ABSTRACT
This chapter, through an exhaustive reading of Manoranjan Byapari’s autobiography, Itibritte Chandal Jiban, interrogates the Dalit’s experience of the historico-political event of Partition. The Dalit subject has survived in the threshold of culture, with histories to narrate but muted by the valorised elitist ordeals of culture and aesthetics. The present chapter explores how the hierarchically structured dynamics of caste persists and how the premise of marginality for the Dalit sustains as a pre-conditioned regulatory truth, an inescapable fate that remains unaltered/ uncompromised even in a ‘state of exception’ like Partition. As such, the chapter substantiates Byapari’s autobiography as a potent impediment to the overarching yet shallow claims of modernity that the newly Partitioned Nation State had advocated.
