Subaltern Experimental Writing: Dalit Literature in Dialogue with the World

This essay analyses the experimental features of three contemporary novels produced by Dalits in relation to the novels’ approach to caste and national and international audiences. Bama’s Sangati (1994), Sharankumar Limbale’s Hindu (2003), and G. Kalyana Rao’s Untouchable Spring (2000) create fragmented, innovative, and complex narrative structures that are experimental both in their attempts to reflect oral narrative structures that validate the unique communal legacy of Dalit culture and their production of radically new narrative strategies that evoke a world free from caste discrimination. The essay also explores the novels’ complex positioning of multiple readers and the distinctive features of their English translations. The three translations re-code the texts for international consumption but simultaneously try to keep the novels somewhat “strange”; the translations, which attempt to replicate the novels’ innovative features, are also emphatically experimental.