Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation
Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation

Author: Sarah Beth Hunt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-08-07

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1317559517

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This study explores how Dalits in north India have used literature as a means of protest against caste oppression. Including fresh ethnographic research and interviews, it traces the trajectory of modern Dalit writing in Hindi and its pivotal role in the creation, rise and reinforcement of a distinctive Dalit identity. The book challenges the existing impression of Hindi Dalit literature as stemming from the Dalit political assertion of the 1980s and as being chiefly imitative of the Marathi Dalit literature model. Arguing that Hindi Dalit literature has a much longer history in north India, it examines two differing strands that have taken root in Dalit expression — the early ‘popular’ production of smaller literary pamphlets and journals at the beginning of the 20th century and more contemporary modes such as autobiographies, short stories and literary criticism. The author highlights the ways in which such various forms of literary works have supported the proliferation of an all-encompassing identity for the so-called ‘untouchable’ castes. She also underscores how these have contributed to their evolving political consciousness and consolidation of newer heterogeneous identities, making a departure from their long-perceived image. The work will be important for those in Dalit studies, subaltern history, Hindi literature, postcolonial studies, political science and sociology as well as the informed general reader.

Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation
Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation

Author: Sarah Beth Hunt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-08-07

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1317559525

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This study explores how Dalits in north India have used literature as a means of protest against caste oppression. Including fresh ethnographic research and interviews, it traces the trajectory of modern Dalit writing in Hindi and its pivotal role in the creation, rise and reinforcement of a distinctive Dalit identity. The book challenges the existing impression of Hindi Dalit literature as stemming from the Dalit political assertion of the 1980s and as being chiefly imitative of the Marathi Dalit literature model. Arguing that Hindi Dalit literature has a much longer history in north India, it examines two differing strands that have taken root in Dalit expression — the early ‘popular’ production of smaller literary pamphlets and journals at the beginning of the 20th century and more contemporary modes such as autobiographies, short stories and literary criticism. The author highlights the ways in which such various forms of literary works have supported the proliferation of an all-encompassing identity for the so-called ‘untouchable’ castes. She also underscores how these have contributed to their evolving political consciousness and consolidation of newer heterogeneous identities, making a departure from their long-perceived image. The work will be important for those in Dalit studies, subaltern history, Hindi literature, postcolonial studies, political science and sociology as well as the informed general reader.

Writing Resistance
Writing Resistance

Author: Laura R. Brueck

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-06-10

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0231166044

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Writing Resistance is the first close study of the growing body of contemporary Hindi-language Dalit (low caste) literature in India. The Dalit literary movement has had an immense sociopolitical and literary impact on various Indian linguistic regions, yet few scholars have attempted to situate the form within contemporary critical frameworks. Laura R. BrueckÕs approach goes beyond recognizing and celebrating the subaltern speaking, emphasizing the sociopolitical perspectives and literary strategies of a range of contemporary Dalit writers working in Hindi. Brueck explores several essential questions: what makes Dalit literature Dalit? What makes it good? Why is this genre important, and where does it oppose or intersect with other bodies of Indian literature? She follows the debate among Dalit writers as they establish a specifically Dalit literary critical approach, underscoring the significance of the Dalit literary sphere as a ÒcounterpublicÓ generating contemporary Dalit social and political identities. Brueck then performs close readings of contemporary Hindi Dalit literary prose narratives, focusing on the aesthetic and stylistic strategies deployed by writers whose class, gender, and geographic backgrounds shape their distinct voices. By reading Dalit literature as literature, this study unravels the complexities of its sociopolitical and identity-based origins.

Hindi Dalit Literature in the United Provinces
Hindi Dalit Literature in the United Provinces

Author: Tapan Basu

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-05-30

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 938986707X

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The book will focus upon the growth of a Hindi Dalit literary culture at its formative stage in the 1920s and the 1930s, and the significant role played by Swami Acchutanand and Chandrikaprasad Jigyasu, in this process. The book introduces the Dalit public sphere in the United Provinces in the early decades of the twentieth century. It tracks the growth and the development of a Dalit print culture in the United Provinces during the 1920s and the 1930s. The book centres on the figures of Swami Acchutanand and Chandrikaprasad Jigyasu, anti-caste intellectuals, and the most eminent figures in the Hindi Dalit world of letters during that era. The purpose of the proposed book is to rescue Swami Acchutanand and Chandrikaprasad Jigyasu from undeserved obscurity and accords to them the importance that they merit in any chronicle of the Dalit cultural movement in North India.

Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste
Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste

Author: Toral Jatin Gajarawala

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0823245241

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Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism--progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental--in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit ("untouchable caste") fiction. Drawing on a wide array of writings from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V. S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce?

The Gender of Caste
The Gender of Caste

Author: Charu Gupta

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0295806567

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Caste and gender are complex markers of difference that have traditionally been addressed in isolation from each other, with a presumptive maleness present in most studies of Dalits (“untouchables”) and a presumptive upper-casteness in many feminist studies. In this study of the representations of Dalits in the print culture of colonial north India, Charu Gupta enters new territory by looking at images of Dalit women as both victims and vamps, the construction of Dalit masculinities, religious conversion as an alternative to entrapment in the Hindu caste system, and the plight of indentured labor. The Gender of Caste uses print as a critical tool to examine the depictions of Dalits by colonizers, nationalists, reformers, and Dalits themselves and shows how differentials of gender were critical in structuring patterns of domination and subordination.

Writing Resistance
Writing Resistance

Author: Laura R. Brueck

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-06-10

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0231166052

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Writing Resistance is the first close study of the growing body of contemporary Hindi-language Dalit (low caste) literature in India. The Dalit literary movement has had an immense sociopolitical and literary impact on various Indian linguistic regions, yet few scholars have attempted to situate the form within contemporary critical frameworks. Laura R. BrueckÕs approach goes beyond recognizing and celebrating the subaltern speaking, emphasizing the sociopolitical perspectives and literary strategies of a range of contemporary Dalit writers working in Hindi. Brueck explores several essential questions: what makes Dalit literature Dalit? What makes it good? Why is this genre important, and where does it oppose or intersect with other bodies of Indian literature? She follows the debate among Dalit writers as they establish a specifically Dalit literary critical approach, underscoring the significance of the Dalit literary sphere as a ÒcounterpublicÓ generating contemporary Dalit social and political identities. Brueck then performs close readings of contemporary Hindi Dalit literary prose narratives, focusing on the aesthetic and stylistic strategies deployed by writers whose class, gender, and geographic backgrounds shape their distinct voices. By reading Dalit literature as literature, this study unravels the complexities of its sociopolitical and identity-based origins.

Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature
Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature

Author: Śaraṇakumāra Limbāḷe

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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"This book, the first critical work by an eminent Dalit writer to appear in English, is a provocative and thoughtful account of the debates among Dalit writers on how Dalit literature should be read. This book includes an extensive interview with the author, an exhaustive bibliography, and a critical commentary by the translator. Originally published in Marathi, this is the first English translation of the book."--Provided by publisher.

Caste Matters
Caste Matters

Author: Suraj Yengde

Publisher: India Viking

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780670091225

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In this explosive book, Suraj Yengde, a first-generation Dalit scholar educated across continents, challenges deep-seated beliefs about caste and unpacks its many layers. He describes his gut-wrenching experiences of growing up in a Dalit basti, the multiple humiliations suffered by Dalits on a daily basis, and their incredible resilience enabled by love and humour. As he brings to light the immovable glass ceiling that exists for Dalits even in politics, bureaucracy and judiciary, Yengde provides an unflinchingly honest account of divisions within the Dalit community itself-from their internal caste divisions to the conduct of elite Dalits and their tokenized forms of modern-day untouchability-all operating under the inescapable influences of Brahminical doctrines. This path-breaking book reveals how caste crushes human creativity and is disturbingly similar to other forms of oppression, such as race, class and gender. At once a reflection on inequality and a call to arms, Caste Matters argues that until Dalits lay claim to power and Brahmins join hands against Brahminism to effect real transformation, caste will continue to matter.