Bending Biography: The Creative Intrusions of "Real Lives" in Dalit Fiction

This paper focuses on the writings of Uday Prakash and Ajay Navaria, both Delhi-based Hindi-language authors whose literary work focuses on the dynamics of caste in contemporary India, to consider each author's innovative use of metafictional narrative techniques to blur the boundaries between "real" and fictional life narratives. I argue that reading these texts through the critical lens of postrealism allows us to reconsider the apparently arbitrary generic distinctions between auto/biography and fiction in Dalit narratives with a careful analysis of the strategically interventionist employment of real lives in Dalit fiction.