Self-determination involves interrogation of the social hierarchy and morally regressive conditions created by the caste system in order to push the “untouchables’’ beyond morally minimum humanness. The self is also determined to produce resistance within such conditions but also radically interrogate such conditions. Self-determination thus involves transcendence of the self and the adversarial other.
By writing in a “Dalit style of language,” taking recourse to oral tradition, the Dalit woman elides and invents words, breaks the syntactic structure to express the Dalit world, thereby countering the hegemony of the upper-caste/ upper-class language which seeks to impose order and obedience.
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.
