Dalit Autobiographical Narratives Figures Of Subaltern Consciousness, Assertion And Identity Guy Poitevin

Centre for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences (Pune, India)
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Dalit Autobiographical Narratives
Figures of Subaltern Consciousness, Assertion and Identity
Guy Poitevin
Abstract
A general presentation of the social, literary phenomenon of the "dalit literature" -- literature of the oppressed -- is firstly required to realise the specificity of that significant trend inthe recent Marathi literature (since the sixties) in the state of Maharashtra, in India. The context, perspectives and characteristic of that historical trend differentially qualify the concept of autobiography itself vis à vis the Western definition of the genre. A functional approach is claimed to be the proper perspective for a literature which focusses on the individual not as an Ego isolatedin a world of his/her own but on the Subject as one individual among many who share the same types of cultural ostracism, physical repression and social stigma, with the result of being kept out of the legitimate boundaries of a human society.
The second part will attempt to make a typological display of various distinctive figures of dalit subaltern consciousness. The inner quest of identity,the cultural denunciations of the iniquitous Hindu dispensation and the social struggles to assert one's human dignity take various forms according to the will, vision and capacity of each writer. Nonetheless some recurrent types of strategy can be defined. These self-narratives bear direct testimony to the inalienable creative potentialities of the human agent.
I - Contexts, Perspectives andTerminology
These are analytical reflections on the autobiographical narratives written in prose by contemporary dalit authors in their mother tongue, Marathi. The most genuine autobiographical masterpiece of N.S. Suryavanchi, Things I Never Imagined (1975), and the sensation caused in the literary circles of Maharashtra by Daya Pawar's Balute (1978) may be considered as marking the rising of the'dalit autobiography' at the horizon of the Marathi literary establishment. We could trace eighty six such autobiographical texts. They show a great variety in respect of length, mode of production, degree of elaboration, quality of editing, printing, publication and publicity. This essay tries to acquaint the reader with some of them.
Marathi Dalit Literature
Marathi is not only the languagespoken in Maharashtra (India) by the great majority of the population (about seventy-nine million, Census of 1991) of a state which was carved out on this linguistic basis in 1960. It is also the vehicle of one of the most ancient literatures of the Indian sub-continent, which knows a tremendous modern development since it started interacting with Western literary genres in the middle of the nineteenthcentury. The dalit literature is one of its most significant recent trends since the sixties (Poitevin 1996). The trend is still alive, possibly on the increase, and a matter of literary debates and dissemination in a score of specialised journals, academic studies, literary conferences and seminars, regular press reports and articles. The term dalit literally signifies the depressed andsuppressed groups of various social formations (Guru 1998: 59). But it is used in ways which vary with the specificity of contexts, the speakers' ideological positions and the political strategies of those who address audiences with it. In the matter of facts, the term is essentially a political idiom and often puts one in a temper.
Nowadaysdalit uses to be understood and is actually used by most of theMaharashtrian former untouchables (but not all them) as a comprehensive revolutionary category specifically designating those social segments of Indian society which are culturally, socially and physically repressed by dominant sections, and maintained by virtue of a traditional, inequitous and hierarchical socio-cultural dispensation in a sub-human state of subservient subalternity called...