Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste

Notes

no t e s three burnings: an introduction 1. Dalit, which might be translated as “oppressed,” from the Sanskrit root dal for “broken down, crushed,” is the term that has come to replace the British designation of Scheduled Caste and Gandhi’s appellation Harijan for the untouchable castes. I use the term Dalit here in reference to the contemporary literature in question, which is explicitly a literature of protest. I reserve “untouchable caste” for those situations in which it would be anachronistic to do otherwise—for example, the pre-Ambedkarite historical period. 2. This includes the states of Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. The center of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, says critic Laura Brueck, is Delhi, the home of several important organizations, publishers, and writers. 3. See Sharankumar Limbale’s Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature and Omprakash Valmiki’s Dalita sahitya ka saundaryashastra. 4. In the context of Marathi, see Eleanor Zelliot’s entire oeuvre, including From Untouchable to Dalit, and An Anthology of Dalit Literature, as well as Gail Omvedt’s Dalit Visions. 5. The rare focus on aesthetic aspects of modern Dalit texts functions alongside a keen attention to genre; many critics demonstrate the caste-specific generic production of which contemporary Dalit texts are an heir. See, for example, Gail Omvedt’s “Social Protest and Revolt in Western India.” 6. Amrit Rai, Premchand’s biographer, points out that in his position as district head of schools, Premchand was required to travel extensively across the state, to various cities, district towns, and villages (Premchand, Duniya 9); it was these travels that put him in contact with the people and communities that would become the central material for his writings. 7. The Mandal Commission was established in 1979 in order to reevaluate “reservations,” the system by which caste discrimination was redressed through the reservation of seats for “backward castes” in government and educational institutions. The commission confirmed the 22.5% reservations for Scheduled Castes and recommended an additional reservation of 27% for Other Backward Castes in government institutions. Its potential implementation in 1989 led to widespread resistance. See Anupama Rao’s Notes 208 “Caste Radicalism and the Making of New Political Subject” in The Caste Question. 8. The Akademi’s critique was defended through the citation of the Prevention of Atrocities Act, passed in 1989. The use of the slur “Chamar,” it was argued, could potentially incite discriminatory behavior and violence towards Dalits. 9. The text of Rangbhumi used in in the school curriculum was indeed eventually changed; “Chamar” was replaced by “Dalit.” 10. Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography Joothan begins with just such a scene: a teacher tears out the pages on Ambedkar from a school primer and instructs his students to do the same. 11. Varna refers to the traditional idealized four-fold division of caste hierarchy cited in Vedic texts and the Manusmriti. The varna system, or chaturvarna (the four varnas) is comprised of Brahmins (priests, scholars), Ksatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants) and Shudras (laborers, artisans). The “untouchable” theoretically falls outside the varna order. The ideology of varna, literally “color,” gained a renewed importance in the nationalist period when it was revindicated by Gandhi as an idealized division of labor. 12. For an analysis of the nationalist critique particular to North India, as it is related to the failures of the Congress Party, see Christopher Jaffrelot’s India’s Silent Revolution. 13. The Progressive Writers Association (PWA) was founded in England by Sajjad Zaheer, Mulk Raj Anand, and others and officially established in 1936 in Lucknow with the First Progressive Writers Conference. Drawing together writers and intellectuals under a platform of anti-imperialism, antifascism, and intellectual commitment, the PWA also offered a powerful critique of social life and cultural tradition. I discuss this in more detail in chapter 2. 14. This is particularly the case in Hindi/Urdu, where reform movements were triangulated through religious discourse, as Mukherjee points out (Early Novels xviii). Dilip Menon argues that caste was a central category of analysis in the nineteenth-century novel in Malayalam, a much more salient axis than “the national.” See his essay “No, Not the Nation: Lower Caste Malayalam Novels of the Nineteenth Century.” 15. In fact, the most “realistic” portion of the story comes towards the end when the hero happens upon the battlefield full of corpses, located in “Hindustan .” The mix of realist and fantastic, historical and magical, is characteristic of early novelistic writing in India (Mukherjee, Realism 38). 16...