Dalit movement & literary phenomenon

In 2004, the French Institute of Pondicherry provided a platform for about a dozen Dalit writers in Tamil to reflect on their experiences in the Dalit literary movement. What they said on the occasion, along with extracts from their writings, were published later. And the book under review is an English translation of that publication. David C. Buck, an American academic who has translated some medieval Tamil texts, has joined the editor of the Tamil volume, Kannan M., in this venture.

The Dalit movement had a late start in Tamil Nadu, when compared to Maharashtra and Karnataka, largely because of the dynamics of the non-Brahmin Dravidian movement. It was only in the early 1990s — in the wake of the Mandal–Masjid developments, and in the context of Ambedkar centenary and the break-up of the Soviet Union and its impact on the Left movement — that the Dalit movement first manifested itself as a literary phenomenon in Tamil Nadu.

Full report here Hindu

Colours of discrimination

Dalit literature of our times, born out of lived experience and art, is a significant contribution both to the collective social conscience and to our notions of aesthetics.

The best of art for me is that which speaks — in various forms and voices — of the lives of dispossessed people, of the ways they live, cope and overcome; and of dreams and visions of a better, fairer, kinder world.

Among the most moving reminiscences of a dispossessed childhood that I have encountered, for instance, are in a new genre of dalit autobiographies. Close to my heart is Sharankumar Limbade's autobiography Akkarmashi. Limbade begins with memories of a school picnic to a forest near his village. The dalit children play and eat separately embarrassed in front of their upper caste classmates by their stale dry rotis, chutney and a dried fish. They can smell the delicacies from the other group: fried paranthas, delicious laddoos, fresh spiced vegetables, gujiyas and so much else. Some girls feel sorry, and give them some vegetables, careful not to touch them.

Limbade is embarrassed by their pity. When they have eaten, the teacher asks the dalit boys to gather the leftovers in an old piece of newspaper. They can barely wait to eat the scraps, which they attack as soon as their classmates have walked ahead. When he returns home that night, his mother asks him sourly why he did not also bring some of the leftovers home for the rest of the family to taste.

Full report here Hindu

Phoenixes of banishment and oppression

Recently I had the opportunity of reading Changiya Rukh (Against the Night), the first Punjabi Dalit autobiography that has been rendered into English. Changiya Rukh means a chopped tree — a metaphor of mutilation and a symbolic image of enforced stunting — of something made small and inferior so that the others appear larger and superior — an excellent parallel to the position of the Dalits in this deeply divided society.

Balbir Madhopuri movingly describes rural poverty and the hunger in the dry, wintry months, the closely-knit relationships among the Ad Dharm community to which he belonged and the centrality of his 100-year-old grandmother in shaping the lives of not only her immediate family, but almost every woman in that village. Burdened with the stigma of untouchability in the Jat heartland, he grows up to learn that tea is an inferior drink because only the lower castes drink it, whereas milk was the staple beverage of the upper-castes.

In Changiya Rukh, he documents the inner turmoil to which Dalits are reduced whenever they have to conceal their caste identity. We observe instances of how, sometimes, the Dalit people themselves internalise the view of caste-Hindu society and develop a feeling of inferiority. Simultaneously, Balbir reveals how he was so upset with his Hindu-sounding surname that he dropped it and instead took up the name of his birthplace Madhopur. By expunging one identity, and taking on another, he succeeds in rejecting an entire history of oppression.

Full report here Express Buzz

Untouchable prejudice: Dalit literature

A VIBRATION of sympathy ran through the audience at the recent Jaipur Literary Festival in Rajasthan as author Omprakash Valmiki, his voice trembling with indignation, spoke of the daily humiliations suffered by his community.

As one of India's 160 million ''untouchables'', Valmiki is part of an emerging genre of writers now telling their stories of centuries of abuse under the rigid and hierarchical Hindu caste system. Brimming with anger and bitterness at the injustices meted out by upper caste Hindus for more than 2000 years, the writing has a singular quality to it: raw and jagged, full of anger and pain.
His people, Valmiki told the audience, were not allowed to wear decent clothes, ride on a horse during marriage processions, draw water from the village well or remain seated while an upper caste person was standing.
Indeed, the very word ''untouchable'' hurts - denoting a status so lowly it falls outside the caste system, a system that deems untouchables too filthy for higher castes to touch, and which has in the past decreed that molten lead be poured into the ears of untouchables who tried to memorise Hindu sacred texts, and that the tongues be cut from upstarts who dared to read them.
Hardly surprising then that many of India's 160 million untouchables would rather be known by a term of their own choosing, ''Dalit'' - the word is derived from the Sanskrit for destroyed or crushed - much as African Americans rejected ''Negro'' during the civil rights movement in the US.
As Valmiki spoke, the largely upper caste audience almost visibly winced with embarrassment. Dalit children, he continued, were seated apart in school, forced to sweep the classroom and given water in different glasses. Upper caste Hindus refused to be treated by a Dalit doctor or rent their homes to Dalits for fear of ''pollution''.

Full report here The Age