.” With these points in mind, it would not be a stretch to consider Hindi Dalit literature in general as a kind of “literature of alienation,” and its authors as “alienistic performers.”

According to literary theorist William Monroe, “[a]lienistic performers ‘front’ what is predictable and comfortable about culture by confronting and affronting readers who may feel touched in ways that make them uncomfortable. The performers of alienation are usually ‘in your face’ and the reversing aspect of their work often has the virtue of impropriety about it.”⁷ Monroe’s characterization is apt for our understanding Dalit literature as a distinct genre. To consider Dalit literary discourse as a literature of alienation offers another perspective on the role literature plays in the Hindi Dalit counterpublic. The goals of many Dalit writers are to make their non-Dalit readers uncomfortable and to decenter their understanding of literature by expressing what is not traditionally literary, or aesthetic. Additionally, they want to force people to confront an unnerving social reality and perhaps their own complicit participation in it, while at the same time attempting to light revolutionary fires in the hearts and minds of Dalits. Dalit literature can be understood then as an alienistic performance meant to both confront and affront the non-Dalit world and to force Dalits themselves to recognize their own alienation.

Dalits produce literature that discusses the reality of caste-based oppression, thereby disallowing comfortable, “modern” conceptions of the caste-free, class-free, secular nation of universal citizen-subjects in modern, independent, democratic India. This leads Aditya Nigam (2000) to argue that Dalits are waging a critique of modernity. M. S. S. Pandian has pointed out the absence of Dalits in mainstream notions of modernity. “It is evident that the Indian modern, despite its claim to be universal—and, of course, because of it—not only constitutes lower caste as its ‘other,’ but also inscribes itself silently as upper caste. Thus, caste as the other of the modern, always belongs to the lower castes.”⁸ In recent decades in major fields of the social sciences, however, caste itself has become more visible than it ever has been. This is especially notable after the discomfort surrounding the discussion of caste in the public sphere in the nationalist and early postcolonial periods because of the notion of caste’s dissonance with the idea of the modern state. Nigam writes,

… the dalit has emerged—not merely as the object whose history ‘we’ secular historians and scholars can now write, but as the subject who writes her own history. It is this emergence of the dalit as the subject-object of another history—one that falls outside the reckoning of secular/nationalist historians that we must now deal with.⁹

As we have seen, Dalit authors have indeed become subjects who write their own experiences and perspectives into literature, and their literature also falls outside the reckoning of normative understandings of literary language, aesthetics, and social and political relevance. Their literature alienates non-Dalit audiences in order to bring attention to the insertion of their voices and their bodies into the discourse of modernity, to ensure that they cannot be stricken from mainstream imaginations.

Navaria’s treatment of alienation is different from that which characterizes most other Dalit literature, however. Navaria’s characters are alienated from themselves: from their past, their origins, their family, and often even their present. His stories explore alienation within the Dalit character who, by all appearances, has achieved the ideal of a modern casteless identity. This kind of alienation is, as Frederic Jameson has suggested, a common feature of the “late capitalist culture critique … the expression of a pathos inherent in the traditional romantic diatribe against ‘modernity’ and its ills.”¹⁰ Though Jameson finds the literary expression of alienation as a critique of modernity to be somewhat tiresome in western romanticism, it is remarkable in the context of the literature of contemporary Dalits, for whom the promise of modernity meant, as Gopal Guru explains, “the language of rights to equality, freedom and dignity, self-respect and recognition.”¹¹ Modernity for Dalits in the colonial period meant new opportunities for advancement through increased access to education as well as professional development in the British army, while in the last generation or two, institutionalized systems of reservations and affirmative action have allowed a minority of Dalits to establish a middle-class population in Indian urban centers, increased political participation, and facilitated a wider dissemination of the rhetoric of self-awareness and community liberation. Phule and Ambedkar embraced modernity as the route to emancipation for Dalits, and the post-Ambedkar generation of Dalit writers and politicians have stayed true to this pro-modernity ideology, citing education, secularization, and political participation as the most promising avenues for Dalit advancement. As we will see in the following discussions, then, Navaria’s questioning of the efficacy of modern life for urban, middle-class Dalits—in other words, whether modernity has delivered its promise of freedom from oppressive caste hierarchies—is an important innovation in Dalit literary discourse. The following analysis of three of Navaria’s short stories suggests the nature and significance of this literary and ideological innovation.

DALIT BODIES IN URBAN SPACES

Navaria manipulates the trope of alienation in his short fiction, bending it to serve multiple uses. He may not be the first Dalit writer to do so, but he does employ formal strategies in extraordinarily novel ways that heighten the impact of the alienation theme. Shalini Ramachandran (2004) has also explored the theoretical concept of alienation in her study of early (1960s and 1970s) Marathi Dalit literature. She highlights both social and psychic alienation in the well-known anthology Poisoned Bread (1992):

… the emphasis is on a certain unfeasibility of subjecthood, as the inhabitants of the stories feel the pull of modernity, but are punished, fragmented in the process of seeking entry into it. Thus, even as Dalit subjectivity is brought into existence in the short narratives, it is dismantled…. Resistance in the narratives is registered in this impossibility, in the disintegration of the Dalit body—literally or symbolically—as death or mutilation…. Dalit writers effectively use the condensed form of the short story to focus their final narrative instant on the subject’s dissolution.¹²

In Navaria’s stories, on the other hand, I suggest that the entry of the narrative subject into the modern does not lead to a dissolution of the body, but rather a state of alienation from it, and from the extended bodies of one’s family and community. The “modern” in Navaria’s fiction can be replaced here by the term urban, as the city is, in all of his stories, representative of social, political, educational, and economic opportunity. The modernity of the educated, urban Dalit is signified in additional ways, with references to technology, equitable gender roles in the domestic sphere, and the use of English words embedded in Hindi prose. Publisher and journalist S. Anand has suggested that the selective use of English vocabulary by Dalit authors is “symbolic of all things modern,”¹³ and the access of Navaria’s Dalit characters to mobile phones, cars, and other forms of technology represent not only a level of middle-class economic status but also a conversant relationship with the tools and toys of modern civilization. But Navaria’s characters do not have a comfortable relationship with their middle-class positioning within modern, urban spaces and all their technological and professional accoutrements, and this unease creates alienation. Navaria’s characters go through the motions of modern, secular life, but they are not entirely comfortable in it. Their disquiet emerges in a kind of suspension of control and awareness of the physical body, or an alienation of the mind from the physical self. This does not, perhaps, qualify as a full-blown critique of modernity, but it does offer a rather more complicated look at its promise of an unmarked subjectivity unmediated by caste, class, or religious identity.

The Marathi Dalit writers of the late sixties and seventies were the first to write about the failure of the city to offer full participation in the modern as promised. Gopal Guru (2004) has pointed out that while Gandhi called for the preservation of the idealized village society, Ambedkar encouraged Dalits to go to the city to work, to escape the feudal backwardness of the village and gain representation in India’s march toward modern nationhood. But Guru suggests that with the inequitable distribution of material wealth, only the higher classes decide who has access to the modern and who does not, and Dalits continue to be relegated to the margins of modern society.¹⁴ The resulting disillusionment with the promise of the urban space as site of entry into the modern is well documented in early Marathi Dalit literature of the Dalit Panther era. The characters in these stories and poems are at the bottom of caste and class urban hierarchies, living in slums, and struggling daily for survival. S. P. Punalekar writes of Baburao Bagul, one of the founders of modern Marathi Dalit literature and the author to first address the demoralization attendant to Dalit urban life in his story “Jevhā Mi Jāt Chorlī Hotī” (“When I Had Concealed My Caste”):¹⁵ “The characters in Bagul’s stories include factory workers, scavengers, rag-pickers, petty traders, and lower-grade government servants. He tries to locate the roots of their identity crises and tensions and in a larger locale of market economy and political system governing the relations between the ruler and the ruled.”¹⁶ Eleanor Zelliot has identified Bagul as the Dalit writer who has most starkly represented the misery of the poor, urban Dalit in prose, while Namdeo Dhasal is the urban Dalit’s principal champion in poetry.¹⁷ Playwright Vijay Tendulkar evoked the nature of the Dalit body in the urban space as it exists in Dhasal’s groundbreaking poetry collection Golpiṭhā,

This is the world of days or nights; of empty or half-full stomachs; of the pain of death; of tomorrow’s worries; of men’s bodies in which shame and sensitivity have been burned out; of overflowing gutters; of a sick young body, knees curled to belly against the cold of death, next to the gutter; of the jobless; of beggars; of pickpockets …¹⁸

Vidyut Bhagwat has also pointed out how Marathi writers in the megalopolis of Bombay presented the urban space as a principal agent in the defeat of Dalit aspirations. She writes:

For the Dalit in the city, the new situation takes a tragic form. His flight from the culture of feudalism and face-to-face repression in the village offers him both the reality as well as the illusion of becoming a member of a free universe. But he soon realizes that once again he remains an unnoticed, expendable stone at the base of the edifice of modernity, the ugly city dominated by the rich and the powerful.¹⁹

Despite the overwhelming and malevolent representation of the urban Dalit experience in Marathi literature, urban spaces and the alienation of Dalits within them are either nonexistent in Dalit literature in other languages, or of a very different nature. Rita Kothari points out the lack of representation of the urban middle-class Dalit experience in Gujarati Dalit literature, suggesting a disinclination on the part of Dalit writers to privilege the experience of the individual over that of the community. She writes, “Does an urban Dalit elide over his ‘nuclear’ and urban identity in literature? Does the need to ‘represent’ and speak for/with his community make it imperative to affiliate with a rural, feudal history of anger?”²⁰ Yet Kothari also recognizes a need to address themes of individualized urban identity in Dalit literature: “The sociological shift from rural to urban has attendant problems of identity which is fraught with contradictions—mirroring the urban sociology in Gujarati Dalit literature perhaps also means resolving the contradictions.”²¹

The conflicts of the educated, middle-class Dalit in an urban space are indeed the focus of much of Navaria’s fiction, particularly his short story “Subcontinent.” These characters have a much less tortured relationship with the urban experience, having benefited from the institutionalized avenues of social advancement such as reserved seats in education and government sectors, and yet they retain a subject position that is still at a remove from full citizenship. This story demonstrates Navaria’s particular strategies in presenting alienation, including flashbacks, detailed description of setting, and constructions of liminality.

“Subcontinent” (“Upmahādvīp”)

The story moves fluidly and often between past and present. The bulk of the narrative consists of two major flashback episodes. The frame that brings it all together is the narration of Siddharth, a young professional Dalit living in Delhi, the father of one daughter and married to a college lecturer. The setting of the frame story is a fourth-floor Delhi flat, at sundown, when the narrator is just waking from a nap. The liminal qualities of the time of day, plus the narrator’s own mind, mired in a kind of half-sleep, allow for fluid transitions back and forth across time and space. In the two flashbacks, Siddharth is alternately remembering when he was a child and then an adolescent, and both the flashback stories are set in his ancestral village.

The first major flashback takes us back to when Siddharth is a small boy. He is walking with his father and grandmother to visit his father’s sister in a neighboring village. His father has recently found work in the city, and the trio is wearing new clothes bought in the city with his wages. It is a beautiful day, and they are in high spirits. But at the start of the flashback narrative, they have already been attacked by a group of upper-caste men from Siddharth’s village. These thugs, one in a worn police uniform, have taken offense at their new clothes and the influence the family appears to have come under in their exposure to the city, a kind of burgeoning awareness of their rights. As their attackers explain it to the village pandit:

“The wise men said it right, Panditji, you shouldn’t trust whores and bulls. They’ll fuck anything. And this bastard is strutting with arrogance. The sisterfucker was threatening to go to court! Now we’ll see if you will wear nice clothes around here again. Will you dare strut around in the village again?” The boy who was cursing Dadaji was the same one who had beaten Amma with his shoes. He said all this staring at Father who lay face-down on the ground, half-dead.

“The fucker got a big head goin’ to the city! He wants to show off …” one said, rolling up his sleeves.

“He forgot the village rules! This ain’t the city motherfucker. It’s the village … the gāṁ! Here you live by the rules. Only our law governs here. Do whatever the fuck you can.”²²

In their association with an urban space and the new kinds of social and economic opportunities it entails, the Dalit characters have transgressed their prescribed socioeconomic roles dictated by village caste hierarchy, and for this they are punished bodily. Siddharth’s father is beaten unconscious, his body bloodied and the pockets of his kurtā emptied of rupees. The boy is hit hard across the mouth and stands mute, watching his family being assaulted. His grandmother is humiliated, made to writhe in the dust at the feet of her attackers begging for mercy, called a whore, and beaten. The men and the pandit saunter back into the village, leaving the small family to pull themselves together.

In the second flashback, Siddharth is an adolescent guest at a village wedding. A crowd of angry men has gathered outside the wedding because the groom, a Dalit, has dared to mount a horse for the wedding procession to the bride’s house. This is against a village law forbidding Dalits from riding horses, and a laṭhī-wielding crowd has gathered to enforce the law. The groom’s grandfather begs the men for forgiveness while they threaten him, but an enraged member of the wedding party charges the angry mob, and a brawl breaks out. Siddharth is struck by a laṭhī and falls unconscious, only awakening later to witness his aunt being raped while he is forcibly held to the ground.²³

In the present time and setting of his urban apartment, Siddharth’s reverie is broken by a cup of chai falling to the floor and smashing. He thinks about how different his life has become since he moved from the village to the city. He thinks about how there is no place for Dalits in the village, except as exploited subjects of the upper castes. He explains,

Here is the village—our roots, our land. Where there is indignity, abuse, helplessness and weakness. Every moment the fear of dishonor. Every second the feeling of being small. There is sand everywhere, squeezed dry of water. There is no police station for us, no hospital, and no court. There’s the village panchayat, but it is not ours. In the panchayat there is no justice for us, no hearing. Only taunts. In the village there were no fields. The land was not ours, only the labor. The harvest was theirs, the fields were theirs, the houses were theirs, the earth was theirs and we had just a hut.²⁴

Siddharth continues with the contrasts of his new life, and that of his wife and daughter, in the city. It is a life of modernity made possible by an urban anonymity. They have a house, a car and driver. His daughter takes singing lessons and attends a private convent school. They eat at Pizza Hut and speak on cell phones. But the narrator is still haunted by his caste; he and other Dalit workers in his office are believed to have achieved their positions only because of the quota system, and for this they are taunted. This situation is not at all comparable to the beatings and humiliation suffered in the village, but it is not absolute equality, or the unmarked citizenship of the “modern” man. Rather it is a life still bounded by caste identity, fettered by prejudice and “tradition.”

Finally we learn that Siddharth’s unease was triggered by an invitation to a cousin’s wedding in his childhood village. His wife and daughter are anxious to see his village and encourage him to take them to the wedding. It is implied that they know nothing of his traumatic past, and Siddharth is clearly worried about bringing these two worlds together. In a bizarre twist at the very end of the story, Siddharth suddenly decides to go back to the village, to bring his family along, and perhaps to settle some old scores. In the final lines of the narrative, he fishes a revolver from the desk drawer and cryptically says, “We have to go. If we don’t go, then we’ll die.” His wife stares at him in surprise and the story ends.

Attention to descriptive language throughout the story offers some insight into the pervasiveness of the alienation felt by the characters, principally the protagonist, of “Subcontinent.” In Siddharth’s half-awake, half-asleep state, haunted as he is by the dreams of his past, which Navaria describes in realistic and straightforward prose, his own apartment and wife look and feel strange to him, as though he is viewing his life from the perspective of a confused outsider. Navaria strings sentence fragments together to highlight the protagonist’s state of disarray, “Thinking too much wouldn’t let me sleep. Squandered sleep, ravaged wakefulness. Just a little light, the tiniest brightness. Light like ruins. Consciousness like ashes …” (“Zyādā sochnā nīṁd nahīṁ detā. Ujaṛī–ujaṛī nīṁd, ujaṛā-ujaṛā chetan. Thoṛā-thoṛā ujālā thoṛā sā hī ujālā. Khaṇḍahar sā ujālā. Rākh sī chetnā …”).²⁵ This broken string of unfinished, abject thoughts, punctuated by staccato repetitions of adjectives, is broken by Siddharth’s wife’s query about whether or not he will drink some tea. This is a familiar pattern in the story, Siddharth almost constantly slipping into reverie, a liminal dream-speak that leads him to his overwhelming reality: the village, the past. But then he will suddenly be snapped back to the present by her voice, or the sound of a teacup smashing to the floor, or a shrill scream as a rat runs across the floor. He is almost an unwilling participant in the present, or perhaps unable to fully be in the present, in the city, until the atrocities of his rural past are resolved.

The natural world too is perceived as hemmed in by the structures of the city, such as the description of the evening light when Siddharth awakes from his reverie of memory:

My eyes opened and I saw a broken piece of sky, agitated, caught in the square of the window. A big, inky black cloud had grabbed the feeble sun and squeezed it, breaking the sun’s legs.

And later, when the daylight becomes faint enough to turn on the lights inside,

Like a tuberculosis patient, the old tube-light coughed seven or eight times before filling the room with a lackluster light, the yellow shade of mucus. How dark it had become outside. Because of the light inside, the darkness outside seemed even more inky, more scary.²⁶

These descriptions of both the feebleness of the daylight, trapped by the walls of buildings and overwhelmed by looming clouds, and the menacing nature of the night, which the electric light of the urban apartment does little to diffuse, creates apprehension. There is embedded in this narrative a conscious construction of liminal space and time to match the cloudiness of Siddharth’s state of mind. These narrative descriptions create a mood of disquiet and dread, a mood that eventually focuses on obvious markers of modernity such as the advertising of foreign products and a collection of academic books whose titles are in English.

There was a small boy on the back of her white T-shirt clutching a bottle of some foreign brand of soda, sticking his thumb up. I could see him until she turned towards the kitchen. He was climbing my wife’s back … in the skin of some charming sheep? Thinking about this made me uneasy.

… My glance fell on the English titles at the head of the bed, Riddles in Hinduism and Art and Social Life. Delhi … was this our home?²⁷

Everything in Siddharth’s line of sight is off-putting; it either threatens him or perplexes him. Even the books—Ambedkar’s Riddles in Hinduism, and Marxist thinker Georgi Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life—two texts that immediately reveal the progressive political sensibilities of the narrator, seem off-putting to him in his restless state. The pervasiveness of Siddharth’s unease, and the descriptions of the threatening darkness of an agitated, angry sky outside the window, barely held at bay by the weak electric tube light, contribute to his alienation. This is well before Siddharth narrates his tale of himself and other Dalits feeling isolated and reviled in his government job near the end of the story, the plot point that most clearly spells out his sense of displacement in the supposedly caste-blind secular city. Navaria’s construction of a persistent mood of alienation in the text is palpable. Monroe describes the unsettling qualities of narratives of alienation, “… the sulky signs of alienation often imply an intense but diffuse accusation. We often cannot tell where the accusing finger points or what it condemns, but we feel an instinctive doubt and discomfort, perhaps an undifferentiated sense of shame. Something unspecified is wrong, something pernicious that we cannot fully grasp.”²⁸

What that pernicious element is that pervades “Subcontinent” soon becomes clear. Siddharth thus narrates two violent experiences of caste-based abuse and attacks that shaped his childhood and adolescence—incidents that Siddharth suggests drove him to create a new life in the city. Eventually, Siddharth reveals that his own wealth and status in the city, his job, his wife’s academic career, his daughter’s voice lessons and trips to Pizza Hut; all of this hangs by a delicate thread of “enforced” equality. The story suggests that in the chasms of people’s hearts yet lurks the same malicious discrimination and prejudice, the same human cruelty and its religious justification that remains untouched in villages, not yet transformed by the social interventions of modernity. What alienates Siddharth from all the elements of his modern life, what makes him anxious, is the knowledge of the proximity of this lurking malevolence.

People only offer us smiles in our presence. No one would dare laugh at us. Here there is the police. Here there is an expensive lawyer. In this world of utter anonymity in the city, there’s happiness all around—unending, eternal. This anonymity forever colors our rainbow dreams.

But here in the familiar world there are the same snakes. The same whispers, the same poison-laden smiles. Our ‘quota is fixed’. I got promoted only because of the quota … that’s it. Otherwise … otherwise, maybe I’m still dirty. Still lowborn.²⁹

Although Siddharth has benefited from the material advantages of modern society and enjoys a comfortable middle-class life, he is still aware of the precariousness of this newfound status. To use Monroe’s language, his “encultured self” is the one that has become accustomed to buying power, and to the surface-level respect and civility that power brings, but his sense of self was shaped much earlier by violence in his rural childhood and is therefore attuned to the malevolent social forces still at work underneath the polished surface of urban modernity. His constant slipping back into the past, his inability to be fully present in the moment, is evidence not of a “desire” to be elsewhere, to be back in his village, but perhaps rather of an inability to escape it. By ensuring his own well-being and that of his small family in the modern city, Siddharth has isolated himself from his community identity that remains vested in the village, and he is never completely able to make the journey away from it on his own.

AN IMPOSSIBLE JOURNEY TO THE CITY?

The story of the journey from village to city, and sometimes—painfully—back again, is another narrative trope that characterizes Navaria’s fiction, and that perhaps most clearly elucidates the alienating personal and familial, even bodily, ramifications of gaining access to modern subjecthood. The following discussion will focus on the story “Sacrifice” (“Bali”), while also referring back to “Subcontinent,” in an analysis of the figurative distance between village and city in Navaria’s fiction.

Before such an analysis, however, note that the narrative trope of journeys from rural to urban spaces as a metaphor of self-transformation has been a common one in both western and non-western literature since the advent of the city itself. And in the generations of literature in which the metropolitan and the pastoral have been opposed as contradictory poles of the self, both have been fraught with significance. Raymond Williams explains the complexity of this symbolism in The Country and the City,

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved center, of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness, and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation.³⁰

As I have already suggested, from the perspective of the Dalit, the city is the nexus of opportunity and anonymity, of education and wealth, the only possible escape from the exploitative rural socialscape. In a country where more than 70 percent of the population still lives in rural areas and where Gandhi famously quipped that the heart of India is said to reside in the village, Ashis Nandy points out the significance of the city in the rural Dalit imagination:

Obviously, the anonymity and atomization in a city are doubly seductive in a society scarred by socio-economic schisms and cultural hierarchies. A Dalit, landless, agricultural worker or rural artisan seeking escape from the daily grind and violence of a caste society has reasons to value the impersonal melting pot of a metropolitan city. He is ever willing to defy the pastoralist’s or the environmentalist’s negative vision of the city. Because to lose oneself in the city is to widen one’s freedom in a way not possible by migrating to another village, however distant from home.³¹

The previous discussion, however, of representations of the city in early Marathi Dalit literature destabilizes this rosy dream of a personal and communal transformation in the postcolonial metropolis. And in “Subcontinent,” Siddharth’s upsetting awareness of the precariousness of his privileged social position and of the snakes who continue to hiss just beneath the civilized surface of his government job, his car and driver, and his daughter’s private school also throws into question the stability of the secular and universalist foundations of the postcolonial nation-state. Gopal Guru suggests that, although post-independence constitutional provisions and welfare policies aimed at Dalits have offered new opportunities, the urban Dalit still faces both physical and economic marginalization and “the Dalit claims to modernity suffered from the lack of recognition either by the state or by the Hindu (civil) society.”³²

Navaria’s fiction presents alternative considerations regarding the role of the metropolis in the minds of rural Dalits. Often, Navaria’s characters look at the city, and the material, political, and ideological changes it renders in people from the village, with distrust and scorn. This attitude is highlighted in the following discussion of Navaria’s “Sacrifice”. A second kind of distance between the village and the city in Navaria’s fiction manifests itself psychologically between generations, between those young Dalits who have made the journey and started a new life, and those older family members who refuse to join them or are brought against their will. The village is, for them, the site of their lifelong suffering, the rustic social hierarchy the justification for untold hardships, what Williams has referred to as “processes of exploitation … dissolved in a landscape.”³³ Nonetheless, it is still home, still at the center of family and community identity formation. As Siddharth explains about his grandmother in “Subcontinent,”

Papa had brought Amma to the city, after Dadaji’s death. But Amma … she could never really adjust to the city. Not even at Papa’s insistence. The thatch from the huts of her village was lodged in the dark wrinkles of her face. Thatch blackened by the soot and smoke of kitchen stoves…. From the time she came to the city, until she finally left her body behind, she could never settle here.³⁴

The village is continuous with the old woman’s body, the smoke and soot from years bent over her kitchen fires embedded in her skin, grounding her to the land where she was born, and where she had always lived. This imagination of the rural evoked in the physicality of the body, as well as the distance and dissonance between rural and urban bodies, is the focus of the following discussion.

“Sacrifice” (“Bali”)

Although the theme of sacrifice runs deep in this story, the narrative begins with its most obvious referent. A young boy, Kalu, reluctantly helps his elder brother, Kaka, butcher a kid goat who had once been Kalu’s pet. (A bit of this despondent scene provided the epigraph for this chapter.) The story goes on to feature a very long, detailed description of the death and dismemberment of the goat and of the horror and grief of young Kalu, for whom this is a life-shaping experience, one he never forgets, although he himself eventually becomes a skilled butcher like his brother. As he explains it,

Seeing the meat already cut up and seeing a goat being butchered are two different things, brother. I wasn’t born a butcher. But Kaka’s training and beatings made me one,” said Kalu …³⁵

After several pages of Kalu’s first-person narrative about the butchering of the kid goat, the narrative shifts, and the first-person voice now becomes that of Kalu’s nephew, Avinash. Avinash and his wife and son have come from the city to Kaka’s home in the village, and Kalu has come from another village to attend a sacrifice in Avinash’s son Kushan’s honor. Avinash is clear from the beginning about his distaste for this kind of ritual performance, but he relents for the sake of a visit to his mother. Avinash and his father, Kaka, have a strained relationship for several reasons. For one, Avinash has married a Dalit woman from another subcaste (jāti), which is a source of shame and ridicule for his father. Though Kaka’s family is also Dalit, they live in the village and do not have the same liberal notions of a pan-Dalit community within which there are few familial or jāti divisions. Rather, Kaka is still concerned with the complex hierarchy of jātis that govern marriage relations among members of the same varṇa. Kaka taunts Avinash:

This one is our first-born, brother Kalu. He’s got my nose cut—brought dishonor to our caste. He has returned after getting himself married to the daughter of some Gautam Buddha from U.P. But we’ve such a kind heart that we still made place for them in our home. Else they’d have been left without shelter,” said Father to Kalu gesturing towards me. Arrey, at least chant the names of ‘Rama-Kisna’, Ramesar! Kalu is like your uncle! If you’ve forgotten even this … what is it you people say? Yes, your ‘Jai Bhim’!”³⁶

Further angering his father, Avinash did not follow in his father’s footsteps and become a butcher. Instead he left the village for the city, where he changed his name from Ramesar (evocative of the Hindu god Ram) to Avinash, and refused to allow his father to name his grandson Ganeshi (again, evoking the Hindu elephant-headed deity Ganesh), instead choosing Khushan, rejecting any reference to Hindu mythology in his and his son’s name. Kaka’s taunt about chanting “Jai Bhim” makes it clear that Avinash has become part of an Ambedkarite community in the city. Like the reference to the books in “Subcontinent,” the phrase “Jai Bhim,” a paean to Ambedkar that is a common greeting among Ambedkarite Dalits, reveals the political mindset of the protagonist. After suffering through his father’s criticisms and asides to his brother Kalu, Avinash shouts at his father that he should be ashamed that he is so caught up in the rules and traditions of caste hierarchies. When his father leaves, Avinash is left with Kalu, who begins to tell another story.

This time the story is about Kaka when he was an adolescent in a village outside Delhi and in love with a young Brahmin girl from school. Avinash is mesmerized by Kalu’s story, never having considered his father in such a human light before. Because of the gulf between their castes, the couple’s relationship remained secret and ended abruptly when both were married to suitable partners in their own castes. Years later, in the story’s present, Kaka finally learns from Kalu of his young love’s fate, that her husband died days after their marriage and she lived as a widow with her in-laws who shaved her head, starved her, and beat her. Eventually she was raped, escaped to another village, lived among a Dalit community, and raised a daughter alone. She has recently died, and in Kaka’s realization of this he is transformed into a compassionate man such as Avinash has never before seen. At the end of his story, Kalu, whose health is increasingly demonstrated to be failing, is wracked with coughs, falls unconscious, and is taken to the hospital, where he dies. His last thoughts are of Piloo the kid goat he was forced to slaughter as a child. And in the emotional upheaval of the night’s realizations and tragic events, father and son are finally reconciled. Kaka finally accepts a cup of chai from the hands of his daughter-in-law, signifying that he accepts her into his family and has decided to respect his son’s chosen way of life.

As was suggested at the beginning of this section, the very physical dissonance between rural and urban Dalit bodies is made manifest in Navaria’s prose. Additionally, the literal and figurative distance of the journey from village to city and the ideological, psychological, and emotional distance between those who have made the journey and those who have not is striking in this story. To illustrate this, I string together here several separate quotes from the narrative, detailing Avinash’s growing fascination, as well as revulsion, with his rural uncle’s movements and gestures, in particular, his habit of squatting on the floor.

I greeted Uncle Kalu and sat down in a chair. Father sat in a chair opposite. Only Kalu was squatting on the floor, smoking a bīḍī.

“Why don’t you sit up here,” I motioned towards an empty chair.

…

He was overtaken by a coughing fit. His eyes bulged. I immediately filled a glass of water and brought it to him. He poured the water from the glass into his cupped palm and drank. He found some relief. When he finished he ran his hooked forefinger through his grizzled mustache, wringing out the water that clung to the hairs, and flicked the drops aside. Watching him I felt a kind of revulsion….

…

He gazed intently at me. Then, lost in thought, dangling his arms on his knees, he drummed his fingers on the floor. He shifted in his position like a clucking hen, and then sat motionless as though he’d been sitting this way for years.

…

He was still squatting on the floor. How long had I been watching him sit in this position! I wondered if this posture was something he had perfected. He must not have felt any pain in his thighs from sitting this way. I would not be able to sit like this for two minutes, my feet would fall asleep and my legs would start to tingle.

…

Kalu was still sitting on his haunches. He had indeed gotten up once to pee, but had resumed his position as if he had never gotten up at all. It seemed like he had been sitting here motionless forever. What a strange man. The sight of him sitting in such an awkward posture began to irritate me.³⁷

Avinash’s curiosity, then fascination, then revulsion, then awe, then irritation with his uncle’s movements, or lack of movement, adds an element of humor to an otherwise emotionally wrenching story of caste inequality, widow abuse, lost love, death, and family discord. But even more telling is the sense of place and self, here emphatically performed in the practices of squatting and drinking, that Avinash has lost as he has gained a foothold in modern urban living. Avinash is political; he has renounced his own name for its reference to Hindu mythology, married an educated Dalit woman who works as a teacher, and adopted the religious and social language of an Ambedkarite, but he has lost the ability to squat on his heels for hours. In some sense, Avinash sees in his uncle Kalu the person he himself might have been if he had never made the physical and ideological journey to the modern city, instead remaining in the village and learning the art of butchering from his father. His emotions in the face of this reality are funneled into his obsession with his uncle’s posture, and his rapidly shifting reactions suggest grief at this loss of identity. Perhaps it would not be too extreme to say that Avinash’s physical and intellectual journey to the city, his entry into the modern, has resulted in a loss of an essential, unmediated self that is celebrated in the rustic deportment of the body, in the rejection of chairs for sitting and glasses for drinking. Another incident, centered on Kalu’s inability to pronounce the name of Avinash’s son, demonstrates the distance Kalu also feels from his urban-dwelling nephew:

“Go get him, son,” Kalu said. When my gaze fell upon the dirt collected in the corners of Kalu’s kohl-lined eyes, I was faintly disgusted.

“Who?” I asked, tearing my eyes away from the filth in his eyes.

“What is that English-sounding name you gave your son, brother? I can’t get my tongue around it. Khus … nam,” he said, stammering, and I laughed.

“Not Khusnam, Kushan.”

Embarrassed, he said, “Yes brother, Khusnan, Khusnan.”

“Arre, who’s gonna remember when you give him a name like that?” It was Father’s turn to strike.³⁸

Much as Avinash’s body cannot contort itself into Kalu’s squatting position, Kalu’s tongue cannot wrap itself around the foreign-sounding name of Avinash’s son. It is cause for Kalu to be embarrassed and another indication of how far Avinash has strayed from his family, becoming fodder for his father’s derision. This detail provides more evidence of the now-unbridgeable distance between the men in this family, ideological and educational distance, wrought by the physical distance of village and city and embedded in the behavioral distance between bodies.

I have largely set aside those elements in this story that reflect more normative aesthetic imperatives, although there are plenty. There are moments of outright sermonization in this story, such as the description of the horrific treatment of the widow Archana at the hands of her Brahmin in-laws and her eventual refuge among a Dalit community. This reflects, and propagates further, the impulse in much Dalit writing to demonize Brahminical social custom as misogynist and inhumane, while celebrating the egalitarian social practices of lower-caste communities. Also, through the mouthpiece of Avinash, Navaria is able to lecture about the progressivism of Ambedkarite ideology and praise the ascendance of rational thinking over superstition. Yet these instances are set within a much more complex family drama and beset by narrative moments such as those discussed above, resulting in what appears as a meditation on the personal and familial losses that accompany modern political awakening. Avinash is dislocated from his family and community, having left even his name behind. I do not want to suggest that Navaria is proposing a regress to political ignorance and life under structures of caste-based exploitation. Yet it is evident that he uses literature to explore the personal costs of such social and political transformations, both of individuals and communities. The road to freedom and modernity is not without sacrifice.

THE INTRUSION OF MEMORY

Finally, this chapter will generally address the multiple deployments of memory in Navaria’s fiction, and it will ultimately introduce a third short story for consideration, “Eternal Law” (“Es Dhamm Sanantano”) First, however, it is interesting to consider the ways in which memory becomes a narrative tool in the stories already discussed.

Sukeshi Kamra makes a distinction between two different kinds of memory in Bearing Witness, her study of narratives of India and Pakistan’s partition violence. She suggests that while “narrative memory” is coherent and chronological, the kind of memory that tells a story, traumatic memory is broken, isolated, uses inadequate language, and is in some ways beyond the control of the narrator. Traumatic memories are characterized by a sense of “intrusion of the past” in their telling.³⁹ There is a somewhat chaotic patterning in traumatic memory, including a lack of sequence and memory-fragments. Narrative memory, on the other hand, is much more organized and controlled by its owners and tellers.

Navaria mixes examples of both traumatic and narrative memory in his writing. In “Subcontinent,” the memories themselves are narrated in clear prose, but the frequent transitions into and out of each experience of memory are marked by physical transitions in a liminal space. Navaria invokes the image of an old water tank with broken, crumbling steps covered in weeds. Drawn to the edge of the tank, pulled as though by some magnetic force, before each flashback Siddharth descends the steps of this water tank in his mind.

I start to descend the crumbling steps of an old step-well, surrounded by withered vines. I keep going down. Step by step. The mist is dense. Sarrr … ssseeee … jjhannn. One, two, three … twenty-five. Twenty-five steps down. Guddup … guddup.⁴⁰

At the bottom of the twenty-five steps of the tank lie his memories, hissing like snakes in the deep mist. Even language is dissolved in the mist as Siddarth descends into his memories, the counting of the steps turning simply into noise, “guddup.” In another instance of the transition to memory, an old wound throbbing on his head evokes the flashback to the brawl at the wedding party, and Siddharth is once again drawn to the steps of the well.

An old wound throbbed on my scalp under my hair. Chhhup … chup … chhhup. Darkness had spread near the step-well. Dense black. The gasping of grass. Whispering, like hissing black snakes. Steps … broken and unsteady. One … two … three … fifteen. Guddup.⁴¹

Siddharth’s memory is inscribed on his body, in the old wound on his scalp, and he is powerless to defy or escape it. Once again he must navigate the increasingly black and uncertain terrain of the old water tank in order to relive his memories. The persistence of Siddharth’s wound is evidence of the persistence of his memory: As Elaine Scarry suggests, “What is remembered in the body is well remembered.”⁴² Ramachandran also highlights the significance of pain in Marathi Dalit writing, “As a narrative strategy, the writers effectively use the body ‘in pain’ to articulate protest at the severity of as well as pervasiveness of the conditions that the Dalit villager or urban underclass faces.”⁴³ The body in pain here is not only an important signifier in a semiotics of oppression but also a permanent site of traumatic memory. As long as the wound “throbs,” though hidden from public view under Siddarth’s hair, Siddharth will be drawn compulsively to the steps of the old water tank, and to his past.

While in “Subcontinent” Siddharth is possessed and arrested by his traumatic memories, narrative memory operates in “Sacrifice” as a way in which to repair the generational rift between Avinash and his father, to bridge the divide that was rent by Avinash’s embrace of modernity. Kaka feels abandoned by his son because Avinash has changed his name, renounced Hindu ritual, and married a woman of his own choice, thereby robbing his father of the patriarchal benefits of a dowry and the service of a daughter-in-law, essentially because Avinash has opted out of his worldview and chosen another. Avinash therefore sees his father as a relic, and their relationship is colored by the common misunderstandings of different generations. But the locus of this misunderstanding is Avinash’s stake in the modern, and Kaka’s scorn and suspicion toward the same. It is through the recounting of memory to both Avinash and Kaka, through the medium of Kalu, the rural uncle who quite literally embodies the nature of the village, that the two men who live in different worlds finally come to understand and respect one another. There is in Kalu a kind of inherent, native wisdom that is revealed through his clear narrative memory that is able to heal the relationship between Avinash and Kaka even as his own body disintegrates.

Avinash, then, in all of his modernity, is nonetheless educated in an important lesson of love, loss, family, and understanding by his rural uncle Kalu. Similarly, in the following discussion about the third and last of Navaria’s stories to be considered here, we will look at the ways in which Navaria complicates even further the normative notions of the benefits of the quest for the modern in Dalit society by a kind of doublespeak: his characters’ political rhetoric advocates an abandonment of feudal village society and a move to the city, while their nostalgia, constructed through the telling of memory, mourns for a lost community and pastoral innocence.

“Eternal Law” (“Es Dhamm Sanantano”)

The bulk of “Eternal Law” is a flashback, framed by two short, almost indecipherable scenes in the present. Both these present moments are represented in obfuscating, stream-of-consciousness language that distances the reader from the text.⁴⁴ The story opens with the narrator in distress and semiconscious. He seems to have suddenly woken from a disturbing dream, in which he hears a faint, repeating voice referring to his caste and his being on the quota, and he is unable to move or respond; there is only the sound of the voice in his head.

“The bastard is on the quota … sick … he hides his caste,” the voice said. Very faint, but perfectly clear … and I heard it over and over throughout. But all I could do was hear it. I wasn’t in a position to do anything, not even to move. This wasn’t sleep … but was I really awake? Maybe my eyes were closed because I had only opened them when Nilima shook me.⁴⁵

A woman, Nilima, has apparently shaken the narrator awake, but he is not yet fully conscious. Here the narration becomes very confused, with brief and disparate references to a college staffroom, dry leaves on the ground, and the narrator running. The next several lines of the opening paragraph illustrate the narrator’s feeling of utter alienation and inertia; he is in control of neither his thoughts nor his body, seemingly unaware of his own reality.

But the memory of the voice was splitting, like something sharp. Who knows what level my consciousness was on. Unconscious, subconscious, half-conscious, good conscious, bad conscious … and, and who knows how many consciousnesses. Man and his mind and his words and his dissimulation. Or maybe this was just a doorway to his thoughts … a twilight.

Nilima had said something and then gone. But I … wasn’t I there? Perhaps even the words she spoke had gone away with her. She left no footprints behind.⁴⁶

This narrative-defying, fragmented description of a liminal space between reverie and wakefulness, the fractured language reflecting the strangeness and atemporality of dreams, immediately distances the reader from the subject. Just as the retellings of dreams can never be as vivid as the experience of them, as their immanence and tangibility is lost upon waking, so the trauma of caste-based violence and discrimination can never be fully realized by someone who has never experienced it. It is suggested that the narrator is haunted by a fear, or an actual incident, of his caste identity being discovered at the college where he teaches, but we are never sure.

This semiconscious, confused speech gives way almost as quickly as it begins. A layered collection of coherent narrative memories follows, tinged not with fear or confusion, but with a distinct sense of nostalgia. The narrator remembers his grandfather, a jovial man who had fled his village with his family after beating up and throwing down a well an upper-caste man who had committed some “crimes” against him. The narrator’s grandfather secures a plot of land in a scheduled caste settlement on the outskirts of an unnamed city and establishes himself as a community leader-in-exile who assists Dalits persecuted because of their caste. Alhough the narrator himself is not permitted by his grandfather to go to the village, he grows up on stories and memories of the old village:

Often Grandfather would lie on the big cot and when we insisted would tell us stories about the old days, to which we would listen eagerly…. There were some Thakurs in his stories, some Brahmins, some … who knows how many kinds of people. When I would go to the cinema, then I found I did not like Thakurs, landowners, and Brahmins because in the films they were always beating people up, or having them beaten, for no reason.⁴⁷

The narrator’s understanding of the village and its cast of archetypal characters, comes from movies, his grandfather’s stories, and the testimonies of those Dalits who would flee the village to “come weep at grandfather’s feet.” His grandfather is emotionally affected by leaving his village, and he is known to covertly wipe a tear from his eye when he tells his grandson tales of the old days, but he nevertheless admonishes the narrator’s father never to return,

That night Grandfather sent me to call Father and said, “Daya, do not covet pieces of land from the village. Don’t go there. You must never go there. Wherever a man waters his memories, it is there that he finds himself. You stay here! You’re listening, aren’t you? Stay here! There is no one there to speak for you. Times have not changed. Only your identity has changed. Only hypocrisy has grown.” Father listened quietly and nodded his head in agreement.⁴⁸

The boy’s grandfather dies when he is twelve years old, and the family relocates again, this time to a government colony in the city. They rent the house his grandfather built to a large family of rural Chamars, who perfectly embody the pastoral ideal: “They were carefree folks, but trustworthy.” The narrator remembers going to the house to collect the rent when he was a boy. Though they were desperately poor, the narrator’s memory is dominated by details of cooking food, shouting, singing, dancing, and tambourine-playing while the family performs the songs of their village. He has a sense of what they are saying but cannot understand everything because he has been forbidden from speaking his village tongue. “We had never been taught our own language, and if we tried to speak it we suffered a scolding. Do you want to be a rustic?”⁴⁹ As in the majority of stories discussed in chapter 5, language here once again becomes a signifier either for modernity or backwardness, with modern standard Hindi acting as the most important marker of modernity. But in this moment in the narrator’s memory, his parents’ desire to keep him from being marked as a bumpkin instead isolates him from the joy of this family of laborers. He watches from the outside, wistfully, because to join them would be to go backward.

Other changes too come with the move into the city.

The other was that instead of calling Ma Bahū we started calling her Mummy. The first change was certainly difficult, but we adjusted. But we felt such shame in calling Ma Mummy instead of Bahū. Grandfather and Grandmother always called Ma Bahū, so we had also started calling her that. But here all the children laughed at us. So reluctantly we started calling her Bahū sometimes and Mummy sometimes and eventually exclusively used the word Mummy. Even Father (pitā-jī) slowly became Papa. This habit was established after one or two years. We were starting to be refined (saṁskārit) according to our new surroundings.⁵⁰

The ironic use of the term “saṁskārit,” a high-class Brahminical term that suggests a rejection of low class/caste practices and a striving to achieve a more “elite” socialization, is very telling. The children here are being persuaded to use the English terms Mummy and Papa over the village terms Bahū and Pitā-jī. The English terms feel like an imposition; they are unnatural, and the children are reluctant to adopt them. The pressure to assimilate into the culture of their surroundings feels like a process of self-aggrandizement, promulgated by Hindu reformers in the nationalist era who encouraged untouchables not to eat beef, or tan leather, or clean up animal carcasses in an effort to alleviate their stigma of pollution. Ambedkar categorically rejected this very practice in favor of modernization, advocating for Dalits to abandon the Hindu hierarchical code altogether rather than try to rise within its ranks by submitting to upper-caste prejudices. But here, what is meant to be modernization, what is meant to relinquish these Dalit characters from the stigma of the “rural” and “backward,” in fact feels oppressive.

Finally, the narrator layers his memories, speaking of the nostalgia he felt as an adolescent in the government colony for the more rural settlement of his childhood. He narrates several tales of himself and his boyhood friends performing odd jobs, such as shoe-shining, creating fake stories to try to elicit more money from their customers, and cavorting at the edges of a water canal, catching birds and roasting them, daring each other to eat them. Though he acknowledges later as an adult that many of these boys did eat the birds out of hunger and that they all lived in a state of extreme want, there was nevertheless a pervading sense of camaraderie that infused his memories of those days. We are reminded, as the story ends and the obfuscating prose of a schizophrenic present is once again evoked, the narrative dissolving into incomprehensible words and sounds, that it is modern life that in fact is much more unsettling, that with all of the economic comfort and social mobility and anonymity comes a loss of self and community that is, undoubtedly, damaging to the psyche.

Though the narrator’s memories of the past depict a life of poverty and discrimination, they are softened with the nostalgic reminiscences of the joys of community and simplicity, reading almost as an ode to bucolic boyhood. This is in sharp contrast to the threatening tenor of the present in the traumatized, confused narratives that frame the larger story. Like Siddharth in “Subcontinent,” it is clear that in moving to the city, taking advantage of state employment quota systems, and impersonating the unmarked, modern citizen-subject by concealing his caste from his coworkers, the narrator has in practice joined the undifferentiated ranks of residents of the modern metropolis. But also like Siddharth, he is psychologically tortured by the fear of reversal, of being found out, of the crumbling of the thin façade of modern equality that surrounds the nation’s urban spaces. At least in the village, among his community, he was sure of his identity. There his environment, although often difficult to navigate, never appears as threatening as does the modern present.

TOWARD A MODERNIST CRITIQUE

Aditya Nigam has written of the fundamental role of the Dalit production of knowledge as collectively representing a critique of modernity, defined as a state of civil society characterized by the ideal of the unmarked, universal subject. This subject is best articulated by its participation in the two theoretical pillars of modernity—secularism and the nation. Nigam suggests that there is no specific body of Dalit writings that can be pointed to as a critique of modernity per se, but that the critique is inherent in the establishment of Dalit writing, that it is an “absent presence” in all Dalit writing. He reads the intrusion of Dalit voices in the fields of history, the social and political sciences, and literature as “… the insurrection of little selves. This insurrection of little selves marks a global crisis of modernity and its great project of realizing the emancipation of Universal Man—embodied in the abstract citizen, unmarked by any identity. This project, we realize today, was meant to be achieved by erasing and repressing particular identities.”⁵¹ Therefore, Nigam reads the Dalit reinsertion of themselves into historical and political discourses as a reclamation of an identity and unique set of experiences that was once silenced out of a lack of access to education and media, and is now being silenced out of a deference to the modernist ideology of erasing hierarchy by erasing difference, and the creation of the universal subject.

Thus, a theoretical understanding of the role of Dalit narratives positions them differently than many of the materialist and political projects of Dalits in the interest of social advancement in the last century. Indeed, the contemporary Dalit movement in India, from its inception with Mahatma Jotirao Phule’s political and educational activism in Maharashtra in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has depended heavily on the tools of modernity, including education, political representation, and material capital. Phule himself suggested in 1890, “Without education knowledge is lost; without knowledge development is lost; without development wealth is lost; without wealth Shudras are ruined.”⁵² Ambedkar also put great faith in the institutions of the modern state, as his numerous graduate degrees and his role as the architect of the constitution of the modern Indian nation-state attest. Partha Chatterjee writes of him, “Ambedkar was an unalloyed modernist. He believed in science, history, rationality, secularism, and above all the modern nation-state as the site for the actualization of human reason.”⁵³ Chatterjee goes on to suggest that Ambedkar’s use of narrative, specifically his creation of an alternative “original” narrative for Dalits, is also part of the modernist project of grounding Dalit identity not in a timeless and abstract religious narrative, but rather in the context of linear historical development as driven solely by the actions and institutions of human beings. He summarizes Ambedkar’s new narrative of Dalit history thus:

He argued that there was, in the beginning, a state of equality between the Brahmins, the Shudras, and the untouchables. This equality, moreover, was not in some mythological state of nature but at a definite historical moment when all Indo-Aryan tribes were nomadic pastoralists. Then came the stage of settled agriculture and the reaction, in the form of Buddhism, to the sacrificial religion of the Vedic tribes. This was followed by the conflict between the Brahmins and the Buddhists, leading to the political defeat of Buddhism, the degradation of the Shudras, and the relegation of the beef-eating “broken men” into untouchability. The modern struggle for the abolition of caste was thus a quest for a return to that primary equality that was the original historical condition of the nation.⁵⁴

This (re)creation by Ambedkar of the meta-narrative of Dalit history, grounding the roots of untouchability in a political and economic context rather than a religious one, was an essential component of the project to construct the secular nation-state, one of the “fundamental pillars of modernity,” as Nigam has characterized it.⁵⁵ According to Nigam, the pervasive Indian nationalist approach of considering history through a Marxist lens that privileged class over caste “tended to do violence to that enterprise of self-definition,” that is, the assertion of Dalit subjecthood. Ambedkar’s turn toward Buddhism and his creation of a new historical narrative of a clash between Buddhists and Brahmans in Indian society was “an ingenious attempt at instituting as cultural memory a new historical discourse…. To be able to speak of the past in the language of history and modern subjectivity was the task at hand.”⁵⁶

It seems, however, that the task has changed. Though the construction of a modern, secular Indian state promised Dalits full participation in educational and political institutions, tools with which they could finally achieve their freedom from caste oppression, the dream of full equality and the reign of secular rationalism in Indian society has yet to be fulfilled. Certainly the state system of reservations in the educational and political sectors has contributed to the rise of a new Dalit middle class and increased power sharing, with political parties constructed along the faultlines of marginalized caste representation, such as the Bahujan Samaj and Republican Parties. There has also been a marked shift, as has already been discussed, of Dalit labor from rural to urban spaces, and the ever-seductive promise of the city to erase caste hierarchies and “traditional, feudalistic” constructions of Hindu social identity. Yet, as we have seen, Dalit writers in the contemporary Dalit literary movement have begun to poke holes in the unqualified promise of modernity.

It is both these limits of modern social and political institutions, as well as the silencing of Dalit identity that are intrinsic to the theoretical construction of the modern subject, addressed in contemporary fictional narratives of alienation such as Navaria’s. How do we characterize the shift, then, of the Dalit narrative from being part of the modern project of nation-building, to the contemporary critique of the absences inherent in that same modernity? If we consider Frederic Jameson’s definition of alienation as the “inward turn of modernism,”⁵⁷ then we might also alternatively construe such narratives of alienation as constituting a literature of modernism, one which demands that the determinist ends of modernity, democracy, secularism, and the nation be reconsidered by those subjects who still find themselves inhabiting the margins of the modern, even as they endeavor to dive into the middle. Monroe suggests the gulf between modernity and modernism when he characterizes the latter as a critique of the former, or modernism as “a subversive stance that opposes those dominant certainties” and later as “cluster of oppositional strategies that often include elements of suspicion and hostility toward the dominant cultures of modernity.”⁵⁸ Harvey defines modernism as a critique of modern claims to universalities when he describes Western European expressions of modernism in art during World War I, “This particular surge of modernism, therefore, had to recognize the impossibility of representing the world in a single language. Understanding had to be constructed through the exploration of multiple perspectives. Modernism, in short, took on multiple perspectivism and relativism as its epistemology for revealing what it still took to be the true nature of a unified, though complex, underlying reality”⁵⁹

Navaria’s stories, in their focus on the urban, educated Dalit individual, rather than the rural community, represent this shift toward multiple perspectives. Again, the contemporary Hindi Dalit literary counterpublic sphere is characterized by its multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and narrative forms. This chapter has extended the discussion of the range of Hindi Dalit literature and broadened the analytical frame in which we can consider the growing body of Dalit texts. To cite Nigam once more, “If we listen attentively to the voices from within, we can hear precisely their refusal—despite heavy investments in the modern—to be willing parts of the two great artifacts of our modernity, namely, secularism and the nation…. belonging as it does to this instance of crisis, both in the manner and the moment of the emergence of the new Dalit assertion direct(s) us to read it as a critique of modernity.”⁶⁰

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, a detailed consideration of three of Ajay Navaria’s short stories—“Subcontinent,” “Sacrifice,” and “Eternal Law”—has clarified the themes and aesthetics of contemporary Hindi Dalit literature. In his employment of memory that is both traumatic and nostalgic, experimental constructions of language that often purposefully obfuscate the meaning of the text and distance the reader from the characters, and narrative details of disquiet to create a pervading sense of alienation, Navaria has challenged the aesthetic exigencies established by the predominant architects of the Hindi Dalit literary counterpublic.

Further, Navaria’s fictions participate in a contemporary critique of modernity, not merely in their existence (Nigam), or simply as a means by which Navaria is inserting his “Dalit voice” into public discourse. Rather, the crises of identity and alienation of Navaria’s characters point to a recognition of the impossibility of universal subjecthood—no “secular society” is truly secular—as well as acknowledge the personal and collective losses of self and community that are inevitable when we strive for an identification with the modern. Considering the critique, or perhaps complication, of modernity implicit in the collected literary strategies and thematic approaches in Navaria’s three stories, we may consider them collectively as representing a kind of literary modernism. According to Monroe, “Modernism, as a strategy of alienation from modernity, alerts us to the arbitrariness of society’s “arrangements,” heightens our sense of sacrifice, and awakens us to the costs of seeing ourselves and our world in one way and not another.”⁶¹ Navaria’s stories alert us to personal challenges that arise, almost like a side effect, from embracing the opportunities for betterment, including education, political awareness, and material consumption. His focus is not society as a whole, but rather those elite Dalit protagonists who choose to re-envision their lives, who have the wherewithal to leave one world and make space for themselves in another.