Abhijay Srekanth- Week 5


Dalit Autobiographies- Why are they important?

Professor Sumit Baudh in his piece on caste- intersectionality highlights the importance of “personal narratives” as a means of conveying lived experiences, in order to provide a lens into life as an oppressed person. They go on to examine the presence of emotion in personal narratives, and how, unlike academic writing, it is a herculean task to divorce emotion from experience, alluding to themes of anger and anguish in lower-caste autobiographies.

Dalit autobiographies act as a symbol of resistance against the conception of literature and art being domains of the upper-caste. Their themes often include pain and hunger, as they delve into experiences in childhood. That isn’t to say that all Dalit autobiographies are memoirs of their victimization at the hands of the oppressors. Prolific Dalit authors like Loknath Yashwant and Kumar Anil have shifted the narrative from “I was a victim of…” to “I succeeded in spite of.”

Dalit autobiographies also expose intersectional sources of oppression. Female Dalit biographies have gone on to detail the double-oppression faced, on account of being a dalit, as well as a woman. Urmila Pawar’s autobiography presents an instance from her childhood, where her family forbade her from touching anything while menstruating. She reflects on the irony of her family performing hygiene practises,considering how upper-caste society hygiene practises oust them.

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