Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste

2. Modernism, Marxism, Metaphor: The Origins of a Literary Politics of Particularism

This chapter focuses on the early Anglophone writers Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, who, in the spirit of Gandhism, are determined to read caste. The seminal text on caste in the English language, Anand's Untouchable (1935), set a kind of literary precedent for the representation of untouchability. It argues that for a writer like Anand modernist form allowed for a particular reading of untouchability, symptomized by the problem of labor, and the problem of metaphor. It is via Marxism and metaphor that untouchability in the novel may become a universalized condition of subjection. Contemporary Dalit texts, however, deny the very category of the universal by advocating a logic of particularism, localism, and non-transferable specificity. Working through structuralist readings of metaphor, the chapter demonstrates how narratively, in several Dalit short stories, the question of labor gravitates away from the abstract worker towards the particularized problem of casteized occuption, via a reliance on the metonymic modes of the realist.