"Dalits enable the purity of the upper caste society, and become impure in the process."
This short quote from Sharan Kumar Limbale's Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature says a great deal about the marginalised other—a term closely associated with Dalit identity. A subaltern group of minorities whose primary task involves cooking, cleaning, serving and existing for a dominant group, they function within the binaries of pure/impure, dominant/subordinate, and upper-caste/lower-caste.
This hierarchical dichotomy finds its scriptural roots within the Vedic period, when the Brahminical decree separating society into the varna system took shape. The medieval period then saw the proliferation of caste hierarchy operating through occupation, land relations, religious authority and social exclusion.
Gradually, as the country moved through the pages of history and entered the era of the mid-seventeenth century, a shift occurred when Indian society began to be organised and ruled by the British. With English schools, industrial capitalism and the rise of a working-class population creating a new Western reality of a modern and developed India, the dynamics of caste were also softened. However, the contradictory result of colonial rule saw the prevalence of caste-based discrimination in altered forms, where it occupied a newly rigid structure, was documented intensively and became increasingly tied to politics.
What was unexpected, however, was the use of new intellectual and political resources to elevate the identity of what it actually meant to be a Dalit. It was particularly Ambedkar's and Phule's writings about Dalit struggles, coupled with their own lived experience, that ushered in a change that proved extremely valuable for the Dalit community. The reception to these works, both within the country and abroad, further pioneered a group of Indian writers—the likes of Arjun Dangle, J. P. Pawar, Baby Kamble, Namdeo Dhasal and others. Their own individual experiences gave rise to a host of textual formats such as novels, discourse, poems, autobiographies and short stories, representing Dalit identity.
Now, as the pages of history near the twenty-first century, where we have a steady stream of works that represent and disperse the ideas of being a Dalit, the hierarchical nature of caste-based segregation continues to exist within the country. So, in contemporary times, where a modern outlook centres itself around the ideas of inclusivity, egalitarianism, empathy and sensitivity, why is it that Dalit identity still manages to find itself in a subordinate position? How is it that the predecessors' approach of creating a separate body of literary work depicting Dalit literature, despite its overarching benefits, still isn't able to erase the traces of caste-based vulnerabilities?
Although the emergence of Dalit literature has challenged dominant representations and created spaces for self-representation, literature alone cannot dismantle the structural, institutional and cultural conditions through which caste inequality is reproduced. What is required is a broader change in one's understanding of the self in relation to the position one occupies within the environment—basically, a change in one's social consciousness about Dalit identity.
And ironically, it is literature itself, in the form of Limbale's Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, which provides readers with a facet to reaffirm their belief about Dalit identity. Limbale's work is seminal in bringing forth the idea of aesthetics towards understanding Dalit identity.
Aesthetics—a term, an idea, often associated with the pleasing, the proportionate, the balanced, the coherent and the beautiful. Such understandings of aesthetics are often shaped by the everyday realities of individuals, particularly those situated within a dominant socio-cultural environment, and by a steady stream of literary, visual and cultural texts that mould their perceptions. It is only for a few, whose perception of reality is not aesthetic in the manner seen and witnessed by the majority, that reality is something which is not beautiful, is disproportionate, uncomfortable, demoralising and gory. And this is the reality experienced by marginalised groups who are marked not by balance or harmony, but by humiliation, exclusion, poverty, violence, labour and the denial of dignity.
Hence, in this context, Limbale's work can be considered a valuable addition to perceiving Dalit identity. His work functions as a harness for readers, keeping them fastened to the difficult realities of Dalit poverty, exclusion and humiliation instead of allowing them to retreat into comfortable or idealised understandings of society. His work brings the reader into contact with the lived reality of caste and compels an engagement with the narrative which dominant aesthetics may attempt to conceal.
Published in 2004 in Marathi and translated into multiple languages, Limbale's work therefore attempts to connect a larger consciousness towards an issue that has riveted the country for multiple centuries. His is an approach, a subversive move, which explodes the binary and exposes the inner contradiction it conceals. It acts as a manner of defamiliarising a reader, where a dominant reader might be provided with a facet of renegotiating their identity with the world, and a subordinate (Dalit) reader may reaffirm their indigenous identity and consciousness.
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*Contact: rohit.pathak@maeng.christuniversity.in
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