Say Hello to Ambedkar: Understanding Dalit Consciousness through Ajay Navaria’s Hindi Short Fiction

Abstract

Ajay Navaria is considered “the modern-day Premchand” by Mohammed Hanif, for his radical representation of the Dalit subject in Hindi literature. Navaria’s stories contain the urban Dalit individual dangling between his identity as a village “bhangi” and the privilege of a city “babu” at the center of the narrative. This paper is an attempt to understand Dalit consciousness within Hindi literary discourse and the language politics of urban India by closely analyzing Navaria’s Hindi short stories, translated into English by Laura Brueck in Unclaimed Terrain (2014). In the first part, I examine Navaria’s intertextual relationship with Premchand in “ कथा” or “Hello Premchand” in order to understand the discursive potential of Navaria’s “Dalit consciousness” as inspired by Ambedkar. In the second part, through “गोदना” or “Tattoo,” I explore the hybridized nature of his literary-language, and the attendant questions of translatability of Dalit chetna into English. I argue that Navaria’s use of language is an exercise in the construction of a modern Dalit identity that is often silenced and reserved. This paper, therefore, studies the revolutionary potential of Dalit literature as manifested in, both, its political and esthetic sensibility.