Validating Dalit literature as a tool to awakening Dalit consciousness

Abstract

This paper attempts to understand the role of Dalit Literature and unravels the idea of consciousness as an arena for social protest. At the same time, the present study caters to underpin that concept of Dalit consciousness is a socially and culturally constructed reality which expresses, initiates, and engages social protest as a form of empowerment and emancipation discourse. Such social protests become a norm of social assertion for empowerment of the marginalized communities. This is especially the case in a society which is highly stratified in social, economic, political and cultural realms and where this stratification has been maintained through social and cultural engineering of dominationand subordination for centuries. The Dalit community, which has been pushed to the bottom in social ladder in the name of caste and untouchability, has inherently realized its sense of human dignity in recent times and started recapturing its lost identity in and through such protest movements.