Caste, Culture and Identity: Reading Dalit Autobiographies

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences</strong> <strong>CSSS Colloquium</strong> <strong>Raj Kumar</strong> (Professor, Dept. of English, University of Delhi) a talk on <strong>Caste, Culture and Identity: Reading Dalit Autobiographies</strong> Date:&nbsp;<strong>September 22nd, 2016</strong> <strong>Abstract:&nbsp;</strong>The history of Indian society is intimately associated with ideas related to caste. Caste has indeed been a major site to understand Indian society and culture, both in popular perception and serious academic pursuits. With the emergence of the Dalit movement and Dalit literature, we do witness the emergence of new perspectives that enable us to understand questions related to caste. My attempt in this working paper is to emphasize the importance of reading Dalit personal narratives in order to grapple with fascinating possibilities involving Dalit culture and identity. For doing so, I will be analyzing few selected texts originally written in Marathi by Dalit men, such as, Sharankumar Limbale's The Outcaste (2003), and Daya Pawar's Baluta (2015). And for studying Dalit women's autobiographies I will be referring to Baby Kamble's The Prison We Broke (2008) and Urmila Pawar's The Weave of My Life (2008). One important aspect about studying Dalit autobiographies is that they cannot be appreciated or properly evaluated in terms of the existing conventions of evaluating autobiographies written by the educated upper caste writers. Many of these narratives have not, in fact, been written down. They have been orally communicated and then recorded by others. So a comparison will be made to see the differences in autobiographies written by Dalits and non-Dalits. Bio: Raj Kumar is Professor in the Department of English, Delhi University. His research areas include autobiographical studies, Dalit literature, Indian writing in English, Odia literature and post-colonial studies. He has been a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla in 1999 and has published in journals such as Social Action, Sateertha Bulletin, The Fourth World, Creative Forum, Language Forum, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Indian Literature, Social Scientist, Journal of the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies and Economic and Political Weekly. Raj Kumar has also translated literary texts from Indian languages, especially Odia into English. His book, Dalit Personal Narratives: Reading Caste, Nation and Identity has been published by Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi in 2010 and got reprinted in 2011 and 2015. His English translation of Bheda, the first Odia Dalit novel is scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in 2016.