ABSTRACT
The line ‘no name is yours until you speak it’ is taken from an essay by Homi Bhabha (2004: xxv) in which he defines the vernacular cosmopolitanism of migrants and diasporic minorities circulating between cultural and national traditions as a minority perspective, a ‘difference within’ that questions and fractures a number of mainstream narratives. In India, Dalits could be identified to such a ‘difference within’ – a difference to which outcastes have been condemned by one of the most ideologically articulated systems of socio-cultural exclusion and estrangement (Poitevin 2002a), and a difference reclaimed or championed. Dalits have also constructed themselves as a dissident political and cultural non-Hindu minority in the course of the twentieth century. It is from such a marginal position that
they have dislodged not only conventional discourses on democracy and modernity, but also challenged official representations of the Indian nation, of its culture, literature and founding myths. This decentering perspective from the ‘rest’ (almost literally, here, in the case of Dalits, the ‘refuse’ of Hindu society) seems to lend itself to a postcolonial reading. One of the relevant premises of postcolonial theory is to rethink the ‘center’ from the peripheries; the West from the perspective of the non-West; nationalism from those that nationalism has rendered homeless or stateless; disciplines, modernity, history and other so-called universal or global categories from non-Western locations and narrations.
