ABSTRACT
Dalit existence and the Black American existence are both suffused with a past and a present of ‘oppression and suffering’, of marginalization and exclusion, of segregation and inferiorization. Clearly, this makes for definite correspondences/affinities in their experiences and expressions. The comparability of caste and race has been historically problematic. As Andre Beteille points out in his influential essay, ‘Race, Caste and Gender’, thinkers such as Gunnar Myrdal and Gerald Berreman have foregrounded the inevitability of this comparison, with the understanding that the connotations of ‘race’ are more physiognomic, while ‘caste’ has a socio-economic basis (Beteille 1990: 490). ‘Dalit’ literally means poor or downtrodden; but also attached is the specific connotation of traditionally disadvantaged lowcaste Indian minorities, including the indigenous tribal. This specificity of ‘casteist’ implications of the term ‘Dalit’ is due to its use by B. R. Ambedkar in 1928 in his Bahshkrut Bharat (or ‘India of the Ex-communicated’) (Rege 2006: 11). The term ‘Dalit’ runs the danger of being inundated with oversimplification that does not address the issues of diverse and pertinent
historical, linguistic and religious conditions influencing it. In his The Weapon of the Other: Dalitbahujan Writings and the Remaking of Indian Nationalist Thought 2010, Kancha Ilaiah underlines the denial of and indifference towards the caste question by the Brahmanical nationalist discourse. He observes:
Quite surprisingly, Basava, Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar do not figure in any text of nationalism. Their absence is not accidental but well-designed; the design of constructing a Self into nationhood and to make the Other totally invisible in that very nation. (2010: xxx)
Protest and resistance against this hierarchical, hegemonic, exclusionist discourse has taken many forms, Dalit literature being a significant one. ‘Dalit Sahitya’ emerged as a deliberate rhetoric of radical challenge to the established perceptions almost concurrently with the rise of the ‘Dalit Panthers’ in the 1960s. As the nomenclature suggests, the Panthers derived their inspiration from the Black Panthers of the United States, and shared their revolutionary aspirations of establishing their autonomous identity and culture. The experiences conveyed in both Black American and Dalit writings have surfaced from life based on inequalities and discriminations; both prefer the idiom of protest and resistance against the social system which oppresses them on the basis of racial or caste constructs.
