ABSTRACT

With its foundations in the writings of Jyotirao Phule in the nineteenth century and Bhimrao Ambedkar in the twentieth, Dalit literature has relentlessly questioned the hierarchy of the caste system. It has argued that such a system has little to do with ecclesiastical matters and more to do with dominance and exploitation. The Dalit literary canon, as it has developed over the past two centuries, has accordingly been along secular lines, within the paradigms of liberalism and constitutional reform. Contemporary Dalit literature from Bengal is also on these lines, reflecting harsh realities and representing the injustices of the social system. But the problem with this modernist stance is that it tends to erase the specifically religious dimension of caste, and of the Dalits’ condition of social exclusion. That this erasure results in a reflection of Dalit realities, which can only be partial is indicated by the forms of resistance, evolved over the past two centuries, which span both the secular and the religious. These suggest the

inadequacy of the discourse that conceptualizes Dalit life experience in uniformizing and purely secular class terms – so typically a feature of the dominant modern discourse.