Dalit Texts: Aesthetics and Politics Reimagined – Edited by: Judith Misrahi-Barak, K. Satyanarayana and Nicole Thiara

Book: Dalit Texts: Aesthetics and Politics Reimagined
Edited by: Judith Misrahi-Barak, K. Satyanarayana and Nicole Thiara
Published by: Routledge, 2020

This publication tries to understand the aesthetics present in the works of the Dalit writers that emerged due to the unique positioning of their experiences in a post-colonial context. The book is categorised in three sections – interviews with Dalit writers, importance of translations in context of Dalit writings and lastly, Dalit works in visual arts. Each interview in the first section is followed by an essay contextualising the writer’s works within a larger body of Dalit and non – Dalit Indian writings and aesthetics. The second section approaches translations of Dalit writings as a value addition to the pre-existing Dalit literature rather than analysing it as a mere change of language. The last section deals with Dalit works in visual art forms, their presentation and aesthetics. By bringing together different writings, this book proposes that Dalit literature is not just about representation but is also a presentation in itself.

“It is precisely in the context of the caste violence of the 1980s that the literary burden of dealing with the caste question fell squarely on the shoulders of the Dalit writers in Gujarat. What one saw in the decades following the riots in Gujarat is the birth of a committed group of Dalit writers given to the task of self-representation. If the first collection of Dalit short stories, Gujarati Dalit Varta (1987), is of any indication, one could clearly see a marked preference in their short stories for the social realist mode of representation. The Dalit writers found the realist mode more preferable to the casteless form of the short story which Suresh Joshi had put together in the name of modernity in the 1960s.” (Pg. 95)