Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature

1. Munshi Premchand (b. Dhanpat Rai, 1880–1936) is considered one of the most significant Indian authors of the twentieth century. His works include more than a dozen novels and more than 200 short stories in Hindi and Urdu. He helped to inaugurate a new realist aesthetic in Indian fiction, and he was a formative influence on the Progressive Writers Association (formed in 1936). Raṅgbhūmi was his ninth novel. For more information on Premchand see Geetanjali Pandey, An Intellectual Biography of Premchand (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989).

2. Caste hierarchies in India continue to play an extraordinarily influential role in politics and society, as well as in the realm of culture. Much of the impetus behind Dalit literature is that the upper castes have overwhelmingly been both the authors and subjects of literature in India for most of its history. Premchand is generally understood to be among the first modern authors to address caste inequality in sensitive, politicized ways, but he is a divisive figure among contemporary North Indian Dalits.

3. The National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) was established by the government of India in 1961 to advise central and state governments on matters of state-run education.

4. Chamars, whose traditional occupation is often cited as “leatherworking,” are among the most populous and politically dominant Dalit castes in North India. For a history of the Chamar caste see Ramnarayan S. Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011).

5. The full text of the Act can be found at http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1999/India/India994–16.htm.

6. Dalit is the preferred term for the collection of castes in India formerly known as “Untouchable.” The political contours of the term “Dalit” for Ambedkar and subsequent generations following in his political legacy are considered in some depth in Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi: Manohar, 1996).

7. Pragya Kaushika, “NCERT Plays It Safe with Premchand Prose,” The Statesman, January 29, 2006.

8. For this sense of “cultural performance,” I borrow Nancy Pezullo’s definition of one which foregrounds “the non-verbal activities that are involved in negotiating public life, including physical, visual, emotional, and aural dimensions.” Nancy Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345–365.

9. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, 25/26 (1990): 60.

10. Bhimrao Ramji “Babasaheb” Ambedkar (1891–1956) was the most significant political leader of the Dalits in India in modern history. A Mahar by birth, Ambedkar pursued graduate degrees at institutions that include Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He returned to India and became a follower of Gandhi, only to split from him later for what he saw as a lack of commitment by Gandhi towards the eradication of untouchability. For many contemporary Dalits, the distinction between Gandhian and Ambedkarite philosophies on the question of caste is extraordinarily stark. For Ambedkar’s own perception of their differences, see B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. (Delhi: Gautam Book Centre, 1945). For accounts of Ambedkar’s time in the West see Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), and Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (Delhi: Sage, 1994).

11. The “internationalization” of Dalit literature through the publishing of English translations of Dalit texts from diverse Indian languages such as Marathi, Tamil, and Malayalam has exploded in the last decade: In 2011, Penguin India published No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India, and in 2012, Oxford University Press published two massive “Anthologies of Dalit Writing,” in Tamil and Malayalam, that attempt to map the growth of the genre in each language over the last century. There has been a spate of single-authored autobiographies and memoirs published abroad, such as Gail Omvedt’s English translation from Marathi of Vasant Moon’s popular Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography in 2001, Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), and Narendra Jadhav’s Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Journey out of the Caste System in Modern India (New York: Scribner, 2005). The progressive Delhi-based publishing house Navayana has also published two significant translated collections of contemporary Dalit short stories: Gogu Shyamala’s Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small Basket, But…” (translated from Telugu by various authors and published in 2011) and Ajay Navaria’s selected stories in Unclaimed Terrain: Stories by Ajay Navaria (translated from Hindi by this author and published in 2013).

12. Toral Gajarawala’s recent book Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012) also presents an important corrective to the general trend of locating studies of caste in Western India.

13. Prominent critics, such as S. Anand, have raised important questions about the commodification of suffering and resistance in the literary marketplace in Touchable Tales (Delhi: Navayana, 2004).

14. Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, trans. Alok Mukherjee (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004), 33.

15. Trisha Gupta, “The Dalit Deliberations,” Tehelka 7, no. 5 (February 6, 2010).

16. Quoted in Lata Murugkar, Dalit Panther Movement in Maharashtra: A Sociological Appraisal (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1991), 237.

17. Kusum Meghwal, Hindī Upanyāsoṁ Meṁ Dalit Varg (Jaipur: Sanghi Prakashan, 1989), 1. Translation mine.

18. For examples of Dalit pamphlet literature and a discussion of the multiple levels of Dalit literary discourse, see Badri Narayan and A. R. Misra, eds., Multiple Marginalities: An Anthology of Identified Dalit Writings (Delhi: Manohar, 2004).

19. Digish Mehta, “Differing Contexts: The Theme of Oppression in Indian Literatures,” New Comparison, 7 (1989): 83.

20. S. Anand, ed., Touchable Tales: Publishing and Reading Dalit Literature (Chennai: Navayana, 2003), 1. Limbale, Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, 19.

21. Sharatchandra Muktibodh, “What Is Dalit Literature?” in Poisoned Bread, ed. Arjun Dangle (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992), 267.

22. Anand, Touchable Tales, 33.

23. Anand, Touchable Tales, 25.

24. Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (New York: Penguin, 1990).

25. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 334.

26. L. Chris Fox, “A Martyrology of the Abject: Witnessing and Trauma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” Ariel 33, no. 3–4 (2002): 35–60.

27. Premchand, “Dūdh kā Dām,” in Premchand Rachnāvali, ed. Ramvilas Sharma (Delhi: Janvani Prakashan, 1996), 283–290. Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, trans. Arun Prabha Mukherjee (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

28. Premchand, “Dūdh kā Dām,” 285.

29. Premchand, “Dūdh kā Dām,” 290.

30. Valmiki, Joothan, 12.

31. Shashi Bhushan Upahdyay, “Representing the Underdogs: Dalits in the Literature of Premchand,” in Studies in History 18 (February 2002), 59.

32. Debjani Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives,” Asian Studies Review 33, no. 4 (December 2009): 434.

33. Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood, and the Collective,” 437. Chuhras are traditionally considered a “sweeper” caste.

34. Ajay Navaria, Unclaimed Terrain, trans. Laura Brueck (Delhi: Navayana, 2013), 123–154.

35. Navaria, “Hello Premchand,” 125. Bhangis have traditionally been considered “sweepers” or “scavengers.”

36. Navaria, “Hello Premchand,” 133.

37. Ganguly, “Pain, Personhood and the Collective,” 434.

38. Rita Kothari makes a similar point about the relative newness of the Gujarati Dalit short story, saying “…it did not evolve out of a larger political movement against the upper castes” (2001, 4308).

1. K. P. Jindal, A History of Hindi Literature, 2nd edition (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1993), 219.

2. Prakash Chandra Gupta, Makers of Indian Literature: Prem Chand (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1968), 60.

3. The Manusmṛti is an ancient Sanskrit legal treatise that dates from the second century BCE to the second century CE. While it addresses an astounding number of topics on the way life should be lived, it is most notorious among Dalits for its elaboration of a harsh treatment of untouchables. A brief example of the dictates the Manusmṛti hands down regarding the treatment of untouchables reads thus: “…the dwellings of ‘Fierce’ untouchables …should be outside the village; they must use discarded bowls and dogs and donkeys should be their wealth. Their clothing should be the clothes of the dead, and their food should be in broken dishes; their ornaments should be made of black iron, and they should wander constantly” [10:51–52]. For a full translation, see The Laws of Manu, trans. Wendy Doniger (London: Penguin, 1991).

4. For more information about the centrality of Ambedkar in the Dalit movement of the twentieth century and the political impact of his burning of the Manusmṛti, see Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement, (Delhi: Navayana, 2013).

5. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 4.

6. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 43.

7. Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 2.

8. Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 7.

10. Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere: 1920–1940 (New Delhi: Oxford, 2002), 9.

11. Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere, 12.

12. Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 32.

13. Discussions of the various constellations of members and examples of organizational activities in which I participated are largely from the longest stretch of my fieldwork, from April 2004 to March 2005, with subsequent visits in 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2012. As with any contemporary, living, evolving movement, the various actors, group formations, and their specific activities are ever changing. But this particular snapshot in time still presents a valid, exemplary, and experiential model on which to base a theoretical understanding of the nexus of people, institutions, texts, and media in the Dalit literary sphere as a counterpublic.

14. A small boxed passage of text in every issue of the newsletter exhorts its readers, “Himāyatī fortnightly newsletter: a representative newspaper of the Ambedkar mission. Subscribe to it, read it, and read it to others. From this, mass consciousness (jan chetnā) will be awakened and the Dalit struggle will be sharpened.” Translation mine.

15. Ambedkar’s preeminence as a meaningful symbol in the Dalit counterpublic is abundantly clear; as an author of the Indian constitution outlawing the practice of untouchability, as a premier twentieth century leader and political organizer of Dalits, as the author of such radical tracts as “The Annihilation of Caste,” and in his struggle against Gandhi and the Congress in the fight for separate electorates for Dalits in a postcolonial parliament, Ambedkar’s centrality in the Dalit counterpublic is unparalled. Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule predated Ambedkar as advocates for women’s education and the dismantling of caste hierarchies in the nineteenth century. Bhakti poet Kabir regularly wrote from the perspective of an untouchable in his sixteenth-century poems, and he critiqued the social constructs of caste. Finally, many contemporary Dalits, particularly in Western India, are Buddhists. This is where Ambedkar himself converted to Buddhism before his death in 1956 and where the idea of Buddhism as a secular and native alternative to Hinduism is most entrenched.

16. I attended the BDSA annual national conference of Dalit writers in December 2004 at Talkatora Stadium in New Delhi that drew close to 8,000 people, as well as a few regional meetings in Rajasthan and New Delhi that drew closer to three hundred to four hundred.

17. Hauser, Publics and Public Spheres, 34.

18. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 67.

19. Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere, 68.

20. The 2011 Census of India reports that Scheduled Castes represent 16.2 percent of the national population at more than 166 million. See http://www.censusindia.gov.in/Tables_Published/A-Series/A-Series_links/t_00_005.aspx. The National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights claims that Dalits constitute 19 percent of the general population.

21. See S. K. Thorat and R. S. Deshpande, “Caste System and Economic Inequality,” in Dalit Identity and Politics, ed. Ghanshyam Shah (New Delhi: Sage, 2001), 44–73.

22. While Adivasis face specific economic problems related to the appropriation of once-communal lands, Dalits and Adivasis face similar social and political marginalization in India and are frequently grouped together under the category “Scheduled Castes and Tribes.”

23. Chandra Bhan Prasad, “A New Order for Today,” The Pioneer (September 27, 2005). Prasad is the first Dalit to have a regular column in an English-language publication in India. He started his weekly column, “Dalit Diary,” in the English daily, The Pioneer, in 1999.

The Delhi-based nonprofit publishing house Navayana (“focusing on caste from an anti-caste perspective,” according to the publisher’s website) has sought to address the dearth of caste diversity in media and publishing industries in India by sponsoring “Avarna fellowships” that support Dalit and Adivasi students in the pursuit of education and training in media and publishing. According to their website, “Like other private sectors in India, publishing too has been the preserve of the social elite. Dalits and Adivasis hence go almost unrepresented in this field. For many Dalits/Adivasis, publishing does not even seem to be a career option. Navayana, with the Avarna fellowship, seeks to address this anomaly” (http://navayana.org/?p=1025).

24. See, for example, Indian Literature 42, 185 (1998): 12–50; 43:193 (1999): 5–9 and 15–49; 45:201 (2001): 9–71. Also Samkālīn Bhāratīya Sāhitya (May–June 1999): 91–95.

25. My interview with K. Satchidanandan, March 1, 2005.

26. The group’s original mission was explained to me by Sudesh Tanwar, former general secretary of the DLS, in an interview on August 24, 2004. Translation mine.

27. Vimal Thorat, “Dalit strīke tihare shoṣaṇ ko sāhitya mein uṭhaya jānā chāhiye,” Haṁs 19 (2004): 229. Translation mine.

28. Some of the Dalit writing that contests the “master narrative” of Dalit literature, such as modernist and feminist writing, will be discussed in chapters 6 and 7.

29. “Jan-Sattā aur Vimarsh,” Haṁs 19:1, August 2004. This issue of Haṁs was guest-edited by two active Dalit writers and DLS members, Dr. Sheoraj Singh “Bechain” and Ajay Navaria.

30. This interview took place in the offices of Haṁs, in Daryaganj, Delhi, on September 3, 2004.

31. “Nayī nazar kī nayī nazariyā,” Haṁs 24:1, August 2009.

32. This concept is subsumed within the larger theoretical concept of “Dalit chetnā,” which is a fundamental component of the growing body of Dalit literary aesthetic theory. This concept is discussed in great detail in chapter 2.

33. The focus on Dalit Studies at IGNOU was given a boost by the addition of Ambedkar scholar Gail Omvedt as the B. R. Ambedkar chair on social change and development in 2009. A new postgraduate program on the philosophy of Dr. Ambedkar was inaugurated at IGNOU in July 2010.

34. In late February 2004, scholars Gail Omvedt, G. Aloysius, and P. G. Jogdand and Dalit writers Omprakash Valmiki and Sheoraj Singh “Bechain” among others came together for the “National Seminar on Dalit Studies and Higher Education: Exploring Content Material for a New Discipline.” See program and paper abstracts at http://www.deshkalindia.com/pdf/Bodh%20Gaya%20brochure.pdf. The proceeds of this conference later resulted in the publication of a book, Kumar and Kumar, eds., Dalit Studies in Higher Education: Vision and Challenges (Delhi: Deshkal, 2005).

35. Published originally under the name “Ahalya” in Haṁs, December 2002, 32–35.

36. Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, trans. Alok Mukherjee (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), 19.

37. Interview in Haṁs 19, 1(August 2004): 228. Translation mine.

38. This was a common sentiment among Dalit women writers I interviewed. For an example of the fierce disapprobation Dalit women writers can face for articulating their gender-based discontent, see Dr. Dharamveer’s scathing critique of Dalit woman writer Kausalya Baisantri: “‘Dohrā Abhishāp’ Kitnā Dohrā? Ek Dinosaur Aurat” (“‘A Double Curse’: How Is it Double? A Dinosaur Woman”) in Haṁs 19, 1 (August 2004): 66–71.

39. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics (Abbreviated Version),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, 4 (2002a): 420.

40. See especially Thorat, “Dalit strī ke tihare shoṣaṇ ko sāhitya meṁ uṭhāya jānā chāhiye,” 228–231.

41. Chandrabhan Prasad, Dalit Diary: 1999–2003. Reflections on Apartheid in India (Chennai: Navayana, 2005).

42. Rajni Tilak, Padchāp (Delhi: CADAM, 2000), 15. Translation mine.

43. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), 22.

44. As Ghyanshyam Shah explains, “The word Dalit is a common usage in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, and many other Indian languages, meaning the poor and oppressed persons. However, it has now acquired a new cultural context relating to Dalitness, Dalit literature, and the Dalit movement” (Shah 2001, 195–196). James Massey contends that it is the Dalit Panthers, a militant arm of the Dalit movement that flourished in the early 1970s, who “gave currency to the term ‘dalit’ as a constant reminder of their age-old oppression, denoting both their state of deprivation and the people who are oppressed” (Massey 1991, 9).

1. Though none of these stories have been so skewered in the Dalit counterpublic as “Kafan,” Ajay Navaria takes on the task of reimagining them all by investing each of the Dalit characters from these stories with more anger, determination, and courage than Premchand in his single story “Uttar kathā,” translated into English by this author and published as “Hello, Premchand!” in Unclaimed Terrain: Stories by Ajay Navaria (Delhi: Navayana, 2013).

2. This translation of “The Shroud” was provided by Frances Pritchett on her website hosted by Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urdu/kafan/index.html

3. Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature 1911–1956: Struggle for Freedom: Triumph and Tragedy (Delhi: Sāhitya Akādmī, 1995), 319.

4. OUP, ed. The Oxford India Premchand, with an Introduction by Francesca Orsini (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), xxvi.

5. Geetanjali Pandey, Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Premchand (Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 112–124.

6. Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, “Representing the Underdogs: Dalits in the Literature of Premchand,” Studies in History 18 (February 2002): 71.

7. Upadhyay, “Representing the Underdogs,” 79.

8. Pandey, Between Two Worlds, 123.

9. Sohanpal Sumanakshar, “‘Raṅgbhūmi’ ko ‘Jaṅgbhūmi’ banāne ke liye zimmedār kaun?” Apekṣā (January–March 2005): 18. Translation mine.

10. Quoted in Harlow, Resistance Literature, 29.

11. Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy (Kolkata: Samya, 1996), 33–34.

12. Meera Nanda,. “Are We Post-Hindu Yet?” Himal 23, no. 5 (May 2010).

13. Limbale, Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, 1, 32.

14. Omprakash Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya Kā Saundaryashāstra (Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2001): 28–29. Translation mine.

15. According to Dalit author and critic Sheoraj Singh “Bechain,” “What one expects to find in the consciousness of a Dalit character with respect to the caste system is rage, anger with respect to inequality—but these are missing in Premchand’s characters. Any character who lives in anticipation of kindness, sympathy, generosity, and pity, cannot be a Dalit. He must also have a consciousness of his rights.” Quoted in Alok Rai, “Poetic and Social Justice: Some Reflections on the Premchand-Dalit Controversy” in Justice: Political, Social, Juridical, ed. Rajeev Bhargava, Michael Dusche, and Helmut Reifeld (New Delhi: Sage, 2008), 164.

16. Valmiki, “Premchand: Sandarbh Dalit Vimarsh,” Tīsrā Pakṣ, 14–15 (2004): 28. Translation mine.

17. Ibid. Translation mine.

18. Passed on September 24, 1932, the Pune Pact instituted reserved seats for Untouchables within the general electorate. This is still widely regarded in the Dalit community as a significant defeat for Ambedkar, who had advocated for separate electorates for Untouchables, at the hands of Gandhi and the casteist interests of the Congress Party.

19. Valmiki, “Premchand: Sandarbh Dalit Vimarsh,” 28. Translation mine.

20. Quoted in Valmiki, “Premchand: Sandarbh Dalit Vimarsh,” 28. Translation and emphasis mine.

21. Anita Bharti, “‘Kafan’ aur Dalit Strī-Vimarsh,” Sandhān (2004): 210. Translation mine.

22. Ibid. Translation mine.

23. Mohammad Azhar Dherivala, “‘Ṭhakūr kā kuāṁ’: Dalit chetnā kā dastāvez,” Apekṣā (2004): 16. Translation mine.

24. Jaiprakash Kardam, “Sāhitya meṁ doglāpan nahīṁ chalegā,” Apekṣā (2005): 88. Translation mine.

25. Anita Bharti, “Raṅgbhūmi-dahan aur asmitā kā prashn,” Apekṣā (January–March 2005): 63. Translation mine.

26. This is a reference to Amrit Rai’s biography of Premchand, whose title, in English, translates to “Soldier of the Pen.”

27. Ish Ganganiya, “‘Raṅgbhūmi’, Gandhi, aur Ambedkarvādī-vimarsh,” Apekṣā (2005): 25. Translation mine.

28. This dialectic is considered in significantly more detail in chapter 7.

29. Dharamveer, Premchand: Sāmant Kā Munshi (Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2005): 17. Translation mine.

30. Dharamveer, Premchand, 29. Translation mine.

31. Vasanth Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran. “Caste and Gender: Understanding the Dynamics of Power and Violence” in Gender and Caste, ed. Anupama Rao (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003): 60–63.

32. “Background Information on Dalit Women in India”—Right Livelihood Award, 2006. http://www.rightlivelihood.org/manorama_publications.html

33. Anita Bharti, “Anyāy ke khilāf—laṛnā hī naitiktā hai,” Yuddhrat Ām ĀdmĪ 87 (special issue 2007): 17. Translation mine.

34. Ibid. Translation mine.

35. Pushpa Vivek, “Dalit striyāṁ sabak sikhāne kā hauslā rakhtī haiṁ,” Yuddhrat Ām ĀdmĪ 87 (special issue 2007): 41. Translation mine.

36. Dharamveer, Premchand, 16. Translation mine.

37. Ibid. Translation mine.

38. Vimal Thorat, “Manusmṛti kā tālibānī vistār,” Yuddhrat Ām ĀdmĪ 87 (special issue 2007): 12–15.

39. Bharti, “Anyāy ke khilāf,” 17. Translation mine.

40. Amrit Rai, Premchand: His Life and Times, trans. Harish Trivedi with an introduction by Alok Rai (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).

41. Rai, Premchand, vii-viii.

1. Toral Gajarawala describes this oppositional dialectical engagement of Dalit literature with non-Dalit literature as an “antigenealogy” (2013, 4).

2. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987): 28.

3. Harlow, Resistance Literature, 22.

4. The book is listed as “forthcoming” in the Indian Sahitya Akademi’s catalog. The text I consult here is a manuscript given to me by Mohandas Naimishray in 2005.

5. Omprakash Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya kā Saundaryashāstra (Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2001), 15.

6. Sharankumar Limbale., Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies, and Considerations, trans. Alok Mukherjee (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), 35.

7. Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya, 24. Translation mine.

8. Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya, 30. Translation mine.

9. Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya, 31. Ram Chandra Shukla (1884–1941), also known respectfully as Acharya Shukla, is widely considered the first historian of Hindi literature from the medieval period to the modern. His most famous work is Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās (Varanasi: Kāshī Nāgarī Prachāriṇi Sabhā, 1929).

10. Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya, 50.

11. Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 330–63.

12. The Subaltern Studies Group is a group of scholars who emerged in the 1980s with a focus on narrating a colonial history (particularly of South Asia) from below.

13. For elaborations on this project, see Guha 1982 and Chatterjee 1989.

14. S. Anand, Touchable Tales (Chennai: Navayana, 2003), 17.

15. Spivak, “Subaltern Studies,” 342.

16. For a thorough description of the development of the term Dalit in Marathi and its various meanings depending on the political perspective of the speaker, see Zelliot (1998, 268–269).

17. Arun Prabha Mukherjee, “Introduction,” in Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xix.

18. Harijan means “person of God” and was Gandhi’s alternative to “untouchable”.

19. Spivak, Subaltern Studies, 342.

20. According to Gopal Guru, a Dalit Brahmin is “…a modernist Dalit who has developed a detached, disengaged view of his/her community and turned his/her back on it” (2000, 127).

21. Arjun Dangle, ed., Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1992), 249–250.

24. This remains a common sentiment even among contemporary Hindi Dalit authors with whom I have spoken over the years.

25. Two special issues of the Hindi Dalit literary magazine Apekṣā are devoted to the two major bhakti poets held in especially high regard by contemporary Dalit writers: Kabir and Ravidas. See Tej Singh, Apekṣā: Kabīr par Kendrit. 2 (January–March 2003) and Apekṣā: Sant Ravidās par Kendrit. 3 (April–June 2003). See also Dharmavir 1997.

26. See Hawley 2005, 23.

27. See B. R. Ambedkar, “Annihilation of Caste,” in The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar, ed. Valerian Rodrigues (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Also see Hawley (2005, 276) and Naimishray, forthcoming, 21.

28. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 21.

29. See Bharti 2003, 11–16; See also Purushottam Agrawal, “In Search of Ramanand: The Guru of Kabir and Others,” in Ishita Banerjee-Dube and Saurabh Dube, eds., Ancient to Modern: Religion, Power, and Community in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).

30. Namwar Singh, “Dalit Sāhitya-Paramparā meṁ Kabīr,” Apekṣā 2 (2003): 24.

31. Badri Narayan and A. R. Misra, eds., Multiple Marginalities: An Anthology of Identified Dalit Writings (Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 9.

32. Tej Singh, “Dalit punarjāgran aur Ravidās,” Apekṣā 3 (2003): 2–8.

33. Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 201–202.

34. Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution, 203.

35. Badri Narayan and A. R. Misra, eds., Multiple Marginalities: An Anthology of Identified Dalit Writings (Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 18.

36. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 47, 50.

37. According to Jaffrelot, this poem was not read publicly until 1927, the same year that Ambedkar burned the Manusmṛti at Mahad (Jaffrelot 2003, 203).

38. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 58.

39. In a similar vein, it has been suggested that Premchand may have been inspired to write his short story “Ṭhākur kā Kuāṁ” (“The Thakur’s Well”) by the 1914 Bhojpuri poem “Acchūt kī Shikāyat” (“An Untouchable’s Complaint”) by north Indian poet Hira Dom (Pandey 2003).

40. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 52.

41. Tej Singh, “Jankavi Bīhārī Lāl Harit,” Apekṣā 9 (2004): 5–6.

42. Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution, 203–204.

43. Naimishray; Navaria 2004; Narayan and Mishra 2004; Pandey 2003.

44. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 46.

45. Narayan and Mishra, Multiple Marginalities, 16.

46. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 45–47.

47. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 16.

48. Naimishray, Hindī Dalit Sāhitya, 60.

49. Feminist Dalit writer Anita Bharti, formerly of the Dalit Lekhak Saṅgh and Center for Alternative Dalit Media (CADAM), has spearheaded this effort to recover Harit’s work and reestablish the significance of his legacy in contemporary Hindi Dalit literary histories. See Bharti 2004: 91–95.

50. Tej Singh, “Jankavi Bīhārī Lāl Harit,” Apekṣā 9 (2004): 4.

51. Ish Kumar Ganganiya, “Ambedkarvādī Rāh ke Musāfir—Jankavi Bīhārī Lāl Harit,” Apekṣā 9 (2004): 67–73.

52. Valmiki, Dalit Sāhitya, 29.

53. See Chandra Bahn Prasad, Dalit Diary, 1999–2003: Reflections on Apartheid in India (Chennai: Navayana, 2004).

1. See Dangle 1992; Dhasal 2006.

2. Besides the description of these networks in part I, also see Narayan 2008.

3. For details on the processes of promoting Dalit literature see Narayan 2008.

4. Toral Gajarawala (2013) and Debjani Ganguly (2009) have recently offered important correctives to the dearth of literary treatment of Dalit literature. However, to reiterate a passage quoted in chapter 1: “the reality of Dalit literature is distinct, and so is the language of this reality. It is the uncouth-impolite language of Dalits. It is the spoken language of Dalits. This language does not recognize cultivated gestures and grammar. Standard language has a class. Dalit writers have rejected the class of this standard language. Dalit writers have rejected [the] validation of standard language by the cultured classes because it is arrogant.” Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, trans. Alok Mukherjee (Orient Longman, 2004), 33.

5. Joseph Macwan, The Stepchild (Angaliyat), trans. Rita Kothari (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), xviii.

6. Digish Mehta, “Differing Contexts: The Theme of Oppression in Indian Literatures,” New Comparison, no. 7 (1989): 79–87.

7. Arun Mukherjee, “The Emergence of Dalit Writing,” The Toronto Review (1998): 34.

8. Arun Prabha Mukherjee, “Introduction,” in Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xl.

9. Mukherjee, “Introduction,” xliv.

10. On Ambedkar, see Jondhale and Beltz 2004, Omvedt 2004, Rodrigues 2002, and Zelliot 1996.

11. The clearest articulation of these ideas can be found in his 1936 essay, “The Annihilation of Caste” (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1979). A fully annotated version of the essay, hosted by Columbia University, can be found here: http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/index.html.

12. Valerian Rodrigues, ed., The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 27.

13. Shalini Ramachandran, “‘Poisoned Bread’: Protest in Dalit Short Stories,” in Race and Class 45, no. 4 (2004): 30.

14. For more details on the literary significance of Premchand, see Orsini 2004. On the Progressive Writers Association, see Gopal 2005.

15. Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (London: Routledge, 2005), 96.

16. Gopal, Literary Radicalism, 118.

17. See Gajarawala 2013 for a more thorough comparison of Dalit realism to other traditions of realist literary representation in South Asian literature.

18. Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (Raniket: Permanent Black and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

19. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 491.

20. Ajay Navaria, “Dalit sāhitya kā vigat aur vartamān,” Prārambh (Dalit Sāhitya Visheshank) 1, no. 3 (2004): 44.

21. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).

22. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 20.

23. The corrupt and greedy moneylender has long figured in Indian literature and film as representative of the entrenched nature of the rural Indian feudalism of the past. For examples, see Premchand’s 1936 novel Godān (The Gift of a Cow) and Mehboob Khan’s classic 1957 film, Mother India.

24. Omprakash Valmiki, “Pacchīs Chaukā Ḍeṛh Sau,” in Salām (Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2000), 80. This and all other translated passages from the two stories discussed in this chapter are my own.

25. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 81.

26. Pam Morris, “Realism,” in The New Critical Idiom, ed. John Drakakis (New York: Routledge, 2003), 103–4.

27. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 78.

28. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 79–80.

29. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 35.

30. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 78.

31. Compare this, for example, with the bare wrists, bereft of bangles, signifying the widow Mangali’s vulnerability to the designs of an upper-caste labor boss, depicted in a short story by Kusum Meghwal, “Mangali” (“Viyogi,” 1997), and with Siddharth’s mobile phone in the story “Upmahādvīp” (“Subcontinent”) by Ajay Navaria (2006), to which he holds tight as a metonymic representation of his middle-class status in urban Delhi. These two stories are discussed in some detail in chapters 7 and 6, respectively.

32. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 78.

33. Rosie Thomas, “Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality in Hindi Film,” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 159–160.

34. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 79.

36. Ibid. There is a predominance in Dalit stories of descriptions of violence on the body serving as metaphors for emotional reactions. I want to thank Allison Busch for this insight.

39. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 35.

40. Jaiprakash Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” in Talāsh (Delhi: Vikram Prakashan, 2005), 128–131.

41. Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” 129.

43. Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” 130.

44. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 36.

45. Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” 129–130.

46. Kathryn Hansen has written about the use of rural dialects to localize Hindi narration in the work of Pharnishwarnath Renu. See Kathryn Hansen, “Renu’s Regionalism: Language and Form,” Journal of Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (1981).

47. Fernando Franco, Jyotsna Macwan, and Suguna Ramanathan, The Silken Swing: The Cultural Universe of Dalit Women (Calcutta: Stree, 2000), 130.

48. Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” 131.

49. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 35.

50. Quoted in Morris, “Realism,” 105–6.

51. Kardam, “Lāṭhī,” 131.

53. Charles E. May, “Reality in the Modern Short Story,” Style 27, no. 3 (1993): 372.

54. May, “Reality,” 373.

1. In 2013, Ajay Navaria was again invited to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival, this time in recognition of his newly translated short story collection, Unclaimed Terrain: Stories by Ajay Navaria, translated by Laura Brueck (Delhi: Navayana 2013).

2. Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies, and Considerations, trans. Alok Mukherjee, Modern Indian Writing in Translation. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004): 33.

3. Namdeo Dhasal, Poet of the Underworld: Poems 1972–2006, selected, introduced, and translated by Dilip Chitre (Delhi: Navayana, 2007): 12.

4. Dhasal, Poet of the Underworld, 100.

5. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998): 288.

6. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 290.

7. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 291.

8. Arun Kamble, “Which Language Should I Speak?” in Arjun Dangle, ed., Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 1992): 54.

9. Kathryn Hansen, “Renu’s Regionalism: Language and Form,” The Journal of Asian Studies 40:2 (1981): 276.

10. Hansen, “Renu’s Regionalism,” 277–278.

11. Surajpal Chauhan, “Tillu kā Potā,” in Hari Kab āyegā? (Delhi: Samayik Prakashan, 1999): 24–26.

12. Chauhan, “Tillu kā Potā,” 25.

13. Ibid. This and all other translations from the stories discussed in this chapter are my own.

14. Chauhan, “Tillu kā Potā,” 26.

15. Omprakash Valmiki, “Salām” in Salām (Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2000): 10.

16. Valmiki, “Salām,” 11.

18. Valmiki, “Salām,” 12.

19. Naresh K. Jain, who has recently translated several of Valmiki’s stories, including “Salām,” in a collection called Amma and Other Stories (Delhi: Manohar, 2008) chooses to render the dialectal marking of the shopkeeper’s speech by altering the spellings of some English words, such as “taim” for time, and “baaman” for Brahmin.

20. Valmiki, “Salām,” 13.

21. Omprakash Valmiki, “Pacchīs Chaukā Deṛh Sau,” in Salām (Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2000): 79.

22. Valmiki, “Pacchīs,” 84.

23. Susheela Thakbhaure, “Badlā” in Saṅgharsh (Nagpur, Sharad Prakāshan, 2006): 51–63.

24. Thakbhaure, “Badlā,” 56.

25. Thakbhaure, “Badlā,” 60.

26. Thakbhaure, “Badlā,” 63.

27. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 295. Emphasis mine.

28. Ajay Navaria, “Upmāhadvīp,” Hans 19, no. 1 (August 2004): 173–78.

29. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 174. All words that appear in English in the Hindi original are italicized in the translation.

30. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 299.

31. Ajay Navaria, “Yes Sir” in Yes Sir (New Delhi: Samayik Prakashan, 2012): 181–192.

32. Navaria, “Yes Sir,” 182.

1. Ajay Navaria, “Bali,” Kathādesh (July 2004): 52–59.

2. Udhar Ke Log (The People Over There) (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2008); Paṭkathā aur Anya Kahāniyāṁ, (Patkatha and Other Stories) (Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2006) and Yes Sir (New Delhi: Samayik Prakashan, 2012). Several stories from both collections were translated and published in the collection Unclaimed Terrain, trans. Laura Brueck (Delhi: Navayana, 2013).

3. “Sattā Vimarsh Aur Dalit,” Haṁs (special issue) 19, no. 1 (2004), and “Nayī Nazar kī Nayīṁ Nazariyāṁ,” Haṁs (Special Issue) 24, no. 1 (2009).

4. Navaria, Paṭkathā, 5. This and all other quoted passages in this chapter are my own translations.

5. Navaria, Paṭkathā, 6.

6. According to Navaria, “Es Dhamm Sanantano” is a Buddhist phrase in Pali that means “This is eternal truth.” Later, Hindus articulated it as sanātan dharm.

7. William Monroe, Power to Hurt: Virtues of Alienation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 121.

8. M. S. S. Pandian, “One Step Outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and Public Sphere,” Economic and Political Weekly (May 4, 2002): 1738.

9. Aditya Nigam, “Secularism, Modernity, Nation: Epistemology of the Dalit Critique,” Economic and Political Weekly (November 25, 2000): 4256–4268.

10. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 130.

11. Gopal Guru, “Dalits in Pursuit of Modernity,” in India: Another Millennium? ed. Romila Thapar (New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 2000), 123.

12. Shalini Ramachandran, “‘Poisoned Bread’: Protest in Dalit Short Stories,” Race and Class 45, no. 4 (2004): 31.

13. S. Anand, “Sanskrit, English, and Dalits,” Economic and Political Weekly (July 24 1999): 2055.

14. For example, Guru writes of the colonial period, “The imperialists and the native capitalists used the purity-pollution ideology to ghettoize the Dalit workers in Dalit chawls, and to restrict them to manual jobs in industry, or those connected to sanitation. Similarly, upper-caste workers denied Dalit workers access to certain sections of the mill to jobs offered better payment. The interests of both the upper-caste workers and the native capitalists put modernity/tradition in a symbiotic relationship, leading to untouchability being reproduced both in the factories and in the working class localities” (2000, 124).

15. See also an analysis of Bagul’s text and its metaphorical significance as the story of a Dalit “in search of a new city” in Abhay Kumar Dube, “Nāye Shahar kī Talāsh,” in Dube, ed., Ādhuniktā ke Āīne meṁ Dalit (Delhi: CSDS/Vani Prakashan, 2002).

16. S. P. Punalekar, “Dalit Literature and Dalit Identity,” in Dalit Identity and Politics, ed. Ghyanshyam Shah (Delhi: Sage, 2001).

17. Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi: Manohar, 1996).

18. Quoted in Zelliot, Untouchable to Dalit, 277.

19. Vidyut Bhagwat, “Bombay in Dalit Literature,” in Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, ed. Sujata and Alice Thorner Patel (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1995), 115.

20. Rita Kothari, “Short Story in Gujarati Dalit Literature,” Economic and Political Weekly (November 10 2001): 4311.

22. Ajay Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” Haṁs 19, 1 (August 2004): 174. This translation and those of all other excerpts of the stories discussed in this chapter are my own.

23. This particular scene is considered in detail in the following chapter, which discusses literary representations of rape in Dalit narratives.

24. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 177.

25. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 174.

28. Monroe, Power to Hurt, 5.

29. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 177.

30. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 1.

31. Ashis Nandy, An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 12.

32. Guru, “Dalits in Pursuit,” 125.

33. Williams, The Country and the City, 46.

34. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 173.

35. Navaria, “Bali,” 21.

36. Navaria, “Bali,” 23.

37. Navaria, “Bali,” 18–35.

38. Navaria, “Bali,” 22.

39. Sukeshi Kamra, Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End of the Raj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002), 182.

40. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 174.

41. Navaria, “Upmahādvīp,” 176.

42. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 110.

43. Shalini Ramachandran, “‘Poisoned Bread’: Protest in Dalit Short Stories,” Race and Class 45, 4 (2004): 36,

44. Ajay Navaria, “Es dhamm sanantano,” Haṁs, December 2003 (55–58).

45. Navaria, “Es dhamm sanantano,” 55.

47. Navaria, “Es dhamm sanantano,” 56.

49. Navaria, “Es dhamm sanantano,” 57.

51. Aditya Nigam, “Secularism, Modernity, Nation: Epistemology of the Dalit Critique,” Economic and Political Weekly (November 25, 2000): 4258.

52. Quoted in Gail Omvedt, Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India (New Delhi: Viking, 2004), 1.

53. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004): 9.

55. David Harvey has suggested, “The development of rational forms of social organization and rational modes of thought promised liberation from the irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition, release from the arbitrary use of power as well as from the dark side of our own human natures” (1989, 12).

56. Nigam, “Secularism, Modernity, Nation,” 4262.

57. Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 131.

58. Monroe, Power to Hurt, 64–65.

59. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 30.

60. Nigam, “Secularism, Modernity, Nation,” 4258.

61. Monroe, Power to Hurt, 68.

1. As Priyamvada Gopal has argued about Shekhar Kapur’s 1994 film Bandit Queen in “Of Victims and Vigilantes,” in Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India, ed. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999): 293–331.

2. Sharmila Rege, “A Dalit Feminist Standpoint,” Seminar, no. 471 (1998): 47–52.

3. Anupama Rao, ed. Gender and Caste. Vol. 1, Issues in Contemorary Indian Feminism (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003): 2.

4. Vasanth Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran, “Caste and Gender: Understanding the Dynamics of Power and Violence,” in Gender and Caste, ed. Anupama Rao (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003), 60–63.

5. Sharmila Rege, “Caste and Gender: The Violence Against Women in India,” in Dalit Women in India: Issues and Perspectives, ed. Prahlad Jogdand (New Delhi: Gyan, 1995), 29–30.

6. Quoted in a document (“Background Information on Dalit Women in India”) prepared and presented by Ruth Manorama upon her receipt of the Right Livelihood Award in 2006 in Stockholm, Sweden (http://www.rightlivelihood.org/fileadmin/Files/PDF/Literature_Recipients/Manorama/Background_Manorama.pdf). Emphasis mine.

7. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1993), 78.

8. Anupama Rao, Gender and Caste, 229.

9. Anupama Rao, The Caste Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

10. Rao, The Caste Question, 221–222.

11. Rao, The Caste Question, 229.

12. Rao, The Caste Question, 222, 234.

13. Rao, The Caste Question, 236.

14. Anand Teltumbde, Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (Delhi: Navayana, 2009).

15. Teltumbde, Khairlanji, 31.

16. Teltumbde, Khairlanji, 46–47, 61.

17. On September 24, 2008, a judicial verdict was passed that pronounced a death sentence for six people involved in the attack and a life term for two more. Although this was heralded as an historic verdict in defense of a crime against Dalits, the judge adjudicating the case refused to file it under the Prevention of Atrocities Act (1989), thus erasing its “meaning” as a caste-based crime. According to S. Anand, “in treating it as just another criminal act and by offering death for death, the judgment decontextualises one of the most horrific caste crimes in post-independence India, and gives us the vicarious pleasure of avenging the brutal killing of the Bhotmanges. By making many feel that those convicted ‘deserve to be hanged’, the verdict manages to successfully mask caste realities. It reduces both the crime and the punishment to abstract ‘human rage’ stripped of all social and political underpinnings” (The Hindu, Oct. 5, 2008)

18. Teltumbde, Khairlanji, 97–98. This is, of course, brought into further relief by the public uproar surrounding the gang-rape of a young woman on December 16, 2012, in Delhi. In part because the normative caste and class structure of the attack was reversed, the brutal case galvanized tens of thousands of women in Delhi to take to the streets in protest. According to Shefali Chandra, quoted in the International Business Times on January 5, 2013 (“Delhi Gang-Rape Protests: What About the Sex Crimes Against Untouchable Women?” by Palash R. Ghosh):

“Their mobility, and presence as laborers, has signaled sexual availability,” she said. “Moreover, caste hierarchies themselves have always relied on staking distinctions between the women whose sexuality was secured (the upper-caste, chaste, wife/widow) on the one hand, and the women who were sexually available on the other. The entire edifice of caste required this.”

19. Statistics reported in “The situation of Dalit women—formerly known as untouchables/scheduled castes,” presented before the Committee on Development of the European Parliament by Ruth Manorama, National Convenor of the National Federation of Dalit Women on December 18, 2006 (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/comparl/deve/meetings_hr/20061218/manorama.pdf).

20. Quoted in a Human Rights Watch report: “Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s ‘Untouchables’” (March 1999), http://www.hrw.org/en/node/24487.

21. Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Butler and Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992): 391.

22. Marcus, “Fighting Bodies,” 392–393.

23. Nancy L. Paxton explores rape as “the master trope of colonial discourse” from both the epistemic level of Orientalist textual domination of the colony and also the common narrative trope in the post-1857 British novel of the British colonial woman raped by the native “Caliban.” In her book, Paxton considers “all the scripts related to rape that were in wide circulation between 1830 and 1947 to account for the dominance, after 1857, of the particular rape script of white women threatened with rape by Indian men” (Paxton, 15).

24. Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined, 64.

25. Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined, 72.

26. In addition to Gopal 2004, see Shohini Ghosh, “Deviant Pleasures and Disorderly Women: The Representation of the Female Outlaw in Bandit Queen and ‘Anjaam,’” in Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains, ed. Ratna Kapur (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996); Madhu Kishwar, “The Bandit Queen” Manushi (September–October 1994): 34–37; and Arundhati Roy, “The Great Indian Rape Trick,” Sunday (August 26–September 3, 1994) 58–64.

27. Indira Jaisingh recounts Roy’s and her interactions with Phoolan after the film’s release on July 26, 2001 (http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/jul/26spec.htm).

28. Gopal, “Of Victims and Vigilantes,” 297–298.

29. Gopal, “Of Victims and Vigilantes,” 307–308.

30. Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women, 77.

31. Quoted in Rao, Gender and Caste, 230.

32. Mohandas Naimishray, “Apnā Gāṁ,” in Ãwāzeṁ (Delhi: Samta Prakashan, 1998): 31–63.

33. Naimishray, “Apnā Gāṁ,” 31. This and all other translations of passages from the stories discussed in this chapter are my own.

35. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 56.

36. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 61.

37. Naimishray, “Apnā Gāṁ,” 32.

38. Naimishray, “Apnā Gāṁ,” 33.

40. Navaria, Upmahādvīp, 176.

41. For consideration of the confluence of gender, caste, and race in the NFDW’s participation in the 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban, see Kannabiran (2006), Thorat (2004), and Vishweswaran (2010).

42. Kusum Meghwal, “Mangali.” In Dalit Mahilā Kathākāroṁ kī Charchit Kahāniyāṁ, ed. Kusum Viyogi (Delhi: Sāhitya Nidhi, 1997), 34.

43. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, “Real and Imagined Goddesses: A Debate,” in Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen M. Erndl (New York University Press, 2000), 269.

44. Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy (Kolkata: Samya, 1999), 73.

45. Badri Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity, and politics (Calcutta: Sage, 2006), 28.

46. Sunder Rajan, “Real and Imagined Goddesses,” 270, 272.

47. Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu, 96–97.

48. In her study of narratives of shaktī in Rajasthan, “Gender, Violence, and Power: Rajasthani Stories of Shakti,” in Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories, ed. Nita Kumar (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 26–48, Ann Grodzins Gold suggests the seamless association of femininity and power. Gold relates several versions of popular Rajasthani tellings of Shakti tales in which the goddess emasculates the men around her through acts of literal or physical castration. Gold suggests of Indian goddess tales, “They unite positive and negative evaluations of female power as creative and destructive. Particularly vivid is the way each story differently confounds prescriptions for female modesty, confinement, and deference according to which most rural North Indian women live their lives” (1994, 42).

49. Kusum Meghwal, “Aṅgārā,” in Dalit Kahānī Sanchayan, ed. Ramnika Gupta (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2003), 144.

50. Meghwal, “Aṅgārā,” 145.

51. According to Wendy Hesford’s reading of American women’s testimonials of rape, “The realist narrative purportedly captures a historical truth, whereas the fantasy presumably reveals a psychological truth. The presumption informing both narratives, however, is that by rendering bodily pain and trauma tellable the survivor can undo the grasp of the perpetrator and reestablish the social dimension of the self lost in the midst of violation. The revenge fantasy could be seen as the equivalent of the talking cure—a speech act, which, like the unconscious testimony of a dream presumably gives access to a psychic reality, in this case the trauma of rape” (194). See Wendy Hesford, “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation,” College English 62, no. 2 (1999): 192–221.

1. A notable exception to this general state of affairs is the high public profile of the Tamil woman writer Bama. Three of her Tamil books (Karukku, Macmillan, 2001; Sangati, Oxford University Press, 2005; Harum-Scarum Saar and Other Stories, Women Unlimited, 2007) have been translated into English to wide national and international recognition.