Dalit Studies - Page 2

Understanding Dalit Literature: A Critical Perspective Towards Dalit Aesthetics

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Priyanka Kumari1 & Dr. Maninder Kapoor2

1Research Scholar, NIT Jamshedpur, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. Email: priyanka.cuj@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7464-7080

2HOD NIT Jamshedpur, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. Email: mkapoor.hum@nitjsr.ac.in, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5859-3879

 Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.06

Abstract

Indian literature has always been governed by classical norms. Literature has been divided into ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’. The non-Dalit writing revolves around ‘rasa’ and the motive is ‘art for art’s sake’. Dalit aestheticism is ‘art for life’s sake’. When certain forms and styles are applied imitating Sanskrit poetics, Shakespearean language or Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’, literature is considered to be following beauty parameters that are considered to be necessary for artistic pleasure. This kind of claim of holding traditional Indian aesthetics as a law book for all kinds of literature cannot be validated. The assertion of mainstream aesthetics as aesthetics for pan India is bound to exclude the truth of disregarded subjects. There is a need for Dalit literature to follow alternative aesthetics as the writings are the real story of pain and survival. How can pain be read for the purpose of pleasure? In the case of Dalit literature, the artistic yardsticks are not destroyed rather they are rejected. The traditional aesthetics will not be able to do justice with Dalit literature. Sharankumar Limbale writes “To assert that someone’s writing will be called literature only when ‘our’ literary standards can be imposed on is a sign of cultural dictatorship” (Limbale, 2004, p. 107). This paper will be an attempt to discuss the need for alternative aesthetics to understand Dalit literature.

Keywords: Aesthetics, identity, realism, hegemony, culture.

Entangled Histories: Gender and the Community Mobilisations of the Ezhavas in Colonial Kerala

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Kavyasree R

Doctoral Fellow, Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Hyderabad,

kavyasreeraghunath@gmail.com, ORCID id: 0000-0002-5399-7217

 Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.05

Abstract

This paper explores how transnational historical approaches towards gender can provide a fresh perspective to locate women’s histories of colonial India and how such enquiries can widen the scope of exploring the rich archival sources available. By bringing in the recent scholarship in the area of gender and transnatioanal history, this paper would demonstrate the possibilities to unearth complex and entangled histories of women by bringing to the discussion the community consolidation efforts of Ezhavas, an erstwhile untouchable caste in the colonial Kerala, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the transnational character of the cultural and ideological transactions that shaped the Ezhava community mobilization in the wake of colonial transformations in the region, the paper would trace the specific ways in which such exchanges shaped the history of gender within the Ezhava movement. In doing so, this paper would point towards the need to go beyond both colonial and nationalist paradigms to unpack the intricate histories of gender, caste and regional social movements during the age of empire.

Keywords: Gender, Social Reform, Caste, Social Movement, Modernity, Transnational History

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Problematising Testimony in Autobiographical Narratives by Dalit Women in the English Translation

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Pratibha

Ph.D. Research Scholar, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, and Assistant Professor, Sharda University. ORCID id: 0000-0001-5698-6612. Email: pratibhabiswas85@gmail.com, pratibha.biswas@sharda.ac.in.

 Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.04

Abstract

Dalit autobiographical narratives are widely and habitually being categorised by critics as testimonios or sociobiographies, with an implication to be understood as representative life-stories. Because of the genre’s perceived emphasis on ‘authenticity’, ‘representation of collective suffering’, and immanent connotations of being a political genre of speech for the marginalised, scholars/critics of Dalit literature have been applying the term testimonio to describe autobiographical narratives, which has inadvertently led to a normativisation of the available modi of ‘truth production’ about Dalit lived experiences.  The objective of this paper is to dispute the adulatory assessment of testimonio as a genre, by highlighting the instances where the relationship between the self and the community in autobiographical narratives by Dalit women appears uneasy, fraught with dissensus and problematic, when examined from a Dalit feminist standpoint. By looking into ways of reading agency in Karukku (2000), Sangati (2005), and Viramma, Life of an Untouchable (1997), beyond the true-false, victim-oppressor and Dalit-Savarna simplistic binaries, this paper enunciates the problematic implications of using the nomenclature testimonio for reading these autobiographical narratives translated in English. Further, it posits arguments for shifting the emphasis on the politics of language and narrative to avert the trappings of the genre.

Keywords: Dalit autobiographical narratives, testimonio, self and the community, Dalit feminism, literature and politics, Dalit literature in translation, translation and agency.

 

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Formation of Space, Experience and Thought: A Critical Study of Ambedkar’s Biopic Bhim Garjana

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Sudhir Mehra

Assistant Professor, Department of English & Cultural Studies. E-mail: ssudhir.m@pu.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.15
Formation of Space, Experience and Thought: A Critical Study of Ambedkar’s Biopic Bhim Garjana

Abstract

In his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin establishes that it is the ‘aestheticization of politics’ or ‘politicization of art’ which streamlines the cultural discourse of a nation at a given moment. The present paper attempts to critically analyze the ‘politics of visuality’ vis-à-vis ‘visuality of politics’ as an elemental framework in the making of Indian national discourse. To understand or rationalize this elemental framework, the paper postulates its hypothesis, that the politicization of art is a valid inquiry into how a certain ideological discourse is pre-selected and pre-programmed with a certain grid of features and structures of perception.  It is this ideological discourse that needs to be exposed through a visual text namely, Vijay Pawar’s Bhim Garjana. This visual text broadly represents what Kancha Illaiah terms the Ambedkarite phase of Dalit history spanning over two decades – 1936-1956[i]. Bhim Garjana is an aesthetic artifact directed by a Dalit himself – an ‘insider’s’[ii] document on Ambedkar’s life and philosophy. There have so far been three films on Ambedkar including Bhim Garjana, one directed by Jabbar Patel titled Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000) and second by Anand Patwardha titled Jai Bhim Comrade (2011). All the visual texts though do not follow the definition of biopic strictly, but more or less, the paper places them in the category of biopics. Each text focuses on the life and struggle, both in historical and ideological terms, of Ambedkar.

Keywords: Ambedkar, Bhim Garjana, Dalit, Jai Bhim Comrade.

[i] Kancha Illaiah’s “Towards the Dalitization of Nation” in Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Nation-State edited by Partha Chatterjee.1998.

[ii] Limbale, Sharan Kumar. Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit literature: History, Controversies and Considerations. Trans. and Ed. By Alok Mukherjee. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2010.

Problematizing Dalit Chetna: Sadgati as the Battleground of Conflict between the ‘Progressive Casteless Consciousness’ and the Anti-Caste Dalit Consciousness

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Sumit Rajak

Assistant Professor of English, S.B.S. Government College, Hili, Dakshin Dinajpur, India, &  Ph.D. researcher, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Email: rajaksumit111@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.10

Abstract

The notion of Dalit chetna or Dalit consciousness is central to the development of the anti-caste discourse. Since the inception of a visible and radical Dalit discourse, a paramount importance has been accorded to the idea of Dalit consciousness. Whereas the prevalence of Dalit consciousness is of paramount importance to the Dalit writers, filmmakers and critics, and there is a vibrant presence of this consciousness in their works, there has also been an attempt on the part of the upper-caste writers and filmmakers to engage with the Dalit consciousness on their own terms, and thereby developing what I call ‘progressive casteless consciousness’, which is not synonymous with the anti-caste Dalit consciousness developed by the Dalit writers, filmmakers among others, in their works. This paper is an attempt to explore these distinct versions of Dalit consciousness through a reading of the representation of the caste questions in the celebrated Hindi writer Munshi Premchand’s widely read short story Sadgati (‘deliverance’ in the religious sense of the term), which he composed in 1931, and its film adaptation by the globally acclaimed filmmaker Satyajit Ray in the form of a TV film Sadgati (1981), and the critical writings on the writer and the director’s handling of the caste questions. In the process, the paper will show how Sadgati, both of Premchand and of Satyajit Ray, becomes the repository of conflict between the progressive casteless consciousness of the upper-caste intellectuals and the anti-caste Dalit consciousness developed by the Dalit intellectuals.
Keywords: Dalit consciousness, repository of conflict, adaptation, battleground of representation, progressive casteless consciousness, anti-caste Dalit consciousness


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Unpacking caste politics through the multimodal communicative landscape of Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability

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Suryendu Chakraborty

Assistant Professor in English, Krishnagar Women’s College, Krishnagar, West Bengal, India. ORCID: 0000-0001-8555-2910. Email: suryenduchakraborty@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.06

Abstract

Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability by Srividya Natarajan and S.Anand reveals the bitter truth of casteism as prevalent in Indian society. Through the use of graphic novel format and reviving the traditional Gond art form, the text not only verbalizes the experience of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a major activist who battled against the various modes of oppression and aggression faced by the Dalit community, but also opens up the untouchable’s experiences of existence for the naïve readers. This essay shows how Bhimayana uses a multimodal structure to create a post colonial literacy about caste and caste based marginalizations.

Key Words: Ambedkar , Caste, Dalits, Gondh, Multimodality, Untouchables

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