Representing Resistance in the Global Marketplace: Caste and Dalit Women in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy

Abstract

This article examines how Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) and Arundhati Roy’s novels—The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017)—engage with the problem of representing Dalit resistance and explores the aesthetic challenges they face in articulating the intersectional nature of Dalit women’s struggles. I examine how the novels provide a sustained critique of the discrimination and violence that Dalits face. Still, they align themselves with the progressive Gandhian philosophy, where reformation rather than the annihilation of caste is the principal mode through which they articulate the resolution of caste conflict. In doing so, they run counter to the subaltern Ambedkarite politics that situates itself in opposition to much of the postcolonial, Gandhian, nationalist approach to caste, which locates Dalits within rather than outside the caste system. The framework is complicated further by the portrayal of the normative underclass subaltern Dalit figure as male rather than female in these novels. In the process, it disregards Dalit women’s intersectional experiences against caste-based gender violence and undermines their historical contributions. I argue that in Mistry and Roy’s novels, Dalit women are either invisible, co-opted, or overlooked in the shaping of Dalit male selfhood. They are doubly excluded—first in their own country and then in Anglophone literature.