Text and Subtext: Narrative Techniques in Hindi Dalit Autobiographies

Abstract

Dalit literature began with the Dalit Panther movement in the 1970th in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Since then, its corpus has been steadily growing in many Indian languages and today, Dalit literature has matured and developed into a major literary genre. It is concerned with the lives and experiences of members of marginalized communities across the Indian subcontinent, who have formerly been labeled as “untouchable”. Since its inception, Dalit literary works have been praised as documents of authentic Dalit experience and mainly studied for their socio-political and historical value. While scholarship on the subject is enorm, its main concern is content analysis, whereas analysis of form has rarely been in the foreground. Joining the few scholars in the field whose work is dedicated to the analysis of the formal and the aesthetic, this dissertation contributes to the scholarly understanding of Dalit literature and offers a novel and productive way to analyze it. The present work constitutes a structural analysis of Hindi Dalit autobiographies. It analyzes four books written by three distinguished Dalit authors: Omprakash Valmiki’s <em>Jūṭhan</em>, Kausalya Baisantri’s <em>DohꞋrā Abhiśāp</em> and Tulsiram’s <em>Murdahiyā</em> and <em>Maṇikarṇikā</em>, each a milestone in the history of Hindi Dalit literature in their own way. Using computer assisted text analysis – for which digitized versions of the analyzed texts were created – and close reading as main methods of investigation, the work identifies and examines narrative techniques employed by Hindi Dalit authors of autobiographies to perform their identity. It begins with a terminological analysis of the three autobiographies in question and demonstrates that caste-related terminology and especially the usage of the term dalit is still far from unified and extremely ambiguous. The second chapter explores the construction of a Buddhist identity for Dalits in the two volumes of Tulsiram’s autobiography, where several Buddhist stories are used as parables to create a virtual link between present day Dalits and Buddhists of ancient times. Chapter three shows how Kausalya Baisantri performs her intersectional identity as a Dalit and a woman in her autobiography and creates new literary tropes in the context of male-female relations and the discourse of empowerment. Chapter four analyzes the language and usage of non-standard versus standard forms of Hindi in Omprakash Valmiki’s Jūṭhan and shows how this strategy is used to mark speakers as informed or incompetent in the context of caste oppression. The final chapter demonstrates how Valmiki refers to a short story written by the celebrated and prolific Hindi author Munshi Premchand and draws a subtle comparison between his own life story and the story of Mangal, Premchand’s protagonist. Using this technique, Valmiki challenges the object status, to which Dalit characters have been subjected by mainstream Hindi literature. The present dissertation shows that Dalit authors consciously and purposefully use a variety of narrative techniques to disrupt the centuries-long narrative of oppression and victimization, to claim agency which has been denied them by mainstream Hindi literature and to create their own narrative of empowerment.