The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments, and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. Pollock (2004) establishes that: ‘All literary cultures exist in time and space, and they acknowledge this by their specific internal processes of spatialization and temporalization. They all use language and thereby create literary language; they all appropriate and adapt existing conceptions of the literary and invent new ones’ (p. 16).

Literary history lets us keep an account of how, amidst particular historical moments, a text adjusts, gets distorted, and yet acts as a foundation for the readers over generations. It also compliments the general history by archiving the form and content used and abused in different literary periods. While commenting upon the distinction between the general history of literature and the literary history of literature, Sisir Kumar Das establishes an analogy in which he observes that while the general history, as practiced by the Indologists, is a kind of ‘internal history’ which only strives to identify the ‘monument’, literary history is a form of ‘external history’ which is aimed at exploring ‘the knowledge of the mechanism of production of literature, the role of the individuals, “the makers of literature”, and the role of other participants’ (p. 14). He furthermore notes that

a history of Indian literature, whether it be teleological or evolutionary or a history of the rezeptionsgeschichte is a matter of the aptitude of historian, but it is a history of the total literary activity of the Indian people, an account of all literary traditions, great and little, their ramifications and changes, their recessions and revivals, dominance and decline. (p. 11)

Fredric Jameson has very aptly noted down that in third world countries like India, literary histories compliment the nationalist discourse, and insists upon homogeneity. But it is difficult to claim the same for South Asian historiography—obviously because of the Partition history. In the period following Independence from the British colonial rule, and the Partition of 1947 and 1971, India increasingly began to emerge as a nation-state. As a result, what was historically constituted as one civilisation witnessed a political separateness leading to not only shifting of boundaries but also literary separateness—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. For this reason, for South Asian historiography, it becomes problematic to claim that literary histories essentially manifest themselves as national histories. With Partition, for instance, there were conceptual organisations of space and boundaries, and literatures and cultures, that though problematically so, literary history of South Asia almost hegemonically emerges as the literary history of India.

Having been homogenised under the theoretical denomination of nationalism, the idea of ‘Indian literature’ enforces one to perceive the literature written in India as a singular body. Nationalism in India, which is essentially a post-19th century sentiment, probably began bourgeoning in the period following colonial India’s first war of Independence in 1857. An understanding of nationalism in the Indian context, hence, is fraught between civilisation on one hand, and colonisation on the other. It was only in opposition to colonialism that the popular, yet vague idea of Bharatvarsha, which is evidently traceable in terms of both geography and chronology in works of Indian history and literature, was consolidated in the period following the 19th-century Indian Renaissance. Consequently, when post-colonial theorists like Aijaz Ahmed (1992) consider the idea of India, and hence Indian Literature, to be a concept imported from the West; theorists like Homi K. Bhabha (2004) insists upon renouncing the elitist worldview, and perceives the location of culture and literary history as essentially having syncretic origins.

Multilingualism in India is constituted by differentiated social consciousness, political imagination and linguistic expression. As a consequence, radical differences have always existed between the languages spoken by caste Hindus, Dalits, tribals and women. Literary traditions, particularly within lower-caste and tribal communities, likewise, have largely remained oral at least until the onset of colonial modernity. Manifested in the orality, the historical lineage of the low-class consciousness becomes one of the major problematic in retrieving literary history in the Indian context. Stuart Blackburn has also observed that doing literary historiography in India is challenging, because oral literary traditions remain outside the literary history of Indian literatures.

As the straitjacketed idea of Indian literature compels a strictly synchronic study of regional/sectional literatures under one nationalist umbrella, the divergent literary strands which constitute Indian literature face hindrance on multiple levels. In After Amnesia, G. N. Devy (2009) aptly notes that one of the major limitations in tracing Indian literary historiography is the fact that history of languages in India has remained an unclaimed terrain. A large share of lower-castes assertion in India has been either via orality or through vernacular languages. Consequently, Dalit assertion has largely been neglected amidst the grand narrative of Indian literature and Indian literary historiography. The wholistic domains of dominant histories in India have clearly given first-hand preference to the nationalist and anti-colonial histories, while the caste-histories incorporating low-caste protests are considered secondary and often stays in oblivion.

In The Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani (1997) stipulates that the fundamental agencies of modernism such as colonialism, nationalism, the state, economic development, industrialisation and democracy, helped shape an imagined political community called India. Consequently, right from its inception, the idea of India stays imbued in politics—Congress, Hindu nationalism, surging lower-caste movements, Ambedkarite revolution, Partition, Dalit Panthers and so on. Khilnani (1997) argues that, ‘… politics is at the heart of India’s passage to and experience of modernity. In a fundamental sense, India does not merely ‘have’ politics but is actually constituted by politics’ (p. 9).

The field of Indian literature, especially in the post-colonial era, emerges from the intersectionality of multiple binaries of caste, class, region, religion, culture, language, sexuality, gender, village, ethnicity and nationality. In his introduction to Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of Modern Indian Languages, Hans Harder (2010) accordingly postulates that:

Singularity does not yield the taxonomies needed to structure an account of successions and developments, which is the minimal requirement of any narrative literary history. Literary historiography, then, is a go-between, mediating between a certain literary realm or production and different extra-literary spheres. As such it has multiple binds in both a methodological and a teleological sense: its referent is literature, but its telos is the location of literature in other frameworks….(p. 4)

It is for this reason, perhaps, that any attempt to gauge Indian literature as a unified monolithic structure not only remains complicated but also stands contested. ‘Indianness’, then, remains a mythical, contested and elusive notion, which although mythical, continues to be a formative force to define the cultural baggage and shifting geographies.

However, it has been validly argued that the imaginative construction of nationalism in India is guided by a Hindu majoritarian past, Brahminical texts and Sanskrit literature. For this reason, perhaps, Hindu and India (being a Hindu majoritarian country) are considered synonymous within the colonial discourse. Orientalists, under the influence of relatively privileged native groups, helped establish the Aryan race theory and hegemonise the Sanskrit language and the sacred Hindu texts in contrast to the language and the literature of other minority communities. High caste Hindus informed the Orientalists in the process of re-making Hinduism, thus offering Neo-Hinduism, which was both Brahminic as well as Sanskritised. In Debrahmanising History, Braj Ranjan Mani (2008) notes:

In Orientalist scholarship there was no effort to corroborate the shastras with the non-brahmanical, Buddhist and shramanic texts, more empirical historical sources and archaeology. There was no effort to juxtapose the self-serving brahminical texts with the vastly different social and cultural reality of India’s past as encapsulated in alternative culture and material sources. … It was the same Orientalist scholarship which was later made the basis of the discovery of India’s past by the Indian elites in the name of nationalism. (p. 196)

Almost all the variegated forms of historiography such as colonial, national, Marxist and the subaltern perceive the colonial as the enemy. The unsaid assumption that informs these ideological formulations, hence, helps conceptualise the post-colonial as also anti-colonial. The post-colonial dialectic, in turn, naturalises the indigenous struggles of peasants, tribals, workers, non-Brahmins and Dalits under one umbrella doctrine—the subaltern subject. However, such an outlook fails to consider the problem of graded inequality and inner contradictions that plague India.

Associating the Dalit literary movement with an alternate vision, contemporary theorists like G. Aloysius (1997) and Gopal Guru (2011) essentially stress at perceiving the growth and development of Dalit literature alongside sociology. They argue that the reason for the failure of a caste-structured country like India to emerge as a nation, rests in its failure to duly hegemonise the aspirations of the subaltern movement. However, unlike the West, subaltern studies in India battles several problematic concerns. As most of the subaltern theorisations all over the world emanate from the dialectic between the coloniser and the colonised, the obvious ‘post-colonial’ framework of the subaltern studies hinges upon the ‘anti-colonial’ stance of the colonised.

However, the post-colonial theorists fail to acknowledge the varied reactions the elite/upper-castes and the downtrodden/Dalits displayed towards the colonial forces. The non-Brahmins, Adi-Hindus and Ambedkar, for instance, embraced the reformative potential of the colonial rule, and were more inclined to trust the Britishers than the caste Hindus who crowded not only the Congress party but also Independence politics. In this regard, K. Satchidanandan (1999) construes: ‘[The postcolonial] theory does great disservice to the minorities in [post-colonial] society by deflecting attention away from their oppression by using a unitary vocabulary which confers a “subaltern” status on the entire post-colonial world disregarding the fact that it is ridden with [internal] hierarchies’.

The discourse on caste, accordingly, has been for a long period of time, subsumed, substituted, appropriated, and at times, replaced amid the grand discourses of orientalism, anti-colonialism, nationalism and post-colonialism. Ambedkarite revolution, for instance, signifies a history of rebellion that has nothing to do with the nationalistic struggle. However, the mainstream historiographical school in India has had the tradition to belittle or ignore every other movement except the national. Susan Bassnett (1993), in one of her essays on comparative Indian literature, also postulates that the nation is not just a geographical but a culture bound entity. She notes how in their eagerness to establish a canon and a tradition, emergent nations privilege ‘imagined communities’ of storytelling from the past and attribute a lower status to oral cultures, performance tradition, folklore and cultures which have had no written epic.

However, as against the mainstream school of historiography, the subaltern school of historiography recaptures the role of the downtrodden, the popular, the oral, the local, the vernacular and the oppressed in moulding significant historical changes. Aijaz Ahmed (1992) also notes that:

… the locus of literary production [in India]—certainly for those immense movements which changed the face of India in their own time—was most frequently not the urban elite but the life-process of the artisanate, the peasantry, the women, the shudras, the precariously located clusters of dissent. (p. 254)

The wholistic domain of dominant histories clearly gives first-hand preference to the nationalist and anti-colonial histories, while the caste-histories incorporating low-caste protests are considered secondary and often stays in oblivion.

Hence, it becomes necessary to note that with every document of civilisation—victorious and triumphant—we forget the document of the downtrodden. In his critique of historicism, Walter Benjamin rightly rejects the ‘additive’ or ‘cause and effect’ understanding of history. He rather proclaims that history, as a flash of moment, tends to always reside in the present. In fact, for Benjamin, every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism. For this reason, for lack of epochal discreteness, a history which only celebrates its tradition and culture, remains an unresolved one. As such, while the concept of Indian literature stands contested amidst the tension between the idea of India as a civilisation and the idea of India as a nation-state, neither of the two propositions entertain the cause and the objectives of the Dalit movement. Hence, in order to recover the lost voices from the past and to uncover the truth of the historically subalterns, an alternative historiography emerges as the need of the hour to idealise the retrogressive ‘backward-looking’ alongside a hopeful ‘forward movement’.

In ‘Liberal Democracy in India and the Dalit Critique’, Gopal Guru (2011) states that Dalits were at margins of the Indian civilisation and in spite of the substantial transition that has taken place in the post-colonial India, with the still prevalent politics of ‘isolation’ and ‘insulation’, Dalits continue to find themselves to be at the margins of the Indian state. In another seminal text, ‘The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory’, Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai (2012) have argued that while caste has been discussed extensively by insiders in literature, politics and cultural activism, Dalits have remained averse to theory. Guru maintains that the non-egalitarian nature of the social science practices in India is the reason behind the ‘institutionalised exclusion’ of Dalits from the theoretical realm. The context of Gopal Guru’s (2011) allegation hints that while only a Dalit can enter the Dalit predicament, non-Dalits can never perceive Dalits as a separate subject. The specificity of Dalit oppression and its representation in literature and theory by Dalits, according to Guru (2011), essentialises the Dalit experience. However, such an idea of an ‘essential Dalit experience’ and a ‘homogenous subjectivity’ continues to be problematic. When Dalits speak, for instance, do the male Dalits also speak on behalf of the female Dalits, and vice-versa? Do the middle-class Dalits, who have achieved a considerable upward mobility, qualify to write about the Dalits who are still at the margins? Can urban-based educated Dalits claim an authentic knowledge of community life and rural dialect?

Such attempts to ‘essentialise’ Dalit consciousness, hence, to use Gayatri Spivak’s (2014) concept, can be understood as ‘strategic essentialism’. Offering a critique of the Subaltern Studies Group’s initiative to rewrite the history of colonial India from the perspective of the subalterns, Spivak satirically highlights the ‘provisional’ nature of such professed solidarity amongst the subordinate social groups, which puts the local differences aside for a while in order to invoke a collective identity and achieve a political aim. The construction and circulation of ‘authenticity’ in the name of Dalit chetna, hence, equally elides the prevalence of ‘graded inequality’ within the lower-caste communities. Inferring from Spivak’s criticism of the post-colonial framework of subaltern studies, Laura Brueck (2014) writes:

[The] subalternists are trying to uncover the (singular) ‘consciousness’ of the (plural) subaltern, thereby looking for and ultimately establishing through their research a positivist subaltern consciousness. This kind of universal consciousness of the subaltern can be observed but, in fact, is insufficient to represent a complex and varied group of classes, castes, gender, languages, and locations. (p. 67)

Similar reasons govern the problem in the theorisation of Dalit literature, for a cluster of oppressed groups before being assigned a communitarian identity in the name of ‘Dalits’ were never a homogenous community. The seminal notion of organicity inherent in imagining Indian literature as a nationalist literary body or Dalit literature as the homogenous subaltern literary body, hence, remains problematic. Multi-faceted intra-Dalit hierarchisations and divisions prevent the formation of any unified Dalit voice alongside weakening the Dalit critique of the caste system. The Dalits, likewise, share the customs, beliefs and hierarchical values of caste Hindus, and replicate the caste order within their community. The internalisation of inferiority complex propels them to subjugate the ones lying beneath them.

In the Tamil novel, Vanman, Bama (2008) throws light on the prevalence of intra-Dalit prejudices among Tamil Dalits. From spatial segregation to practicing brutal violence, there are vivid descriptions about the rivalry shared by the two sects of the Dalit community—the Pallars and the Parayars. Refusing to identify themselves as Dalits, the Pallars claim:

The Parayars are inferior to us, and always will be. We are not untouchables, we are of royal descent. We are not Dalits. We are Devendra Kula Velalars or Mallars. Not Pallars. So we must not have any type of contact or communication with the low Dalit Parayars. (p. 77)

Similarly, as Sudhakar Rao (1998) notes, the two dominant Dalit sub-castes in Andhra Pradesh—the Malas and the Madigas—entertain corresponding feudal conflicts. Rao examines:

Chalwadis, non-leather workers, claim superior status over Madigas, leather workers in Dharwad town in Karnataka. But Madigas do not accept food from Chalwadis, whereas the latter accept food from the former’. (p. 12)

The sub-caste consciousness, in this way, intricately informs Dalit heterogeneity. In the North, for instance, the intra-Dalit strife exists between the Bhangi and the Chamar community. In Uttar Pradesh, the leather-working caste of Chamars, who today outnumber the sweeper caste of Bhangis in strength as well as in terms of upward mobility using positive discrimination/reservation benefits, scorn the Bhangis for their deplorable stature. The relatively better position of the Chamars leading from ‘early politicisation and modest economic security’ reveals the unease between the sub-castes within the ‘Dalit’ category. (Hunt, 2014) As a consequence, the subaltern counter-public also inevitably caters division into multiple subaltern counter-publics within the Chamars and the Bhangis (Uttar Pradesh), the Mahars and the Mangs (Maharashtra), the Parayars and the Pallars (Tamil Nadu), and the Malas and the Madigas (Andhra Pradesh)—with all of these communities forging distinct ‘public capacities’ and ‘public sphere activities’. As the Dalits all across India remain differently empowered even in the post-Constitution amendment phase, the nature of public sphere in India also remains variegated.

In the Marathi Dalit novel, Hindu, Sharankumar Limbale (2010) examines the contemporary Marathi Dalit scenario and lays bare the multi-faceted socio-political and economic ramifications the Dalit community denotes today. The varied allegiances the ideologues of the different intra-Dalit communities display herein, form the basis of Limbale’s (2010) project to meticulously analyse the Dalit life-patterns and discover the intricacies of contemporary Dalit struggles. The possibility of myriad individuated narrative strands emerging from the increasing disintegration of the collective Dalit vision, Limbale (2010) shows, leads to the solidification of inner contradictions and conflicts.

Nonetheless, emerging from varied locations, languages and perspectives, the idea of Dalit literature traverses multiple possibilities. The question of Dalit literary historiography, likewise, appears equally complicated as Indian literary historiography. While the discourse of nationalism (and nationalist literature) in India emerged to oppose the colonial framework, Dalit literature emerged to contest the idea of Indian literature. But one may argue, when the Dalit experience itself is not homogenous, how can its articulation be? For a singular apparatus such as Dalit literature, which also poses an apparently organic stance, stands fragmented.

However, just because Dalit literature accommodates complexities, it does not become irrelevant. Feminism, for instance, rose to significance to counter patriarchy. Eventual studies in feminism, however, revealed that on account of differences in class, race, religion, caste and ethnicity, it cannot be hailed as a uniform ideology. This does not imply that in the absence of uniformity or homogeneity of experience of patriarchy, feminism need not exist at all. Rather it needs to become democratic in order to encompass the multiple narrative strands suppressed women from all across the world would offer. To discredit the need for an alternative, in the name of its inadequacy, signifies the retention of the status quo. So as to over-ride the structure of patriarchy, another structure of feminism inevitably emerged as a fundamental requisite. Similarly, the pertinence of Dalit literature and Dalit literary historiography lies in its competence to give representation to the multiplicity of Dalit identity: male-female; urban-rural; Hindi-Tamil; and Chamar-Bhangi. For in its attempt to homogenise ‘culture-specific’ subalternity under one umbrella term, Dalit literature and Dalit literary historiography do offer an alternative to counteract the dominant ‘Others’—the Hindus and the Hindu (Indian) literary history. The possibilities of the alternative Dalit literary historiography, hence, rest in acknowledging the presence of manifold Dalit identities, on one hand, while struggling to accomplish a complete ‘annihilation of caste’ from within and around, on the other.