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origin of dalit literature
the influence of the caste system of India
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A person’s being a Bengali, Kashmiri or Panjabi may become as central to his conception of himself as a person who deprived of this, might feel bare of his personhood itself. So if India is a nation then most of us would like to think it as “one nation with one culture”. This is nation with many cultures and these cultures defined in profound ways the kind of quality of life people live in this country. In India cultures are deeply rooted in religion and social structure. Each culture has different kind of caste and sub-caste system which categorizes people in mainstream and marginal group. In 1873 Jyotirao Phule, a Marathi sudra, published his book Gulamgiri (Slavery), the book was about the oppression of dalits in India. This slave account functioned effectively as a model for Phule to resist the oppressive caste system that had left the sudras and ati-shudras (the untouchables) without a sense of self-identity and consciousness in India. Phule’s life-long work to raise awareness among the lowest castes about their degraded condition as designed by the Manu’s caste system remains an inspiration today. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the greatest Dalit leader in India who drafted the Constitution of India and was the country’s first Law Minister, acknowledged Phule’s work by dedicating his own book to Phule. Ambedkar, highlighted the state of Dalits struggle to claim their identity and humanity against the mainstream society.
Although slavery and the caste system as institutions were abolished in 1950, the legacy of classified systems based on labor and discourses of supremacy has continued in the Indian society. Moreover, the caste system’s official negation has not erased the system from...
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...solved that a subaltern can also better speak for himself or herself.
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
One statement in the beginning of the book was especially poignant to any one who studies Indian culture, It is easy for us to feel a vicarious rage, a misery on behalf of these people, but Indians, dead and alive would only receive such feelings with pity or contempt; it is too easy to feel sympathy for a people who culture was wrecked..
Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. Print.
Woodburne, A. S. "Can India's Caste System Survive in Modern Life?” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 2, No. 5. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pgs. 525-537. Web
Thousands of years ago, Indian society developed into a complex system based on different classes. This system was known as the Caste System. It separated Indians into different castes based on what class were born into. As thousands of years went by, this system grew larger and became further complex (Wadley 189). This system caused frustration for the Indian citizens because they were receiving inequality. Not only did the inequality and separation of the Indian society frustrate the citizens of India, but the imperialism Britain had upon them as well. In the early 20th century, Indian nationalists wanted to take a stand against the British rule and make India independent. The British created unfair laws that created a nationalist movement
Subbiah, Malathi. "Caste System and Caste Related Violence in Indian Culture." Indian Journal of Arts 2.6 (2013): 16-20. Print.
Radu Ban and Vijayendra. (2007). The Political Construction of Caste in South India. Working paper
Gairola, Rahul. “Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to Deepa Mehta’s Fire.” Comparative Literature 54:4 (Fall 2002). 307-324. EBSCOhost.
Owing to India’s diversity, these identities are determined by caste, ancestry, socioeconomic class, religion, sexual orientation and geographic location, and play an important role in determining the social position of an individual (Anne, Callahan & Kang, 2011). Within this diversity, certain identities are privileged over others, due to social hierarchies and inequalities, whose roots are more than a thousand years old. These inequalities have marginalized groups and communities which is evident from their meagre participation in politics, access to health and education services and
Today in India, there is a group of 300 million people who face severe persecution; that’s about 25% of India’s total population (Kersey 1). These people, Untouchables, are now referred to as Dalits (Edwards 1). “In Sanskrit, the word Dalit means suppressed, smashed, broken to pieces” (“India’s Dalits Still Fighting Untouchability” 2). Even the definition of their name indicates the injustice that the Dalit people face. India passed legislation in 1950 that made the caste system illegal; additional laws were passed to give Untouchables other freedoms and legal aid (Kersey 2). Still, Untouchables remain incredibly poor, and they face persecution to this day (Kersey 1). Although the caste system in India was ended by law, life remains difficult for the country’s Untouchables.
There is no question that Mulk Raj Anand has fashioned with Untouchable a novel that articulates the abuses of an exploited class through sheer sympathy in the traditionalist manner of the realist novel He is, indeed, the "fiery voice" of those people who form the Untouchable caste. Yet if the goal of the writer, as Anand himself states, is to transform "words into prophecy," then the reader's struggle for meaning in the closing scenes of the novel become problematic and contestatory. It is reasonable to assume -- and as I would argue, it is implied -- that Anand has ventured to address a specific question with writing Untouchable; this is, how to alleviate the exploitation of the untouchable class in India? He then proceeds to address this question through the dramatization of Bahka, the novel's central character. Having said this -- and taking into account Anand's notion of the novel as prophesy -- I will argue that the author has failed to fully answer the question he has set before him.
Of the themes which dominate the representative writings of the forth world literatures include the theme of resistance, rebellion, opposition, assertion, challenge, sacrifice, suffering and displacement. All these general ideas are interconnected with the common concept of ‘freedom’ and an aspiration for which is truly a driving force for the indigenous people. In this paper an attempt has been made to look into the theme of resistance and how it contributes to the development of the spirit of self-determinism as it is reflected and re-presented in the Fourth World literatures with special reference to dalits’ writings in India in order to appreciate and advance the common cause of freedom in the larger interest of Humanity.
The debut novel by Arvind Adiga was published in 2008 and talks about the life of Balram Halwai, the son of an auto rickshaw puller who lived in a village in Dhanbad with his grandmother, parents, brother and extended family. The story has been told from Balram’s point of view who spent his childhood in ‘darkness’-in the impoverished area of rural India-in poverty and illiteracy, as he had to drop out of his school because his family had to arrange for his cousin’s dowry and so they couldn’t afford to pay for his education. His name itself is the proof that the dominant caste system in India has divided its population into higher and lower social classes. Balram’s frustration is evident from the fact that he critizes the caste system and points
Sharan Kumar Limbale’s novel ‘Hindu’ is a significant addition to the process of reformulating a new aesthetic rubric of Dalit literature. Moving away consciously from the mode of sentimentality, binaries and universality, Limbale’s novel attempts to negotiate a new artistic vocabulary for the Dalits in a fast changing world where old certainties are vanishing at a mind numbing pace. ArunPrabha Mukherjee,in her introduction to the novel points towards the significant departure that Limbale’s novel articulates, by undermining several practices of burgeois narrative technique. Both Limbale and Mukherjee seems to assert that in a complex and dynamic world of dalit realities, experiences and corresponding techniques of representation should be recalibrated to bring out the intricate nuances of the specific life-world of the erstwhile ‘untouchables’.
Roy, Anjali. "Microstoria: Indian Nationalism's 'Little Stories' In Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines." Journal Of Commonwealth Literature 35.2 (2000): 35-49.
On the whole the living literary tradition like the Mahabharata, performs the dual function of recreation and reinterpretation of Indian society. Every period of social transformation tends to dig in this vast storehouse of knowledge for understanding the eras gone by and also for understanding