Exploring Dalit Literature: A Legacy Of The Indian Anti-caste Movement

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Devanoora Mahadeva leads us to a world of spirits ruled by a strong sense of justice. As we listen in, their conversation introduces four generations of a family: Akkamahadevamma, her son Yaada, his son Somappa and the main protagonist, Somappa’s daughter, Kusuma. In this intricately woven cosmos, death casts its shadow. Following the different voices around, we come face to face with the harsh realities of Dalit life.
Steered by the nuances of folk tale and oral tradition, this extraordinary account of feudal oppression presents a rare blend of poetry and prose. A modern classic, when it first appeared in 1988, Kusumabale marked a turning point in modern Kannada literature.

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Providing rare insights on the question of identity, The Outcaste is the emotionally violent autobiography of a half-caste growing up in the Mahar community, and the anguish he suffers from not belonging fully to it. A milestone in Indian literature in translation that helped publicize the Dalit cause, this volume comes with an Introduction by G.N. Devy tracing the Dalit literary movement, an award-winning book of Dalit literature.

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On the third day after the death of Bangaravva, a solemn procession making its way towards the graveyard encounters a strange obstacle. A blast of wind rises up in revolt, the embers flare and the sacred ritual fire falls to the ground. The ceremony is ruined because custom demands that the ritual fire never touch the ground.

What follows is chaos and confusion. Who will bear the blame for things going awry, and how might they be set right? The division between castes and communities comes to the fore as the panchayat struggles to pronounce justice.

A poetic work calling for change in our casteist society, Karya unfurls a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Studded with symbols drawn from nature and myth, this small but significant novel unfurls the politics and power embedded within a Dalit community.

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‘Why did the kanikonna blossom? It shouldn’t have, knowing that no one would pay it heed anyway.’ This anthology answers The question raised by a voice within it. Selected from seven decades of Dalit writing in Malayalam and presented in New translations by abhirami Girija sriram and N. Ravi Shanker, these twenty three stories, farcical and magical, terse and baroque, domestic and picaresque, reveal that the disregarded Laburnum in the forest has blazed with beauty all these years, and we should be the poorer for neglecting it.

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Love after Babel is a brilliant new poetry collection by Dalit poet Chandramohan S, a highly charged political treatise. Chandramohan’s position as a Dalit writer illuminates his treatment of caste-based oppression, while also creating a sense of radical solidarity between various marginalized identities in contemporary Indian society through his focus on other forms of oppression, namely on experiences of Islamophobia, gender based violence and racism. It is an active political tool to counter multiple forms of oppression in India and across the world.

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Eknath Awad was a rare Dalit Mang activist from the Marathwada region of Maharastra, who fought for the rights of all underprivileged communities, irrespective of their caste or religion. In his compelling autobiography, Awad describes his rage against the humiliation of the Mangs by the upper castes; and his struggle to overcome caste prejudices as well as extreme poverty to get an education. He revisits his heady days of activism: rejecting caste-based labour and religious practices by cutting the Potraj’s dreadlocks; joining the Dalit Panthers; being at the forefront of the Land Rights Movement; battling to rename Marathwada University after Dr Ambedkar; and working with an NGO in Thane that helped free Adivasis from bonded labour. He writes about his decision to return to Marathwada, where he continued to fight against caste-based discrimination until his death. Awad doesn’t shy away from admitting his shortcomings, such as his tendency to resort to violence to settle disputes. He also recounts the casteism he faced from other Mangs, and his pain and disillusionment after some of them attempted to kill him. Originally published in Marathi as Jag Badal Ghaluni Ghaav, Jerry Pinto’s remarkable translation makes this inspiring book available in English for the first time.

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A Chaplinesque autobiography that will make you laugh and cry. A poet tracks his journey from a Dalit colony on the edges of Magadi town—where he would rather roam the hills and wade in rivers than attend school—to the hardships of living in Dalit hostels in the city. Instead of despairing in his poverty, he turns to poetry. This makes the poet look at the benefits of sleeping on the streets of Bangalore: ‘the imagination of people who sleep under the star-studded sky takes wing. They become close to the moon.’ we hear Siddalingaiah’s fiercely political and poetic voice mature as he tastes success as an orator and legislator, but his mood for mischief never diminishes. He regards a chief minister and an idli vendor with the same degree of affectionate irreverence. A word with you, world is a vivid evocation of everyday life and labour, of conviviality and courage, of poverty and loss.

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‘Jevha Mi Jaat Chorli Hoti (When I Hid My Caste) was hailed as “the epic of Dalits”. These brilliant stories gave Dalits the strength to face the painful and humiliating experiences of their wretched lives..’—K Satyanarayana and Susie TharuBaburao Bagul’s debut collection of short stories, Jevha Mi Jaat Chorli Hoti (1963), revolutionized Dalit literature, bringing to it raw energy and a radical realism—a refusal to understate or dress up gritty, brutal reality. Through the lives of people on the margins, Bagul exposed the pain, horror and rage of the Dalit experience. The unnamed young protagonist of the title story risks his life and job, and conceals his caste from his fellow workers in the hope of bringing about social change.

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Born into a family of tanners in Uttar Pradesh, Sheoraj Singh Bechain struggled against social disabilities imposed on him by virtue of being an ‘outcaste’. Traded by his stepfather to serve as a bonded labourer at a brick kiln; kicked, punched, slapped, whipped for nurturing a love for education; earning his living by polishing shoes and serving in hotels—Sheoraj suffered hardships all through his childhood. In all of this, however, his quest for an education remained unperturbed, and eventually succeeded in getting enrolled in formal schooling.

This is the life story, a book of Dalit literature that gives a look into the unknown and unfamiliar world of the ‘lower’ castes who suffer unseen, in silence, in all its terrible dignity. Rendered in the folk idiom of western Uttar Pradesh, My Childhood on My Shoulders highlights the dismal lot of those who grow up shackled in free India.

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For the first time, Dalits are writing about their lives themselves. They have long been written about by others, anthropologists, historians and novelists. In fighting against the gross and tremendous injustice that has been their heritage for centuries, Dalit literature gives voice to their aspirations for achieving equality.
Translated into English for the first time from the original Hindi, Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography talks of growing up in a village near Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, in an untouchable caste, Chuhra, well before the defiant term ‘Dalit’ was coined. As he states bleakly,

‘Joothan’ refers to the scraps left on plates that are given to Dalits to eat. In some ways it is a symbol of the demeaning existence imposed on the Dalits. Valmiki’s story is one of terrible grief and oppression, of survival and achievement, of his emergence as a freer human being in a society that remains ‘compassionless towards Dalits.’

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Baby Kamble worked as an activist in Phaltan, a small town in Satara district of Maharashtra. A veteran of the Dalit movement in Maharashtra, she was inspired by the radical leadership of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and got involved with the struggle from a very young age. Later she went on to establish a government-approved residential school for socially backward students in Nimbure, a small village near Phaltan. She has published collections of poetry and been honoured with several awards for her literary and social work. Her autobiography Jina Amucha was first published as a book in Marathi in 1986 and first translated into English by Maya Pandit as the Prisons We Broke (Orient Longman, 2008). This is the second edition of the Prisons We Broke, which includes Baby Kamble’s prefaces to the first (1986) and second (1990) editions of Jina Amucha. She passed away on 21 April 2012.

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It is generally
observed that Tamil Dalit writing which was conspicuous during the period of Iyothee Thass
Pandithar in the early years of the twentieth century failed to sustain its drive in the middle
years. The dormancy in Tamil Dalit writing is attributed to the alignment of Tamil Dalits
with the various political and social movements between the 1930s and 1970s until they
regained a distinct voice in the closing decades of the twentieth century. While there has
been considerable research on the writings of Iyothee Thass Pandithar, Tamil Dalit writings
after his period have received less attention. This paper discusses the writings of Tamil
Dalits in the middle years of the twentieth century (when it was considered to be dormant)
and analyses the reasons for the emergence of a distinct Tamil Dalit political and literary
movement in the last decades of the twentieth century.

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Dalit Poems, Songs and Dialogues from Bengal in English Translation (2019, this review) by Asit Biswas and Shubh Brat Sarkar addresses the suppressed voices of about more than 100 Dalit poets and lyricists of Bengal that have come across a historical silence. The anthology traverses over a wide spectrum of literary personalities who present a kaleidoscopic image of historiography and cultural context of the marginalized lives of Bengal entwined with an alternative discourse. This particular book serves as a chosen translated edition of the poems that mostly appear in the Bengali anthology Shatobarsher Bangla Dalit Sahitya, a joint venture by Manohar Mouli Biswas and Shyamal Pramanik which was earlier published in 2011 from Chaturtha Duniya, the publishing house of Kolkata founded by some of the Bengali Dalit writers.

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K.K. Kochu’s life and work, as both a writer and social activist, challenges dominant narratives—of the Congress as well as the Communists—that exclude the Dalit experience. Among his most significant works, his autobiography is not merely a gritty story of the life of an individual, but a history of modern Kerala written from a subaltern perspective.

By combining a view from below of raw life with an account of the broader socio-cultural, economic and intellectual trajectories in Kerala, Dalithan stands out as a unique contribution to Dalit life-writing in Malayalam, available for the first time to an English readership in a brilliant and faithful translation.

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“Hatachi Ghadi Tondavar Bot” translates to “A Hand Folded Over a Mouth” in English. This Marathi book is a literary fiction novel by Madhav Kondvilkar, first published on December 12, 2023. The book explores the struggles of rural Maharashtra and the state of primary education, leaving readers unsettled. 

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This rare book is a compilation of the powerful Gujarati poetry, an outspoken voice against caste

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Compilation of Hindi stories about the intersectional lives of being Dalit and Muslim in India.

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An excerpt from the collection, poem titled ‘Slave’:

Where a woman in her youth is dried up by tradition

is confined all her life like a stunted tree

She remains in the shadow of someone else’s light

In that country a woman is still a slave.

In that country where women are still slaves

The conflagration starts in the hours made of flowers

The festival of lordship is celebrated with joy

but the stories of all that are recited with pain.

To be born a woman is unjust.

To be born a woman is unjust.

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Angaliyat tells the story of oppression and exclusion by transforming the vanquished into the victor, by turning the periphery into the core. The portrayal of Methi and Kanku as ‘pure’ women challenges the age-old perceptions of higher castes which denigrate the practice of remarriage among ‘backward’ communities. The stepchild who follows the mother to a new home holding her finger or angali, remains on the periphery of the stepfather’s family. Significant from several points of view, the novel provides a view of the ‘history from below’. Caught in external and internal forms of colonization, the community of weavers, the Vankars, is subject to oppression from the more powerful upper caste of the Patels. This paperback edition includes a revised and updated Introduction and a new Preface.

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What Pawar humbly calls a “sketchy history” of the Panthers actually puts the organization and movement within the context of post-Ambedkar Dalit society in Maharashtra, particularly its issues and challenges – socio-economic, political and, above all, psychological. This is where the skills of a novelist (author of Balidaan) serve to put flesh and blood on the bones of dry historical facts.
This volume in English makes this critical work available to students of modern Indian history and especially of subaltern Dalit movements. There are many valuable lessons for all Bahujan activists. No personal or academic library will be complete without it.

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Written after the great war of Kurukshetra, Shanti Parva, the twelfth book of the Mahabharata, is a treatise on peace, the ideals of statehood and peaceful governance, which also simultaneously justifies upper-caste hegemony, hierarchy and the need for organised violence. Des Raj Kali’s Shanti Parav, in contrast, brilliantly parodies the ‘peace’ claims of its source text and provides a radical Dalit response from the margins of history to these justifications of the ruling elite—through gentle interrogation, subversive literary technique and fragments of alternate history.

A post-Independence novel set in the heartland of Punjab, Shanti Parav invites a study of post-colonial socio-political dynamics in India from a Punjabi Dalit perspective. It locates the Dalit within the caste–religion–power nexus, and furnishes alternate narratives of the freedom struggle, terrorism, state violence, development, capitalism and democracy.

The proletarian context of Shanti Parav is harsh and stark, but also colourful, irreverent, carnivalesque, even absurd. Boldly experimental, the novel has a dual narrative which playfully challenges the reader to acquire new ways of reading and interpreting a text. The ‘fictional’ text in the upper half of the page narrates autobiographical stories that recount the struggles and joys of the protagonist’s immediate, everyday subaltern world, while in the lower half run ‘realistic’, quirky, grand historical monologues by three retired Dalit characters who offer philosophical discourses on governance, violence and peace.

A compelling read, Kali powerfully documents alternate lived realities in India.

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The short stories in this first English anthology forcefully convey the “differentness” of dalit literature. The protagonists of these stories are shown struggling for survival at their different levels – confronting limitations, abject poverty, misery and brutality – and fighting a brave battle.

Available on Internet Archive:

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A collection of Gujarati Dalit writing, translated by KM Sheriff, who was a professor in the University of Calicut. The blog is the only source of information on this book. If anyone has a copy, please reach out to us.

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A compilation of Marathi poetry from a range of poets, using words as a weapon of resistance.

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In 1873, Jotirao Govindrao Phule wrote Gulamgiri (Slavery), a scathing, witty attack on the Vedas as idle fantasies of the brahman mind which enslaved the shudras and atishudras. A hundred and forty years hence, Srividya Natarajan and Aparajita Ninan breathe fresh life into Phule’s graphic imagination, weaving in the story of Savitribai, Jotiba’s partner in his struggles.

In today’s climate of intolerance, here’s a manifesto of resistance—Phule setting the dynamite of thought to the scriptures and ideas Hindus hold dear.

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Fear and Other Stories is a reminder of the inherent dangers of the Dalit life, a life subjected to unimaginable violence and terror even in its most mundane moments. In this collection of short stories, veteran Gujarati writer Dalpat Chauhan narrates these lived experiences of exasperation and anger with startling vividity. His characters chronicle a deep history of resistance, interrogating historical, mythological and literary legends, foregrounding the perspectives of the disenfranchised.

Chauhan deftly wields his prose to counter dominant narratives, pointing out gaps and voicing the silences within.

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Gujarat, 1964. The agrarian system of renewable annual contract mandates fulltime labour on the houses and farms of landlords. In these bleak circumstances, Iso, a tanner by birth, graduates from being a child labourer to an adult serf on the estate of Mavaji. His life is one of humiliation, hunger and drudgery, and the only respite comes in the form of Diwali, Mavaji’s daughter. Between them exists a physical relationship that is shrouded in secrecy, shame and fear. Even as Iso creates distance between them, a chance encounter turns to violence and tragedy, and he faces the brutal sword of caste patriarchy.
Based on the blood-curdling murder of a Dalit boy by Rajput landlords in Kodaram village in 1964, Vultures portrays a feudal society structured around caste-based relations and social segregation, in which Dalit lives and livelihoods are torn to pieces by upper-caste vultures. The deft use of dialect, graphic descriptions and translator Hemang Ashwinkumar’s lucid telling throw sharp focus on the fragmented world of a mofussil village in Gujarat, much of which remains unchanged even today.

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THE HISTORIAN Dwijendra Narayan Jha shows us how the ‘holiness’ of the cow is a myth, and how its flesh was an important part of the cuisine of ancient India. The earliest evidence for beef-eating comes from the oldest Indian texts—the Vedas and their auxiliaries. Citing Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina scriptures, Jha underlines that beef-eating was not Islam’s ‘baneful bequeathal’ to India. Nor can abstention from it be a mark of ‘Hindu’ identity like Hindutva enforcers argue.

Available as translations in Tamil and Hindi.

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Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), one of India’s foremost revolutionaries, grew up untouchable. Battling against the odds, he gained multiple doctorates, campaigned against social discrimination and the caste system and went on to draft the Constitution of India. Throughout his life Ambedkar faced routine discrimination: in school at the age of 10; in Baroda after his return from Columbia University; and while travelling in later life. The discrimination experienced by Ambedkar continues to haunt a majority of India’s 170 million dalits as many are still denied water, shelter and the basic dignities of life.

In this ground-breaking work, Pardhan-Gond artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam interweave historical events with contemporary incidents, infusing fresh energy into the graphic idiom through their magical art.

Durgabai Vyam, who has illustrated a dozen books and won the BolognaRagazzi award in 2008 for The Night Life of Trees, says Bhimayana is her most accomplished work yet. Subhash Vyam began as a sculptor before turning to painting. They live in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.

Srividya Natarajan is a dancer and novelist; she lives in London, Canada. S. Anand is the publisher of Navayana.

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In these words, Kalyani Thakur Charal explains why Dalit women writers are different, and how hard it has been for them to write and get published. Until a few decades ago, Dalit literature in Bengal was written mainly by men, who were disregarded by mainstream publishing and impelled to run their own publishing ventures, literary journals like Chaturtha Duniya, which also provided space for women.

Recognizing the political and social complexities where caste is invisibilized, Sayantan Dasgupta suggests that the anthology brings together ‘gender and caste as the point of entry, though class, too, figures as a core definig element in the chosen pieces, constructing a particular, complex and layered ;iterary landscape as a part of Bangla literature that generally seems to escape our eyes’.

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First published in the Odia in 1948, and translated for the first time here into English by Bikram Das, Gopinath Mohanty’s Harijan is one of the most original and radical Indian novels of the twentieth century. It brings to vivid life the story of a group of Mehentars living in a slum. Cleaning latrines with their bare hands is the only work that they can hope to find as their caste excludes them from every other occupation. The leader of this group is the middle-aged and foul-mouthed Jema who starts her day by gulping down a potful of liquor and smoking pinkas in order to deal with the stench of the excreta. One day, Jema comes down with a fever and is unable to go to work. Fourteen-year-old Puni offers to take her mother’s place. The next morning Puni wakes up early, bathes, puts on a clean sari, and dabs some cheap perfume on her skin. Stepping out of the hut excitedly, she picks up basket and broom. When she arrives at the first latrine, the stink hits her with the force of a hammer blow. She drops her basket and broom, turns around, and is trying to run away, when her friends stop her. ‘This is what you will have to do every day for the rest of your life! It is your fate!’ Avinash Babu lives in a palatial house next to the slum. He is planning to evict the Mehentars in order to develop the slum into a residential colony. One night, a fire breaks out and the entire slum is burned to the ground. The Mehentars leave the slum carrying their remaining possessions on their backs. They have nowhere to go but they are past all worries—they know that no matter where they go, they will still be cleaning excrement, for they are Harijans.

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The Fifth Veda is a collection of Dalit poems written by Satish Chandar. This has 36 poems, which were originally written in Telugu and translated into English by the author himself. The period in which he wrote these poems spanned across three decades (1989 – 2018). He wrote on various atrocities against Dalits like Tsundur massacre and happenings of caste discrimination such as Rohith Vemula’s suicide. The poems in the book have been categorized into classroom, love-marriage, village, land, language, worship, politics and race.

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Contemporary Dalit poetry in Malyalam as also in Marathi is vibrant with a variety of voices and divergent perspectives. The source of inspiration in Malayalam was the egalitarian writings of Narayana Guru, Kumaran Asan, Pandit Karuppan, and in Marathi, the first impetus came with the advent of leaders like Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar. The ‘I’ in Dalit poetry acts as an instrument in conveying the agony, pain and protest of the subalterns. Dalit voices, both in Malayalam and in Marathi, emphatically espouse a classless and casteless society.

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Koogai, the owl- huddled in its hollow with the sun overhead, it flies free when darkness descends Bird of the night- an abuse, a bad omen attacked and shunned by birds, by humans… Strong, but unaware of its immense power, Koogai, the owl- foolish or wise? Set in post-Independence Tamil Nadu’s era of agrarian and industrial change, Koogai reflects the nuances of an authentic contemporary myth leavened with irony and fierce humour. Empowering themselves with the image of the owl, a totem of self-respect and hope, men and women break free of old caste taboos only to find themselves entangled in the doublespeak of an egalitarian rhetoric

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Spotted goddesses is an ethnography of caste, gender and Dalit women’s leadership. Situated in transitional feminist discourses, this book is rooted in interactions and lived experiences of Dalit women in Tamil Nadu. Singh’s perspective as a Dalit woman provides an intersectional social analysis of power structures that sustain caste dominance in South India today. She describes strategies of social change in Dalit women’s activism as rooted in subversive applications of imposed identities of ‘difference’ thwarting social boundaries and punishment traditions. The core of this interdisciplinary work is Dalit women’s songs, oral and written testimonial narratives, including Singh’s personal story.

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Winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, 2018Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. Her family, belonging to the Mala caste, was educated in Warangal and Madras by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary – and yet how typical – her family history truly was. Determined to uncover that history, and understand the social and political forces that made it possible, she traveled back to India to record the testimonies of her mother, her uncles, and their friends. In Ants Among Elephants, she tells their story. A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up.

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Lines that cut to the very gut. Gogu Shyamala’s stories dissolve the borders of realism, allegory and political fable. Whether she is describing the setting sun, or the way people are gathered at a village Council like ‘thickly strewn grain on the threshing floor’, or a young woman astride her favorite buffalo, Shyamala walks us through a world that is at once particular and universal. An important book of Dalit literature.

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In Coming Out as Dalit, Dutt recounts the exhausting burden of living with the secret and how she was terrified of being found out. She talks about the tremendous feeling of empowerment she experienced when she finally stood up for herself and her community and shrugged off the fake upper-caste identity she’d had to construct for herself. As she began to understand the inequities of the caste system, she also had to deal with the crushing guilt of denying her history and the struggles of her grandparents and the many Dalit reformers who fought for equal rights. In this personal memoir that is also a narrative of the Dalits, she writes about the journey of coming to terms with her identity and takes us through the history of the Dalit movement, nd attempts to answer crucial questions about caste and privilege.

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The second of two volumes that document the upsurge of dalit writing in South India that began in the mid-1970s brings together in English translation forty-three writers, activists and public intellectuals from Kannada and Telugu. Their poetry, fiction, essays, critical commentary, self writing and research into mythopoeic pasts have changed the very idea of modern literature, culture and society. Each writer strikes a distinct political note that challenges received wisdom. Initially published in small, alternative journals and daily newspapers, this fulsome, ground hugging archive is a rare intellectual biography of the past half century record of the meanings of Ambedkar, Lohia and Marx in contemporary India and a mine of knowledge and insight into childhood, education, family, welfare, employment, work, the role of politics in dalit worlds. The array of dalit perspectives within these pages, sometimes in conversation, at other times clashing, provide texture and dynamism to what is possibly the most vital debate in the country today. Together, they tell the hidden story of India.

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A landmark publication in Marathi, Shahu Patole’s book Anna He Apoorna Brahma was the first ever to document Dalit food history through the culinary practices of two Maharashtrian communities–Mahar and Mang. Fashioned as a memoir with recipes, it explores the politics of maintaining social divisions through food along with a commentary on caste-based discrimination–what food is sattvic (pure) or rajasic (fit for a king), what is tamasic (sinful) and why.

Now translated as Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada, this book presents the poor man’s patchwork plate, one devoid of oil, ghee and milk, and comprising foods not known to savarna dictionaries. It also examines Hindu scriptures that prescribed what each varna should eat–and questions the idea that one becomes what one eats. From humble fare to festive feasts, the recipes carefully woven into the narrative show you the transformative power of food in connecting communities and preserving cultural identity – cementing an important place in Dalit literature.

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Upara: An Outsider, an autobiography written by Laxman Mane, is a path breaking work in the Marathi literature, for its lively depiction of the life of the downtrodden and forceful style, authenticity of experience and its strong plea for social justice. The book is rich with emotional experience at different levels. The love-hate relationship between the author and his father, between his mother and father, between father and relatives, the intense love between the author and his beloved, the mute suffering of both the lovers, the cruelties of life, humiliation and feelings of anger, forbearance, compassion—the intertwining of all these elements gives the work immense vitality.

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Silenced for centuries by caste prejudice and social oppression, the Dalits of Maharashtra have, in the last sixty years, found a powerful voice in Marathi literature. The revolutionary social movement launched by their leader, Dr Ambedkar, was paralleled by a wave of writing that exploded in poetry, prose, fiction and autobiography of a raw vigour, maturity, depth and richness of content and shocking in its exposition of the bitterness of their experiences. One is jolted too, by the quality of writing of a group denied access for long ages to any literary tradition. When published in 1992, Poisoned Bread was the first anthology of Dalit literature. The writers-more than eighty of them-presented here in English translations, are nearly all of the most prominent figures in Marathi Dalit literature, who have contributed to this unique literary phenomenon. This new edition includes an essay by Gail Omvedt, a distinguished scholar activist working with new social movements. Omvedt, who has been actively involved in anti-caste campaigns since the 1970s, lives and works in Maharashtra.

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Days Will Come Back is probably the first Punjabi Dalit poetry collection which has been translated into English. Poems in it are simmering with the smell of revolution that the soil of Punjab has begotten among many of its children. In this, the voice of a Dalit Punjabi is very distinctive and a refreshing change of narrative from the otherwise upper-caste dominant stories that emerge from the region.

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Spotted Goddesses is an ethnography of caste, gender and Dalit women’s leadership. Situated within the ambit of transnational feminisms, this book is rooted in interactions and lived experiences of Dalit women in Tamil Nadu. Singh’s intersectional perspective as a Dalit woman provides a consummate analysis of the power structures that shape the foundation of caste dominance in South India today. She describes strategies of social change in Dalit women’s activism as embedded in the urge to upend and subvert imposed identities of ‘difference’ in a mode of resistance which fearlessly thwarts social compartments and punishment traditions.

Built around a powerful core which is primarily shaped by Dalit women’s songs, and oral and written testimonial narratives, including Singh’s personal story, this interdisciplinary work is a searing vindication of Dalit women’s right to rise and rage against the shackles of Brahminical patriarchy.

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Bheda means a sense of difference, one that’s deeply ingrained in our society; the caste hegemony that has led to economic exploitation, cultural subjugation, social discrimination and political powerlessness of Dalits in Odisha over decades and is an important work in Dalit literature

“The entire village was in an uproar when the news spread that Laltu had beaten up Yuvaraj. How dare a Dom boy thrash the gauntia’s nephew, a Teli? The Telis set out to seek revenge by breaking Laltu’s limbs.Conscious of the plight of the Dalits and the lower castes and hoping to improve their lot, Laltu leads an uprising against the upper castes. Does he succeed? Or is he silenced and crushed by caste power?Set in a remote village in the Kalahandi district of Odisha, the story draws from the real, lived experiences of the region’s Dalits. Bheda, the first Odia Dalit novel, is not only a poignant tale of rebellion and betrayal, it is also a record of the caste atrocities and cultural politics that have defined India.”
Akhila Naik’s 90-page Bheda published in 2010 is considered to be the first Odia Dalit novel, and is centred around caste violence.

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A fine book of Dalit literature, The Lost Heroine is about a girl growing up in a district in Kerala, spinning idle dreams as she worked in the fields, Rosy had never been to the cinema. Her only brush with fame had been to act in the local Kakkarissi plays. So when Johnson Sir, her well-to-do neighbour, asked if she would like to play the role of heroine in a movie his friend Daniel was making, Rosy could scarcely believe it. In a matter of weeks, Rosy is transformed into Sarojini—the beautiful Nair girl who lived in a grand tharavad, wore mundus and blouses of the finest silk and gold jewellery from head to toe. Rosy’s dream world comes to an end when the last scene is shot. A harsh reality awaits her when the film is screened at the Capitol Theatre in Trivandrum. There is shock and horror in the audience as the film rolls. All hell breaks loose, and Rosy narrowly escapes death only to spend the rest of her life in anonymity. It is only in a forgotten roll of film that her story lives on. The story of Vighathakumaran (The Lost Child), the first film ever to be made in Malayalam, in the year 1928.

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Poised to inherit a huge tract of land gifted by the Nizam to his father, twenty-one-year-old Narsiah loses it to a feudal lord. This triggers his migration from Vangapally, his ancestral village in the Karimnagar District of Telangana the single most important event that would free his family and future generations from caste oppression. Years later, it saves his son Baliah from the fate reserved for most Dalits: a life of humiliation and bonded labour.

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On the evening of 5th January 2006, Bant Singh, a Dalit agrarian labourer and activist in Punjab’s Jhabar village, was ambushed and brutally beaten by upper-caste Jat men armed with iron rods and axes. He lost both his arms and a leg in the attack. It was punishment for having fought for justice for his minor daughter who had been gang-raped. But his spirit was not broken, and he continues to fight for equality and dignity for millions like him, inspiring them with his revolutionary songs and his courage.
Journalist and writer Nirupama Dutt tells Bant Singh’s story in this powerful book which is both the biography of an extraordinary human being and a comment on the deep fault lines in Punjabi and Indian society.

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