Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste

Three Burnings: An Introduction

The introduction to Untouchable Fictions frames the major political and aesthetic questions of contemporary Dalit literature by reading three incidents of book burning: that of Premchand's first collection of short stories Soz-i-Vatan (Dirge of the Nation) by the British Raj in 1908, that of the Manusmriti (The Laws of Manu) by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in 1927, and that of Premchand's novel Rangbhumi (The Arena) by activists from the Dalit Sahitya Akademi in 2004. The introduction sketches a literary genealogy for the radical form of realism proposed by Dalit writers, a genealogy that draws on the early Hindi social realists, the first generation of Indian Anglophone fiction, the post-independence regional literature (aanchalik sahitya) movement, and the "postcolonial" fiction produced globally in the 1980 and 90s. In doing so it explains the use of the term "realist," drawing on Gyorgy Lukacs and others, while situating it particularly in a Dalit context, excavating certain notions of the "rational" asserted by prominent intellectuals in the Dalit movement in India. It also provides a historical and literary background to the rise of Dalit literature and its primary concerns.