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.
