ABSTRACT
This volume springs from one simple question: how is it possible that the major political and literary development that has deeply altered the Indian academic and non-academic world as well as Indian society at large in the past three decades, has not had a greater echo outside India? More precisely, how is it possible that the literatures abundantly produced by the Dalits (formerly known outside India as ‘Untouchables’) are not better known in the Western world? Several obvious reasons come to mind. First, even in a globalized world, India does not need the Western world to forge its own literary movements, and what the West (for lack of a better phrase) takes, or does not take, into account does not matter. Second, most of these literatures are written in Indian languages, with only a minority of texts translated into other languages, including primarily English and French (one of the other main languages of translation). Seve ral important anthologies have been published in English by major publishing houses with international distribution, but these are only recent (see final bibliography). Certain Dalit texts – such as Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan (2003) and Bama’s Karukku (1992) and Sangati (1994) – have become classics in the Indian context, and have been available for some time in English and in other languages. Yet, the attention seems to have been focused only on a
few texts instead of taking stock of the general movement. The third reason for such under-exposure, or even neglect, is probably because Dalit literatures do not fit in the categories that the West usually resorts to when dealing with South Asian literatures. In his introduction to Sharankumar Limbale’s Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, Alok Mukherjee signals this when he says that,
[The] work [of Dalit writers] not only does not fit into neat binaries, in fact, it complicates them by exposing how a subjugated society such as that of pre-independence India could, simultaneously, be a subjugating society and how in postcolonial India, that subjugation could continue. (Limbale 2004: 17)
In her introduction to Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan, Arun Prabha Mukherjee also remarks how the ‘dominant discourse of Postcolonial and Subaltern theories . . . not only refuses to notice the high caste status of these writers but presents them as resistant voices, representing the oppression of “the colonized” ’ (Mukherjee 2003: xiii). Thus, oppression in societies such as India is derived not only from the conjunction of imperialism, capitalism and colonialism. In her chapter Laetitia Zecchini (Chapter 4, this volume) addresses precisely the ways in which Dalit literatures have unsettled and decentered the postcolonial doxa, forcing us to revise some of our premises.
