Indian Literary History

Abstract

Abstract The canons of modern Indian literature and Indian writing in English are formed of texts and perspectives that are shaped by an anticolonial nationalism that is actually Gandhian nationalism. In such writing, the glory of Indian civilization, national pride, and national independence are the principal themes. But these texts evade addressing the internal contradictions and complexities in the life of the colonized. Canonical Indian writers do not, for the most part, discuss class, caste, gender, and other inequalities in a radical way. We rarely find Ambedkar as an ideological influence or autonomous Dalit characters in modern Indian literatures, including Indian writing in English. It was in the 1960s that Babasaheb Ambedkar and Ambedkarite characters began to appear as powerful symbols in Dalit literature, first in Maharashtra and later in other regions of the country. This chapter examines how Dalit critics and writers propose and elaborate Ambedkarism as an alternative ideological framework for Indian literary history through an analysis of the Marathi Dalit writer Baby Kamble’s autobiography The Prisons We Broke (originally published in 1982; English translation in 2008).