Dalit Literature as Emergency Literature and Crisis Aesthetic

Abstract

This paper argues for Dalit literature as the embodiment of an emergency aesthetic in a time of crisis, particularly in India. The lack of proper aesthetic paradigms to articulate and address the crisis of subjugation and structural coercion necessitates an aesthetic of resistance that can only form against the backdrop of emergency. This paper offers a close reading of the Dalit feminist author Kalyani Thakur Charal’s poetry and her novella Andhar Bil O Kichu Manus (“Andhar Lake and Some People”; 2019). At the same time, this paper examines the concepts of “emergency” and “crisis” through a non-canonical way of looking that differs from the method to look at these issues from the vantage point of a global, unified implication; Kalyani emphasizes the intersection of everyday social perspectives that also have universal significance in this globalized world. The tendency to prioritize the particular over the general to draw attention to the general importance of the particular gets its impetus from the Dalit feminist standpoint, which seeks to analyze the social structure that put all “differences” into categorical groups. Dalit literature demands a counter aesthetic of recognition and solidarity to erase discriminations by recognizing “difference”, and to address the collective silence or negligence of the everyday emergency condition arising from systemic attempts at keeping the subjugated as nirbak (“alphabet-less”; and the process is called “nirbakization”, or the act of silencing). For the genre of “emergency literature”, there would be a methodological flaw if we focused on various global crises while ignoring everyday existential struggles in liminality. Thereby, this paper connects “emergency literature” with the struggles of Dalits who have had to live within humiliating conditions of emergency and coercive discrimination throughout their lives.