Dalit Identity Research Articles

Understanding ‘dalit chetna’ in Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, A River Called Titash

In the following article, I have attempted to foreground the anti-caste or dalit consciousness of the novel Titash Ekti Nadir Naam by Adwaita Mallabarman. It is done in order to resist those readings or adaptations or interpretations of the text that have overlooked its radical content. I have looked at three aspects of the novel: the use of the folk, the question of emotionality and the relationship between spatiality and dalit identity formation. The article also delineates the kind of subject that emerges with the denouement of the novel. It is an interventionist reading of sorts that seeks to place the novel and the author in their socio-historical context. However, the essay does not engage in an anachronistic dalit critic and faults the text for the ‘absence’ of certain tropes or aesthetics that are considered to be typical of dalit writing.

Caste in Black and White: Dalit Identity and the Translation of African American Literature

In 1965, the critic Manohar Namdeo Wankhade completed a Ph.D. in American literature in the U.S. and returned to Maharashtra, where he published several influential essays for the nascent Marathi Dalit literary movement. This essay examines the role that American literature played in Wankhade's criticism, from early writings on Whitman's “spiritual democracy” to essays on the Black Arts Movement and Ralph Ellison, which were repurposed by a generation of Marathi Dalit writers. These writings imagined new terms of Dalit identity outside of the discourse of the Indian nation and the restrictive language of the caste system. By constructing a racialized, “culturally dualistic” America, Wankhade's Marathi essays sought in African American narratives a way of describing the historical trauma, alienated labor, and “double consciousness” of Black life that could resonate with Dalit subjectivity and the ongoing injustices of caste prejudice and violence.

English

  Caste identity is not just a question of consciousness; it is a matter of structure, of power. Can the category Dalit merely represent a perspective? Can it just be a standpoint? And what are the tools/ideas/texts that would enable a Dalit perspective? Can a Dalit perspective be divorced from the experience of being termed an untouchable? Untouchability is not a singular experience; what holds Dalits together is the structural fact that they have all been termed untouchable and subjected to exclusions of varying degrees, and their rejection of that identity. Dalit, thus, is related to identity, and at the same time is anti-identity. Untouchability and feudalism exist in India even today in the small villages of South India. A Dalit has no right to voice out in resistance against oppression of the high caste and class feudal lords- this problem is presented through a heart-touching and thrilling story ‘Classmate’ written originally as ‘Sahapathi’ by  P. Lankesh. The writer is not only depicting the plight of a Dalit but also presents the shame and guilt of the doer of the injustice and exploitation which he inflicts on the poor untouchables under the spell of his position, monopoly and authority. P Lankesh in ‘Classmate’ attempts to unravel the labyrinths of a decadent feudal order governed by a dehumanizing caste-system. The existential predicament of a Dalit in the trap of caste politics and feudalism is projected by Lankesh. To the usual theme of resistance of the down-troddens, Lankesh brings the subtle dynamics involved in the reality of caste system in India. Instead of bringing in a binary of right and wrong, he gives a holistic view of a social reality that is rooted in the Indian mindscape for centuries.   Key words: Dalit Literature, power, hegemony, mindscape, caste-system, feudalism, identity, oppression, dalit identity, contemporary kannada literature, subjugation, dalit perspective.

Dalitisation of Civil Society

My article will look at the role played by civil society, educational institutions etc in maintaining inequality based on caste. It will try to locate the change that has come up in the constitution of civil society with the arrival of cyberspace on the one hand and the greater visibility of Dalit identity politics on the other. Focusing on the workings of the portal called Round Table Indw and the recent debate surrounding the essay “The Doctor And The Saint” by Arundhati Roy, I shall attempt to delineate the way this debate is attempting to challenge the power‐knowledge‐representation nexus and also ironically moving towards a ghettoisation of the Ambedkarite struggle.

Unified Tamil Dalit Identity: Problematics and Anomalies

This essay examines the validity of a unified identity of Tamil Scheduled castes in light of their differences regarding caste, history, culture, and politics. Different scheduled castes in Tamil Nadu converged at a certain period to form a unified caste identity. At a later stage, there were fissures or divergences within the community. The fissures within their unified caste movement can be attributed to the fact that their trajectories for emancipation and liberation from the early decades of the twentieth century to the contemporary period are distinct. The dissemination of caste ideologies through printed works enabled the construction of unique caste identities within the scheduled castes. The tracts written by Iyothee Thass Pandithar in his journal Oru Paisa Thamizhan, Elangovan's Arunthathiyar Varalarum Panpadum and Gnanasekaran's Mallariya Samuga Varalaru reiterate the demarcation of distinct caste boundaries among various scheduled castes in Tamil Nadu. This essay analyzes the significance of these works in the construction of distinct scheduled caste identities that defy a unified Dalit identity in Tamil Nadu.

Does Caste Matter for Social Disability of Dalit Women?

A cross sectional study was conducted among 301 dalit women in rural Tamilnadu to examine the influence of caste on social identity, stigma, discrimination, social relations and quality of community life. Using multi-stage cluster sampling procedure, the present study used standardized scales to measure the variables of interest. Alongside descriptive analysis, univariate ANO VA was used to examine the caste-wise variance ofk ey variables observed. Results reveal that Parayar women internalized high level of ethnic or social identity, stigma, everyday life discrimination, frequent conflicts in social relations and reduced quality of community life. While women of other lower castes bettered on quality of community life. The study concludes that caste is a significant qualitative variable with substantial influence on ethnic or dalit identity internalization, perceptions of stigma, need for equity, discrimination, conflicts in social relations and quality cf community life. Thus social disability of dalits substantially differ caste wise; therefore developing caste wise systematic evidence on dalit social disability and exclusion are of critical importance to prioritize programmatic and policy interventions to better the life of dalits among dalits.

Book review: British Untouchable: A Study of Dalit Identity and Education

Book review: British Untouchable: A Study of Dalit Identity and Education

Is Dalit Identity a Cause or an Effect of Social Marginalization?

We studied whether Dalit identity is a cause or an effect of social marginalization by examining stigmatization and discrimination of Dalit Christians on account of Dalit social identity. Using multistage sampling procedure, a total of 210 Dalit Christians were recruited and interviewed using standardized measurements. The results revealed that the Dalit Christians perceived high level of personalized stigma, negative selfimage, frequent everyday life and major life event discrimination. The socio-demographic variables significantly correlated with domains of stigma and discrimination. The dimensions ofs tigma and discrimination varied significantly between gender. caste, place of residence, marital status, occupational and educational groups. The sociodemographic variables and discrimination accounted for 66.5% of variance on perceived stigma. Perceived stigma, discrimination and selected socio-demographic variables predicted 52.1% of variance on everyday life discrimination. An empirically guided discussion was initiated on whether discrediting caste identity was a cause or an effect of social marginalization. The study concluded that the deficits in socio-demographic aspects of Dalit Christian life dispose them socially vulnerable.

Challenging caste discrimination in Britain with literature and law: an interdisciplinary study of British Dalit writing

This essay, the collaborative product of a legal scholar and a literary critic, examines the relationship between Dalit literature and legal assertion in challenging caste discrimination in Britain. The construction of caste discrimination in India as an international human-rights issue from the late 1990s onwards has raised awareness of caste discrimination in Britain and given impetus to long-standing demands for caste discrimination in Britain to be made illegal – a possibility envisaged in the Equality Act 2010. We were interested in finding out whether the intense lobbying for a change in British law by Dalit organisations was matched by a similarly vibrant cultural output by Dalit writers and artists, as exists in India. The article specifically analyses the play The Fifth Cup by Rena Dipti Annobil and Reena Bhatoa Jaisiah and the poetry of Daljit Khankhana as examples of British Dalit writing. These Dalit writers are involved in legal and political campaigning against caste discrimination and their writings engage with the concept of law, but only the play by Annobil and Jaisiah addresses caste discrimination in the UK whereas Khankhana's poetry focuses on violence against Dalits in India. The writings reflect two different political strategies towards caste identity and the struggle against casteism. With regard to caste identity, Khankhana disavows it or represents it as problematic in his poetry, asserting a totally non-caste identity, whereas Jaisiah and Annobil embrace and celebrate Dalit identity in their play as having the potential for resisting casteism. However, despite their different approaches to caste identity and the struggle against casteism, both Khankhana and the playwrights Jaisiah and Annobil support the legal prohibition of caste discrimination in Britain.

Empowering Periphery from Below

This paper argues that Dalit identity formation processes in contemporary East Punjab can easily be perceived in mutifaceted activites being undertaken by an all-pervasive and potent agency of Dalit Deras especially Ravidass Deras. These Deras over the last few years have been making concerted efforts towards occupying easily available distinct Dalit space in the peripheries of the villages of this borderland state of North India. Ravidass Deras have been seen as centres off ast emerging Dalit religious domain in the otherwise religion dominated society of Punjab where till recently Dalits were invariably considered as part of one or the other mainstream religion in the state. But the fast expanding constituency of such Deras among Dalits and their consequent confrontation with the dominant religion in the state forced some of the groups within Dalit communities of the region to seek and establish their separate Dalit identity basically based on their indigenous religious ethos deeply rooted in the egalitarian teachings of sant Ravidass of the famous North Indian Bhakti movement, who they reverently consider Guru (mentor/perceptor).

Contemporary Dalit Assertions in Kerala: Governmental Categories vs Identity Politics?

Caste inequality is a heatedly debated issue in contemporary Kerala, in stark contrast to an earlier time, when the idea that Kerala had overcome caste hierarchies through the twin strategies of social development and political mobilisation was still hegemonic. Post-1990s, political developments have pushed the question of caste back into the forefront of public debate, and ‘Dalit identity politics’ has been perceived as a serious threat by Kerala’s powerful left parties, despite the fact that Dalit political formations are not numerically powerful. Three processes seem to be crucial in precipitating the current situation: (a) the transformation of politics itself in the mid-1990s from the ‘public action’ mode to the ‘liberal’ mode, which was rejected by the Dalits and tribal communities; (b) rapidly widening economic inequalities and rapidly crystallising elite ideological dominance led to the strengthening of abjection as a mode of marginalisation of the lower castes which is being resisted; (c) the transformation of the Malayali literary public brought to the fore questions of caste and gender that were submerged under the earlier socio-cultural consensus generated by the hegemonic Malayali national popular shaped by the communists.

Making Sense of Dalit Identity in Contemporary Punjab: Review Article of a Recent Field‐based Study in Punjabi

Making Sense of Dalit Identity in Contemporary Punjab: Review Article of a Recent Field‐based Study in Punjabi

Untouchable cultures: memory, power and the construction of Dalit selfhood

In the context of the philosophical literature on multiculturalism, I argue in this article that models of cultural identity based entirely on the nonvoluntary possession of a set of cultural characteristics are seriously incomplete. In particular, such models cannot address the need, among some groups, to reconstruct, invent and imagine alternative positive identities as a result of historical injustice, and to fill in the content of ‘culture’ accordingly. As an illustrative case, I survey processes of identity construction among ‘Dalits’, members of former ‘untouchable’ and other lower caste communities in India, with a focus on the role of historical consciousness and existing power relations in the imagination of Dalit culture. Dalit strategies of identity negotiation reveal the understandable need, on the part of the members of this community in progress, to produce a cultural identity that makes sense, psychologically and politically, given who they cannot imagine themselves to be, due to the fact of historical oppression. My analysis does not merely target essentialism, nor is it meant to be deconstructive of identity claims. Rather, I highlight select elements within the negotiation of Dalit identity to illustrate (1) the relevance of real historical relations of discrimination and inequality to the construction of culture; (2) the equivocal character of ‘choice’ within this process; and (3) the emancipatory possibilities provided by imagined narratives of cultural selfhood.

Representation and resistance: Strategies in Bama’s Karukku and Raj Gautaman’s Siluvai Raj Sarithiram

The social structure of caste in India has assigned Brahmins to the apex and Dalits to the bottom of the caste system and, importantly, has also attained religious sanction, since the sacred Vedic texts served to perpetuate such stratifications among Hindus. The social institutions of religion, law, politics, art and literature thus reflected the dominant ideology of the Caste Hindus. But, after centuries of suppression, Dalits are now finding their voice, in literature as well as through political activism. In many ways an “arm” of Dalit politics, such literature has become an effective tool in expressing the protest of this community against the domination of Caste Hindus. Dalit literature as a genre was established in the 1960s and 1970s when a body of Dalit writing was published in Marathi and Gujarati, followed, nearly two decades later, by Tamil Dalit writing. Although caste oppression and discrimination are common elements in most Tamil Dalit literary works, their widely differing contexts range from Srilankan Tamil Dalit to Tamil Dalit-Christian communities. Bama’s Karukku (1992) and Raj Gautaman’s Siluvai Raj Sarithiram (2002) bring to light the discriminations prevalent within Tamil Christian communities. The protagonists of these novels take the radical step of rejecting Christianity and identifying themselves primarily as Dalits. Through an analysis of these two texts, the article discusses the caste hierarchy prevalent in Tamil Christian communities, while also exploring larger ambiguities in the construction of pan-Indian Dalit identity.

Futurity in words: low-caste women political activists' self-representation and post-Dalit scenarios in north India

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh, this article explores low-caste women political activists' self-representation. Low-caste communities have been mobilised to supra-local ideologies that posit ‘classic’ forms of subalternity such as the Dalit condition – and the rights and entitlements attached to it – as their rallying symbols. This article offers a counter-intuitive example to expressions of the burgeoning Dalit identity in north Indian society. In particular, it shows resistance to the usage of the Dalit label for self-representation by a number of low-caste women activists within the Bahujan Samaj Party. From women's narratives it emerges that ‘Dalit’ – implying a caste-laden ontological condition of subalternity – is denied on the grounds of its disempowering connotations. These narratives are all the more salient in consideration of the layered structure of gendered, socio-economic, cultural and political marginalities that low-caste women usually experience. While these findings unearth the discrepancies between subaltern pasts and cultures vis-à-vis their appropriation by low-caste women in contemporary north Indian society, they also point to vernacular understandings of ‘Dalit’ in circulation in the Uttar Pradesh public sphere. Moreover, these findings point to the need to de-link caste identity from agency, and to ethnography as a tool to (re)construct their nexus. Finally, by foregrounding the historicity of the Dalit label, this article encourages reflection on its widespread use.

Partition and the Ruptures in Dalit Identity Politics in Bengal

A number of historical studies have revealed that there were powerful Dalit movements among groups such as the Rajbansis and Namasudras in northern and eastern districts in colonial Bengal. The weakening and in some cases almost disappearance of these movements after 1947 is difficult to explain. One plausible explanation could lie in the emotional and physical displacement caused by Partition of the province. Both groups lived in the border region and lost their geographical anchorage following Partition. This essay explores the movement of the Namasudras before and immediately after Partition. Partition represented a major historical contextual shift that resulted in a transfiguration of Namasudra identity politics in the two Bengals, revealing the conjunctural nature of such collective social identities. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Namasudra experience of displacement and struggle for rehabilitation brought to the foreground their “Hindu refugee” identity, overshadowing, at least for a time, their Dalit cultural politics.

Punjabi dalit youth: social dynamics of transitions in identity

This article is based on interviews with young urban dalits in the Indian Punjab and Wolverhampton, UK, and aims to chart their experience of caste border crossings in personal relationships. It links their narratives to the larger political economic context of their respective locations. It suggests that, perhaps due to their preoccupation with economic independence, dalit youth in Punjab are less concerned about maintaining caste borders in marriage than their counterparts in Wolverhampton. Dalit youth in Wolverhampton have experienced caste-related bullying during their schooling that is inexplicable to them given their location in a supposedly casteless society in the United Kingdom, and as a result they seem to be pessimistic about the erosion of caste through crossing caste borders in marriage. Whilst showing reluctance in risking further insult by crossing caste borders in marriage, in their friendships, including sexual relationships, they are willing and able to cross these borders. The paper concludes with a comparison of different explanations and remedies for dealing with caste prejudice in personal relations. It offers the suggestion that the negotiations of dalit identity are best understood by locating them in larger religious, immigrant, national contexts on the one hand and within the intra-personal on the other: radical positioning in the overt political domain may go hand in hand with the embracing of fluidity in the personal domain.

Re-inventing Dalit women's identity? Dynamics of social activism and electoral politics in rural north India

Dalit or ex-untouchable women's voices and perspectives have been marginalized not only in Dalit movements but also in predominantly upper-caste Hindu-led women's movements. This paper aims at exploring the unheard voices and perspectives of Dalit women in the context of Dalit assertion in the state of Uttar Pradesh, north India. Scholarly writing examines the different facets of Dalit political assertion led by the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh. Few scholars, however, examine the ways in which individual and organizational actors engage with women of Dalit castes through social activism in the state. This paper is an attempt to do so. Specifically, it examines, with special reference to issues of culture and identity, the engagement of a grassroots women's non-governmental organization with rural Dalit women in southern Uttar Pradesh. The paper begins with an enquiry into why engagement with issues of culture and identity is necessary for social activism with Dalit women, and how it is carried out. It then examines whether social activism and electoral politics with Dalit women cross-cut each other, and also what implications this or its lack has for the women. Finally, the paper asks how far activism and politics can go towards re-inventing Dalit (women's) identity.

Ravidass Deras and Social Protest: Making Sense of Dalit Consciousness in Punjab (India)

This paper argues that Dalit consciousness in Punjab emerged against the backdrop of the teachings of Ravidass, an untouchable saint-poet of the North Indian Bhakti movement who presented a middle path between assimilation and radical separatism for the construction of a separate Dalit identity. Dera Sach Khand Ballan, one of the most popular Ravidass Deras in Punjab, played an important role in concretizing this path by chiseling the markers of a separate Dalit identity in the state. The author assesses the long-term implications of the newly emerged Dalit consciousness in Punjab for the deepening of democracy in India.

Hindi Dalit Autobiography: an Exploration of Identity

Several powerful constructions of Dalit social and political identity are now circulating in very influential ways within the public sphere in North India, as various groups including both the Bahujan Samaj Party as well as Hindutva organisations compete to assert their influence over how these identities are defined, who they include, and what they mean. In this context, the rise of Hindi Dalit autobiographies as a source of Dalit cultural identity becomes especially important in North India, as they contest traditional conceptions of the Dalit community as ‘untouchables’ and attempt to re-inscribe Dalit identity in positive, self-assertive terms. However, Dalit autobiographies retain certain ambivalences, as the authors struggle to reconcile their low-caste identity with their current urban middle-class status, and more recently, as their claims to represent all members of the Dalit community are challenged by Dalits of the younger generation.