ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at reading postcolonial theory and Dalit literatures contrapuntally – that is, postcolonial theory 'against the grain' and texture of Dalit literatures. Dalit literatures demonstrate forcefully that they imply a formidable effort of assertion and engenderment of the self through language. The Dalit critic Sharankumar Limbale includes in the Dalit community 'all those living outside the boundary of the village'. This is explicit in the poetry of Namdeo Dhasal, the pioneering Dalit poet in Marathi. Dalits have also been excluded at the discursive level, since they have been barred from what has traditionally been authorized as history and culture. Dalit literatures exceed or complicate certain theoretical premises linked to the question of marginality and subalternity in postcolonial contexts, especially the valorization of the pre-modern or pre-colonial, and of everything that seems to have remained 'immune to the invasion of colonial modernity'.
