Remembering Heterodox Pre/Colonial Oral Cultures in (Re)Organising Bengali Dalit Literary Histories

Abstract

The paper explores what a (re)organisation of the existing histories of Bangla literature from Dalit literary perspectives can offer. Towards this end, it examines some of the early questions on the formation of literary standards and how that remained directly connected with caste hierarchies. It turns briefly towards late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Calcutta as a discursive-material site to explore symptomatically how such organising of dominant literary standards works its way through various forms of exclusion. When seen from the perspective of these exclusions, what does the question of Dalit literature offer in transforming the very idea of ‘literariness’? Also, what can the vernacular literatures offer in the reception of Dalit literatures in their multiplicity while resisting the tendencies of homogenising their volatility? Addressing such concerns, the paper turns towards a conceptualisation of Bangla Dalit literature as offering a poetics for multiple forms of dwelling.