Theme 3: Dalit Literature in English Translation
IWE Online Symposium - I
Abstract:
The so-called Indian Renaissance in the nineteenth century was characterized by a reform movement that attempted to rid society of its old orthodoxies regarding caste, class and gender. Women’s education, widow re-marriage, and equality before God were some of the issues taken up by the leaders in different parts of the country. Yet strangely enough in the creative literature of that period the low caste people and the outcastes are virtually invisible. Because education was not available to them, they formed no part of the readership. And since caste Hindu life had been organized to keep them at the peripheries, they did not figure in the Indian language novels about social and domestic life that began to be written in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The situation changed in the early decades of the twentieth century when Indian writers started writing about Dalit lives either in Indian languages or in English. Unnava Lakshminarayana’s Mala Palli (Telugu: 1921), Premchand’s Rangbhumi, (Hindi: 1925) and Sivarama Karanth’s Chomanadudi (Kannada: 1933) are Indian novels written before the publication of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (English: 1935). After Anand the other Indian English novels which depict Dalit lives are: Shanta Rajeswar Rao’s Children of God (English:1976), Romen Basu’s Outcast (English:1986), Bonomali Goswami’s Untouchables: A Novel (English:1994), Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (English:1995), Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things (English:1997), and Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2010). The objective of the present paper is to look into how Indian upper caste writers who were privileged to write in English treated Dalits in their creativity. How do the upper caste writers treat caste as a fictional subject? What are their perspectives on caste system? Do they give any solutions to the caste problems? These and many other questions will be asked while reading Dalit characters in some Indian English novels.
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