Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste

1. The Dalit Limit Point: Realism, Representation, and Crisis in Premchand

This chapter begins with a general discussion of realism in Hindi and the question of "borrowed form", and then examines the Dalit critique of Premchand, the father of modern Hindi letters. Premchand's social realism was grounded in the notion of the readerly compact, the unwritten and variable contract proposed between reader and writer in Premchand's novels. Drawing from the wide range of scholarly work on Premchand, the chapter suggests that a model of readerly guilt and sympathy towards the female victim articulated in response to the then pressing 'women's question' was grafted seamlessly on to the caste question. This model produces a series of problems in Premchand's novels, creating a horizon that is ontologically closed for Dalit characters despite the rhetoric of inclusion. The chapter argues that the Dalit critique of Premchand is actually a critique of the formal constraints of a certain model of social realism. It focuses on the articulation of a different architecture of sympathy, one that aspires towards solidarity rather than pity, particularly in the work of Omprakash Valmiki, one of the most prominent Hindi Dalit writers. We can read a critique in these texts of the liberal-reformist model in the guise of teacher-student dynamic, a reformism that underlies the traditional political project of social realism.