CONCLUSION

IT IS no accident that I chose to end this book with Kusum Meghwal, the first Dalit author I ever met, and one who stands here as a single example of an increasingly vocal community of Dalit feminist writers who are working, through the publication and dissemination of their narratives, to subvert the hegemony of the casteist rape script. Further, these women writers struggle against a pervasive masculinist prejudice in the Dalit literary sphere, a prejudice whose logic is predicated on the idea that to represent the particular issues facing Dalit women is to somehow threaten the emergence and consolidation of a unified literary voice of Dalit resistance, a literary voice that is increasingly being recognized and celebrated in both mainstream media and academic scholarship, but one that is coded implicitly as male by the overwhelmingly disproportionate publication of Dalit men’s testimonial, fictional, and poetic narratives, both in original language and translated publications.¹

I have known Kusum Meghwal since 2001, when I was working on my master’s thesis and happened, through a series of happy circumstances, to meet her during a several-months, long stay in Udaipur. Her fiction, and her own personal story of becoming a writer and founding the Rajasthan Dalit Literary Academy, became the topic of my master’s thesis and the inspiration behind the years of fieldwork and reading and writing that led to the completion of both my doctoral dissertation and—a dozen years after we first met—this book.

I have been heartened in the years since to watch the determined emergence of a powerful coterie of Dalit women writers and activists working in the Hindi sphere—a group of women who collectively pool their voices at women’s literary conferences and in Hindi Dalit magazines like Yuddhrat Ām Ādmī and Apekṣā that focus on women’s responses to current debates in the Dalit literary sphere—and the anthologizing of Dalit women’s short stories and autobiographical essays. Kusum Meghwal once explained the desired impact of her stories to me: that rural, uneducated, disempowered Dalit women might hear them and take strength from them, perhaps imagining alternative twists in the cultural scripts that govern their lives.

It has been my goal throughout this book to understand the contemporary Hindi Dalit literary sphere on its own terms—to trace its public debates and critical contours, as well as to mine the fictional works of contemporary Dalit authors. The debates, discussions, literary histories, critical frameworks, and fictional narratives examined here make clear that contemporary Hindi Dalit literature goes far beyond the “subaltern speaking” into the terrain of the subaltern becoming. Hindi Dalit literature has matured and diversified, as I have shown, into a space in which a modern Dalit identity is being newly constituted.

Toral Jatin Gajarawala, in her book Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (2013), an insightful intertextual study on the function of realism in Hindi Dalit literature, asks the following question: “In light of the alleged inability of realist writing to properly narrativize Dalit lifeworlds, one must ask: Why is it that Dalit fiction turns again and again to the basic tropes of realism?”² The narratives, debates, and literary institutions under scrutiny in my own book provide clear answers to this important question. First, in investing realism as a progressive literary practice with a consequent emphasis on perspectival and experiential “authenticity” and a specific set of political exigencies (both coded in the concept of Dalit chetnā), Dalit writers reshape literary realism to “properly” render their life worlds on the printed page. The chapters in part I of this book make clear that the demands and consequences of Dalit chetnā are in no way fixed or universally agreed upon. Yet there is no ambiguity about the constitutive importance of the discursive sphere that this concept engenders, and we have seen the ways in which the critical lens of Dalit chetnā allows for both a deconstruction of a host of historical non-Dalit claims to Dalit representation, as well as a foundation for building new models of Dalit literary representation.

Gajarawala asks another question too: “Dalit aesthetics will have to seek a new source of radicalism, somewhere and sometime else. The question we may ask instead: Are other forms of realism possible?”³ The short answer is yes. These other forms of realism are already on display here. The literary material of the chapters in part 2 of this book demonstrate that much Dalit literature has already moved beyond a literal adherence to a realist aesthetic as a radical principle (which, as Gajarawala points out, in its original manifestation served to democratize literature) and instead invests realism with a host of other critical and aesthetic interventions, including melodrama, heteroglossia, modernism, alienation, and the fantastic—all in an effort to reclaim authority over its own representation in literature and the popular imagination. This is not a seamless effort; indeed, I have tried to make clear the ways in which dissension, competition, and debate are at the core of this community of writers, editors, and critics. But I assert that these differences of approach to the processes and the possibilities of narrativization strengthen the diverse collective of voices under the misleadingly singular umbrella of Dalit sāhitya.