Dalit Assertion

The pointed finger of Ambedkar statues symbolically conveys the meaning of lecturing, or teaching the nation about democracy and fraternity. The politics of proliferating Dalit iconography is one of seeking visibility and asserting one’s right to access public spaces. However, clashes routinely erupt over such iconography given the upper castes’ fear of their threatened hegemony.

The more than four-month-long Bhim Yatra that culminated a day before the 125th birth celebrations of B R Ambedkar highlighted the pitiable conditions of the most downtrodden of the Dalits, the manual scavengers. While there are a slew of laws to check manual scavenging, they remain largely on paper. The Dalit leadership has also ignored the plight of manual scavengers.

This paper focuses on a new archive of dalit writing in English translation. The "archive" has a forced homogeneity imposed by the term "dalit", which embraces an urban middle-class dalit and a member of a scavenger caste; the homogeneity is consolidated by the fact that the translated texts are in an international language. The questions asked concern the relationship between caste and the English language, two phenomena that represent considerably antithetical signs. Dalit writers accept English as a target language, despite the fact that local realities and registers of caste are difficult to couch in a language that has no memory of caste. The discussion shows how English promises to dalit writers (as both individuals and representatives of communities) agency, articulation, recognition and justice. The paper draws attention to the multiplicity of contexts that make writing by dalits part of a literary public sphere in India, and contribute to our thinking about caste issues in the context of human rights.

This article examines the prospects of the BSP in three of the states going to the polls at the end of this year, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and the National Capital Region of Delhi, and concludes that despite the pivotal position that the dalit identity has come to occupy in national politics, there are limits to the growth of the BSP's influence in these states in the forthcoming assembly elections.

The dalit movement now presents an even greater diversity than before and dalit women, who remain triply exploited on the basis of caste, class and gender, largely remain outside the movement's fold.