Suhaas Putta : Week 5

This week, I will be reflecting on the genre of Dalit Auto-biographies.
A critique of social hierarchy can be provided by better understanding the emergent Dalit movement and thought. Dalit autobiographies, are an integral part of this process and help provide a basis for understanding the contradictions involved in this endeavour. A Dalit autobiography, like any other text, occupies a dual position. It is both a discourse and a source. How a community so persecuted and ostracized never got an opportunity to even let others hear their story is appalling and gut wrenching.

However, unlike many other literary texts, including autobiographies, it is positioned as an explicitly and self-consciously political text at the level of discourse. Dalit writers have never hidden the positioned nature of their writings which reveal the nature of their experience as labourers, as Dalits and as organic intellectuals.

At the same time, they also provide crucial first-hand information about the social organization, ritual practices and inter- and intra-community work relations, as well as access to Dalit thoughts, beliefs and everyday life. They, therefore, also act as a source for knowing Dalit life and work experiences. All the writers we have discussed in the classes, have been engaged in manual work at some point or other of their lives or know someone from within their community who is forced to deal with it. This has provided them first-hand experience of the nature of their work.

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