Pain, Personhood and the Collective

Dalit Life Narratives

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12349237
AutoresDebjani Ganguly (0009-0003-3406-7449, Australian National University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2009
Volumen33
Número4
Páginas429-442
Fecha de publicación2009-11-28
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAsian Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1035-7823 • E-ISSN: 1467-8403
EditorialRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10357820903367109
OpenAlexW2043867554
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas17
Referencias citadas18

Dalit life narratives have gained prominence in the last two decades in line with the increasing visibility of Dalits in the Indian public sphere and their vociferous demands for a more just political and social order. This can be productively situated not just in the contemporary global context of the proliferation of narratives andtestimonios of human rights violations in other parts of the world, but also in the context of an emerging conversation on the nature of "Dalit personhood" in the Indian public sphere, a category infinitely more complex than legal subjectivity and abstract citizenship. The Dalit narratives analysed here are rich illustrations of this double movement: They witness on behalf of a suffering community and keep alive the singular, non-universal nature of Dalit pain through an aesthetic that is not wholly translatable into the lexicon of rights and justice. By invoking the historical and rhetorical force of two prose fictional genres, the Bildungsromanand the picaresque, the analysis has sought to recast the testimonio less as a proxy for the legal witnessing and amelioration of Dalit pain than as a rich and expressive medium of Dalit personhood. This way of reading Dalit lives accords India's ex-untouchables a stature beyond that of victims at the mercy of the capricious sentimentality of upper-caste solidarity

Aesthetics · Art · Caste · Literature · Narrative · Personhood · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Sociology · Solidarity · Gender Studies · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora