The Postman and the Tramp: Cynicism, Commitment, and the Aesthetics of Subaltern Futurity

In January 2017, Bhayyalal Bhotmange died. The only survivor of a massacre in 2006 in Maharashtra, Bhotmange had watched from behind trees as upper-caste men and women from his village murdered his two sons, stripped and raped his daughter and wife, and murdered them as well. In the weeks that followed, there was almost no reporting of the incident in newspapers or on radio or television. The particular brutality of the assault—gang rape, gouging of the eyes, beheading—notwithstanding, the massacre raised once again the problem of the circulation and registration of knowledge. Khairlanji, as the incident came to be known, provoked a series of questions not just about the nature of the crime but about the refusal of the national Indian media to acknowledge or report on it and the state's role in ensuring that evasion. The entire apparatus of truth-telling was thus forced into overdrive: various NGOS and activists, alongside poets and playwrights, launched a determined dissemination effort in the form of narrative and analysis, as well as witness statements, first-information reports, and photographs. This essay raises the question of contemporary Dalit cultural politics in light of continual atrocity. How do new cultural forms wrestle with the "truth-telling" function?

Truth-telling retains a certain kind of value in a range of cultural formations, from the testimonio to Black Lives Matter to postcolonial parkour, but what form does that truth-telling take? In the case of contemporary Dalit ("untouchable caste") culture in India, this is, in fact, an intellectual debate. Beginning in Marathi in the 1960s with the legacy of B. R. Ambedkar and the Dalit Panthers, this powerful body of writing is now present in almost all of the major languages of India and is one of the key sites of caste critique. Truth-telling has a very particular importance in Dalit literature, the primary function of which has been the revelation of a history of Dalit suffering. We see this most powerfully in the genre of autobiography, the predominant sign of Dalit writing; we might even say that truth-telling is, in fact, the preeminent value of modern Dalit culture. In the contemporary public sphere, however, alongside renewed forms of caste violence, a panoply of forms attests to a new mediatized cultural landscape: these include the autobiography, which still retains a prominent place, but also the short film and video, the polemic and the blog, all of which have somehow retained the centrality of the truth-telling function. What, then, is the style through which the mandate for truth-telling is expressed, and what kind of aesthetic form does it demand?¹ The question that emerges in contemporary Dalit culture now is less one of a poststructuralist notion of truth embedded in language than one of various technologies of truth-telling that have been thrown strenuously in relief. I consider here two opposing strains in the battle for representation of "the caste question" by examining recent attempts to rethink the dissemination of knowledge of caste atrocity: Meena Kandasamy's novel The Gypsy Goddess (2014), which takes up the Kilvenmani massacre of 1968 in rural Tamil Nadu, and the new YouTube channel Dalit Camera, which features videos on caste conflict in various contexts, including the village and the university. Kandasamy's English-language novel begins with the directive to "F*** these postmodern writers" while engaging in a series of formalist and generic ruptures with traditional narrative. The text functions as a retelling of tragedy, a critical appraisal of the role of communism in Dalit movements, as well as a meditation on the limitations of the novel, interspersed as it is with Twitter feeds and newspaper headlines. Dalit Camera follows a strictly documentarist vision, using unedited interviews and other techniques of ethnography. It relies primarily on volunteers, who use donated equipment to track stories ignored in the mainstream media and to translate witness statements. "The camera has become a tool for our self-respect," says founder Bathran Ravichandran (Dhillon). I use these "texts" as a provocation to consider the ideological and aesthetic range...