Speakable Selves and Unspeakable Identities

Introduction

Limbale’s autobiography is a self-conscious literary performance which shows how the autos (Sharan), bios (Dalit life) and graphe (self-inscription) abandoned to a drifting multiplicity of significations unite in the production of sociality. The Outcaste shows us ways in which the interaction between the unclaimed Dalit non-self and the Dalit community is mired in contest and conflict and do not result in the production of a permanent and homogeneous selfhood. The autobiography is not just a retrospective repatterning of life events but a prospective unfolding of the Dalit social order that shaped the narrated life so as to make future autobiographers conscious of the indignity and injustice of Dalit livelihood. While it is confessional and meditative, The Outcaste is also a self-consciously creative production enlisting ethnographic lore of Mahar subculture. The autobiography is a reproduction of the self as self-in-text.

James Olney refutes the traditional assumption about life-writing that, “The bios of the autobiography could only signify ‘the course of a lifetime’ and there was nothing problematic about the autos, no agonizing questions of identity, self-definition. In other words, the autos was taken to be perfectly neutral and adding it to ‘biography’ changed nothing.” (Olney, 1980, pp. 20–21)

For Limbale, the writing of the self, fastens the self to history and public acts of visibility, ‘neither autos nor bios is there at the beginning, it is only through the act of writing that the self and life, completely intertwined and entangled, take on a certain form’ (Olney, 1980, p. 22). But unlike the completed and all-knowing subject of Western autobiography, Sharan is not the completed and fully formed public ‘self’ looking back at life from the vantage point of the end. Instead of a public ‘self’ narrating the life story, we get the story of the self-in-production through the writing of the autobiography. Limbale’s strategy to often end sections of the autobiography with open-ended questions shows the narrator, Sharan trying to discover the self and knowledge about it. Sharan, the child-narrator is not a monumentalized artefact that is philosophically and linguistically complete but rather is inscrutable and unknowable. The autobiography remains incomplete since the narrator is not finished; the self like the autobiography in which it is recorded remains incomplete and in the process of self-making. Unlike Western autobiographies which in the words of Philippe Lejuene are ‘retrospective accounts in prose that a real person makes of his own existence stressing his individual life and especially the history of his personality’, The Outcaste is not the text of a singular self but contains traces of other marginal lives within it.

Double Maternity and Female Genealogy

Limbale’s Mahar household shows the predominance of a matriarchal domestic structure since the biological father is absent. Freed from the necessity of unitary and singular parentage, illegitimacy offers the possibility of tracing multiple genealogical frames; not only is Sharan raised by a Muslim grandfather biologically unrelated to him; he also grows up in a household where the maternal figure is polarized into two incarnations; the mother and the grandmother, thus effectively redoubling the maternal principle. Through its depiction of Santamai’s grandmotherly authority and her hold over young Sharan’s formative upbringing, the autobiography tenuously moves the reader away from the absent figure of paternity towards twin models of maternal nurturance. The presence of a male breadwinner often has the potential of dissolving alternative feminine kinship structures within the androcentric ‘Family Romance’ but Masamai’s generative capacity, both biological and economical, permits the dissolution of patriarchal principle and instead allows the bastard to explore generative possibilities of multiple, differentiated and transgressive kinship arrangements. In fact there are no historically adequate Hindu familial referents for the disruptive, heterogeneous and non-uniform kinship structures in the Mahar household. Rather than giving us a linear familial line of production, Limbale’s disordered family model shows a branching out of divergent relational ends, thus creating an ever expansive web of genealogical belongings/non-belongings. Illegitimacy as an anthropological principle alerts the reader to a wide array of digressive and transgressive relations; the ‘Family Romance’ is effectively perverted and parodied. Santamai’s unconventional cohabitation with Dada in its defiance of religious and social interdictions poses an open threat to the official Hindu familial/national model; unlike the caste contaminated identity of Sharan, Santamai’s identity as a Hindu widow jostles with her lived identity as a Muslim porter’s ‘help-meet’. Her refusal to remarry or convert to Islam or renounce her husband’s caste shows a wild profusion of identity positions otherwise not available to the bourgeois Hindu gendered subject. However, this reorganization of traditional relations of domestic cohabitation proves to be both her strength and weakness. Rather than privilege the secular, companionate, amatory and non-threatening model of domesticity she chooses to reinstall herself back into the familiar world of casteist and religious sanctions by locating herself within the world of her husband’s patronymic. On learning about her husband’s death she chooses to perform the sacramental rites of widowhood for a man who was an adulterous and polygamous husband; prioritizing the legitimated but self-denying performance of widowhood despite being robbed of her secure position as a householder. Santamai is thus, both abjected from and embedded within circuits of social legitimacy and validation as she seeks to resolve a double-bind between the outlawed/secular/proscriptive/amatory and the legitimate/casteist/prescriptive/crematory. Her refusal to adopt Dada’s proper name and her final emotional fidelity and wifely piety towards her deceased husband through mourning shows that she preserves and keeps the traditional marital arrangement symbolically intact; the history of her previous marriage is neither erased nor displaced by her newfound libidinal attachment to another man. The male Dalit autobiography thus serves as an important counter-point to the silencing and erasure of women from official juridical and historical discourses. By showing the tenuous double bind of conformity/transgression and wifehood/cohabitation; Limbale enables the reader to understand that even for the economically independent and matriarchal Santamai, a self-willed re-making and reconstruction of identity through dissolution of long-established religious and legal discourses of matrimony is an empirical impossibility in a casteist social structure. The matriarchal Santamai is invariably torn from her body, non-marital sexuality, non-domesticated desire and supplanted back into the domain of patriarchal Law.

The absence of the father or law-giver, allows women to exit prescriptive social roles and functions; women are no longer related to women through filial relations of exchange. Absence of an authoritative male line of descent entails alternative and more permissible models of genealogical relations. Even the Mahar subculture is dominated by the myth of a fearful, emasculating and forbidding female spectre—that of the Goddess Ambabai. Women of Sharan’s ‘semi-Maharwada’ are seen as actively deconstructing the phallocentric and patricentric master code.

This substitutive maternal genealogy or Dalit gynaeology restores the maternal principle which is actively effaced in both the Hindu Lingayat culture and the Maharwada. Limbale exposes the way in which a loosening of the bonds linking women (Santamai and Masamai) to the father/husband allows them to establish newer interconnections between themselves which go beyond paternal affiliations. Masamai too grows up in the absence of her biological father; raped and impregnated by Hanmanta Limbale, she leaves her husband and his family name to return to a fatherless (Dada is not Masamai’s biological father) and husband-less maternal continent. More significantly, the disruption of patrilineal kinship and its attendant cultural norms governing Dalit masculinity, allows Sharan the freedom to explore alternative and variable models of manhood. When Suni is pricked by thorn of toddy palm, Sharan’s discomposure shows that he exhibits more readily the feminine values of emotional turbulence, sympathy, self-effacement and care-giving over the masculine values of emotional frigidity, narcissism, aggression and self-absorption. There is an alternative figuration of masculinity through Sharan’s cultural dislocation from stable inherited gendered positions; as a fatherless bastard with no access to patrilineal models of entitlement, the young Sharan is plunged into a world emptied of paternal significations. His subjectivity is thus not only fissured but also decentred; he is forever fascinated by the marginal, hybrid, mutant other. Since the proliferation of discursive practices of otherness are governed by maternal relations of power, Sharan ends up identifying with female role models and feminine subject positions. The autobiography opens with Sharan occupying a liminal space of becoming that is not yet invested with sexualized and racialized meanings; he watches ‘girls playing phugadi’ rather than play with the boys. He further overturns culturally enforced codes of Dalit manhood by using a feminine metaphor when he compares his self-location in the game of phugadi to a group of dung-gathering women who ‘admired (boys) from a distance’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 2).

Maternity is a culturally sanctioned and socially legitimated function that women are granted in society; once the mother abandons maternity, be it Santamai in the case of her daughter or Masamai in the case of Suryakant, Dharma and Sharan, she reclaims her pre-designated status as a woman. The absence of phallocentric circuits of exchange enables mothers and daughters to recognize each other as ‘women’; this rediscovery of sublimated womanhood not only enables the recovery of gendered female subjectivity but allows women to see themselves as active subjects of self-ownership and not as passive objects of Masculine exchange. However, in the Mahar household, we see no such feminine solidarity between mother and daughter despite the absence of father/husband; Sharan’s home in Maharwada is no Matritopia. Santamai and Masamai are perennially at loggerhead with each other; Masamai is sexually wayward, emotionally restive, volatile, unimaginative, self-absorbed and non-maternal, whereas Santamai is sexually self-disciplined, imaginative, authoritarian, matriarchal, self-effacing, rigidly conservative and maternal. While Masamai is the ‘absent’ mother, Santamai is the nurturing mother solely in charge of the upbringing of Sharan and his sisters. Raped and abandoned, Masamai takes shelter from her mother knowing that she too had been similarly abandoned by her husband; the two estranged women are pushed to the constitutive outside of the normative, regulative and approved social regime. Husband-less and unprotected, they are expelled from the institutional and disciplinary structures of Dalit matrimony.

But paradoxically both women do not discover an emotional resonance in each other’s marginality, they refuse to find interrelatedness in their respective scenarios of emotional and legal abandonment. Hence, there is no maternal duplication but rather polarized maternity as the grandmother not only supplements but replaces and substitutes the mother effectively subordinating and displacing her.

Instead of developing an ideological and familial complementarity, both mother and daughter are positioned as rivals in the liquor business, ‘Santamai and Masamai had separate furnaces. Even their customers were different. Santamai and Masamai, mother and daughter carried on their business as efficiently as men’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 28). Women’s insertion within an economy of competitive rivalry instals them at intersections of formidable locations of power; women centred relations rooted in non-competitive models of reciprocity are overturned as both women are inscribed within persistent power relations. Power dissymmetries and the ensuing flow of capital enables the integration of women into labour force reversing traditional patterns of exclusion. There are no male intermediaries nor are women mere consumers or owners of modes of sexual (re)production, but rather owners of modes of production. Limbale shows Dalit female sexualities being inscribed upon and restructured within a complex matrix of changing economic arrangements. The violation of Mahar women by Patils establish that the material processes of Dalit social formations are embedded in the overdetermined structures of hereditary debt-bondage, labour—domestic, agricultural and sexual— and cultural exchange as against the reified logic of capital. The liquor business marks a shift from a feudal hereditary regime of enduring caste privilege to a modern commodity based economy which recognizes capital and not caste as the underlying basis for social production of class privilege in post-independent nation-state. Hereditary caste based labour regimes recruit women in a circuit of sexual and social exchange between feudal moneylenders and indebted fathers/husbands. Scavenging and disposing of carcasses serves as pre-capitalist constant capital reified by caste, whereas the liquor becomes a source of market capital permitting an economic mobilization thus allowing bastard children to be part of production and distribution instead of serving as bond-labours on the fields of their fathers (Limbale, 2008, p. 29).

Masamai’s attempt to re-eroticize her ‘self’ (volatile, libidinal, self-pleasuring, pleasurable and biological) simultaneously necessitates her alienation from the maternal (docile, labouring, generative, gestative, self-denying and cultural). Maternal subjectivity buries the woman in the role of the mother allowing the husband/feudal lord to exploit this pre-social, invisible and unacknowledged labour. Nancy Chodorow amongst others has established that such a heterosexual kinship arrangement invariably implicates a woman in the Reproduction of Mothering:

The care and socialization of girls by women ensure the production of feminine personalities founded on relation and connection, with flexible rather than rigid ego boundaries. This is one explanation for how women’s relative embeddedness is reproduced from generation to generation. Mothers and daughters experience boundary confusion, for example guilt and blame for the other’s unhappiness; shame and embarrassment at the other’s actions; daughters’ ‘discovery’ that they are ‘really’ living out mother’s lives. (Chodorow, 1978, pp. 57–58)

Myths as Fictions of Self

Lacking in discreet and unified origins as well as being excluded from traditional genealogical inheritance of patronymic, Sharan is forced to create fictions around his identity. In the absence of father figures, Sharan is forced to borrow cultural iconography for self-production. Like Jarasandh, Sharan occupies a contact zone where his two identities—outsider/insider, legitimate/illegitimate, Lingayat/Mahar get entangled and problematized. What Sharan embodies is intersubjectivity—a dual, intercultural and fractured consciousness. Sharan self-manufactures himself as unassimilated through a defensive reassertion of his alterity. Being deviant, mixed, in-between and polluted he extends the fiction of his identity to a pervasive identification with Karna. In Mahabharata, Karna the illegitimate child of a sexual violation was adopted and raised in a lower caste household. The biological son of a Kshatriya queen and Sun God as well as the adopted son of a base born charioteer, Karna too is a socio-ethnic mutant like Sharan, as he occupies a contested and internally contradictory subject positions. ‘My mother clammed up like Kunti. At such moments I felt a kinship with Karna. I felt we were brothers. Many times I felt I was Karna myself, because like him I too was drifting’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 60). The identification with Karna is however inaccurate and misleading; unlike Limbale who is fatherless, Karna was motherless. He should ideally equate himself with Ghatotkacha (born to an ogress and abandoned by his Kshatriya father) or Yuyutsu (the illegitimate son of the lower caste Souvali and Dhritarashtra). Perhaps the reference to Karna (mythical analogue) is meant to evoke the bhava (affective emotion) and anubhava (lived experience) of unbelongingness. However, as an adult living in secrecy in Bhimnagar, Limbale goes on to make a mythical correlation between himself and the Pandavas not Karna. Instead of identifying with the illegitimate son of Kunti, he now fashions himself after her legitimate sons from Pandu, ‘We lived keeping our caste a secret. I felt the house we were living in was like the Lakshagruha’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 104). Sharan equates the Dalit Santamai with ‘Jijabai telling stories of valour to young Shivaji’. He further goes onto identify himself with the Maratha ruler Shivaji, ‘This my history made me restless like the young Shivaji.’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 79). This metaphorical appropriation is highly subversive as it expropriates, contaminates and reverses a dominant myth effectively subalternizing it. Shivaji, the iconoclastic figure of an orthodox Maratha rulership is displaced from his archetypal location within caste imaginary and made an objective correlative for the angry Dalit boy. This is not a naïve adoption of cultural symbols; Limbale shows that cultural analogues are not static repositories of accessible and known meanings but differentially variable signifying schemes which can be manipulated. The reverse appropriation of symbols ideologically spoils untainted Hindu iconographies; in Limbale’s hands myths mutate to become variable cultural hermeneutics. In adopting cultural epistemologies, Limbale appears to be following a long line of Dalit autobiographers but instead of identifying with Eklavya, Shambuka or Shabri, he chooses to identify with mainstream Hindu icons. D. R. Nagaraj in The Flaming Feet and other Essays shows that cultural history embedded in practices of engendering myths is an appeal to the humanist consciousness of Hinduism.

Ethnobiography

The presence of ethnographic lore affirms the prominence of collective/communal memory, indigenous oral narrative traditions as well as the role of narrator as recipient and disseminator of orally transmitted Mahar folklore. By successfully fusing an indigenous narrative tradition in an otherwise Western genre, Limbale asserts that culture specific contexts ‘shape’ the text. Therefore G. N. Devy in his introduction calls such autobiographies from minority cultures ‘social epiphanies’ (p. xxii). I would like to call them ethnobiographies. Limbale’s narrative goes beyond an introspective mode to give voice to a long repressed cultural discourse and face to politically invisible masses, thus giving non-Dalit readers an inside view of non-mainstream ethnic life. There is a vocalization of the silenced subaltern cultural narrative in Limable’s self-narrative. Sharan writes in a tradition borrowed from orally communicated tales privileging folk, polyvocal, vernacular and non-mainstream traditions of storytelling. The protagonist of the Dalit autobiography is communal; in ‘Chronicle of a Fatherless being’ Limbale calls it ‘an autobiography of a community’ (Limbale, 2008, p. xxiii). Santamai tells the ‘listener’ Sharan and the reader about wadaars who ate cats. When the village is struck with cholera, a male buffalo is sacrificed to appease the goddess; and instead of vaccinating the children Santamai prays to Ambabai. The ethnobiography allows us to view the Maharwada as an alternative subaltern sphere; rather than being an excluded non-institutionalized arena of discourse production, the Maharwada self-manufactures itself as an oppositional and conceptually distinct sphere critical of Hindu nationalist hegemony.

Akkarmashi as Concept-Metaphor

Even though translated as ‘Outcaste,’ the Marathi word Akkarmashi can be seen as a concept-metaphor moving from quasi-mythological to historico-political to anthropological planes of signification. Akkarmashi also undergirds the idea of incompleteness and of possessing discontinuous selves; in an exceptional moment in the autobiography, Sharan asserts an imaginative kinship with his step-brothers Suryakant and Dharma as he finally recognizes that they too are incomplete and unformed. Akkarmashi also means contaminated and polluted. Erwin Goffman’s sociological formulation of stigma as a blemish which gets transplanted as an underlying moral failing leading to self-reinterpretation as a discreditable entity can further clarify this point. The Akkarmashi’s ‘ego identity’ which is unblemished is progressively contaminated by negative meanings affixed to his ‘social identity’; transforming him from being discredited to being discreditable. ‘The girl I married needed to be a hybrid like me to ensure a proper match. A bastard must always be matched with another bastard’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 98).

Signature: Autobiographer as Textual Legatee

A reconceptualization of identity through a deliberate disavowal of the Law of the Father can only be accomplished by a rejection of the father’s name. The resubstitution of the patronymic by the matronymic marks a re-birth along matri-lineage; now Sharan does not technically abandon the patronym but being always-already an ‘unnatural’ child culturally born out of caste and out of wedlock, he is already expelled from the traditional and conventional name of the father. Unlike boys born to patrilineage, Sharan learns about the impermanence and provisional nature of public names; names are not embodied and embedded subject positions but identity markers which can be volitional (self-chosen) or created. Limbale observes, ‘I had no inherited identity at all,’ the refusal of the patronymic paradoxically grants a child the creative, epistemological and ontological freedom of self-production or self-making. Writing empowers such a stigmatized and ‘unnatural’ non-subject as it allows him to write his ‘Self’ into Being. The publication and circulation of the autobiography makes the author by virtue of a legal bond authorized and a legitimate bearer of his own name. The signatory acquires legal sanction and identity from the text within which he is inscribed. The textual production of the named text makes the authorial signature public and thus in terms of copyright laws authorizes and guarantees the legatee of the signature a stable and unique subjecthood. Writing the autobiography thus becomes a quest to acquire a complete name and a legal status; the reproduction of the signature through publication, distribution, transmission and reception makes the ‘signified’ more defined, real and credible. Even if only a textual construct, the author’s name ‘Sharankumar Limbale’ acquires a life of its own.

Understanding Illegitimacy

Subjected to generations of hierarchical and exclusionary practices, the Dalits are not constitutive of the nation-state but expelled, delegitimized and outcasted minorities. I would like to see the issue of legitimacy and illegitimacy in the autobiography not simply in familial terms but political and national terms. In many ways, the refusal to identify with the post-colonial nation-state and juridical models of constitutional subjecthood can be seen as reversing the processes of exclusion. Through the wilful practice of delegitimizing one’s subjecthood one challenges the legitimacy of the institutions which bestow legality; for the scheduled castes there can be no Imagined Community . The practices of colonial, anti-colonial-nativist and post-colonial-nationalist state formations have kept caste discriminations intact.

The proud assumption of laying a public claim to illegitimacy by rejecting the Hindu nation becomes a symbolic rejection of the constitutional mores and political processes of amelioration and adequation; D. R. Nagaraj calls this Self-Minoritization (Nagaraj, 2010, p.115). ‘Our entering a temple will make God impure. (Hindu) God discriminates between man and man. One is high caste and the other untouchable. We don’t approve of this God, nor this religion, nor this country because they ostracize us’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 62). One must note the use of collective pronoun ‘We’ in Limbale’s proclamation of self-delegitimation from the Hindu nation. ‘Whenever I heard that reservation facilities for Dalits were about to be cancelled it used to scare me. If these facilities are cancelled, give us our own Dalitsthan.’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 89).

The teacher’s refusal to enrol Sharan without his father’s signature on the freeship form allows us to see a mutually reinforcing causal relation between patrilineality and state sponsored institutions; patrilineality corroborates and rationalizes state prohibitions and regulations governing education. Hereditary caste laws augment state power; the state (father) has the ability to make its progenies destitute and fatherless. Any desire to erase a pre-given and pre-constructed genealogical narrative (one inherited through patriarchal pedagogical descent such as sacred thread ceremony amongst Brahmin boys) is thus a figurative breaking away from cultural codes and conventions.

In Limbale’s case, the desire to reject legitimacy is also personal. One can see his rejection of patrilineal legitimacy as a rejection of patriarchal social relations which sanction the rape of Dalit women by Patil men. Patriarchy uncritically reproduces unexamined differences between upper caste and untouchables; thus, Sharan’s rejection of legitimacy is a wilful abrogation of patriarchal master narrative. He dislocates himself from the Father’s name and the Father’s law to embrace the values of Santamai, Dada or Ambedkar which are non-hierarchical and non-exclusionary. He does not conform to the logocentricity of the caste-based norm and reinvents a new mode of self-legitimization.

Subjected to social censure and living a stigmatized existence, Sharan is ‘No man’s son’ in terms of school records; expelled from the castrating Law of the Father he is subjected to the feminizing way of the mother in an incomplete Family Romance. Even though Dada assumes the position of paternal authority and represents what Lacan calls Law of the Father, the bond between the Muslim grandfather and the half-Mahar/half-Lingayat grandson is invalid and illegitimate since Dada is not married to Santamai. The absence of the father permeates the entire self-narrative; the whole autobiography is pervaded with a sense of lack. Multiple and devalued parentage, the absence of the father in flesh and inheritance of language from the grandmother (grandmother’s tongue) shows that Sharan is absent as a stable subject throughout the book. The child of rape, the bastard of a Hindu Lingayat, the son of a Mahar, the ward of a Patil and raised by a Muslim grandfather; he has no fixed identity. Instead, the child-narrator becomes feminized and an ever shifting panoply of roles. The child-narrator is not stable or permanent; he is both a non-being and non-self. One must note that ‘Sharankumar Limbale’—the proper name and the bearer of the name are both absent from the autobiography so that the subject of the signature (semiotic self-inscription) is lacking in this self-narrative. This ambiguous narrative of lack suggests the unfulfilled desire to be the absent phallus by assuming the role of one’s own father. The child-narrator yearns to bed his mother, ‘Why shouldn’t I enter my mother’s bed? Isn’t she an adulteress?’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 64). This metaphorical identification with the absent father-phallus should not be read as a patriarchal fiat since the father withholds the ‘Law of the Father’ and ‘Name of the Father’, thus forbidding the child’s entry into what Lacan calls the Paternal Symbolic from the (grand)maternal Imaginary. However, the only compensatory phallic self-mastery he can achieve is the writing of the autobiography as a means of filling up the lack, a textual production which paradoxically contravenes the laws of patriarchy since the imagination to tell the story comes from the grandmother.

Gender of Autobiography

Now the fixity of identity, a stable and permanent existence rooted in the patronym is a masculine prerogative, contrarily the shifting and malleability of public names and status (due to marriage) is seen as feminine. Just as loss of the phallus signifies castration, loss of father’s name symbolizes loss of selfhood for Limbale. Thus, the Non-Self of the autobiography by virtue of being unfixed, decentred, fragmentary and multiple violates masculine permanence, stability and unity. Sharan’s castrated and feminized non-self allows us to read his autobiography as ‘feminine’. Being the official dedicatee or addressee of the autobiography, the mother’s name comes above the author’s own signature. By dissolving the gap between the first person ‘I’ and the voices of other characters in the narrative, Limbale reaffirms the link that binds him to the Dalit cultural memory and communal folklore. Unlike the androcentric autobiography, which is deeply privative, meditative and personalized; Limbale’s autobiography is de-personalized and plural; the method of incorporating stories of his relatives and ancestors liberates the narrative from an orbit of privative comprehension. The communal nature of Limbale’s autobiography is again reminiscent of women’s autobiographies.

Some of the conscious strategies of storytelling adopted by the child-narrator can be found in the opening pages of the autobiography; the narrative opens with, ‘One day all the boys and girls from our school were going on a picnic’ (p. 1) and goes on to paint an elaborate picture of games played by Mahar schoolchildren, the actual mention of the narrator’s orphaned status comes much later. In doing so, Sharan alerts us to the ambitious nature of his narrative as well as acknowledges his function as a storyteller rather than a memoirist. In his minute depiction of collective Mahar childhood, Sharan offers the non-Dalit reader an alternative version of Indian childhood than the one found in R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi or Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Nischindipur. The world of Sharan’s boyhood is indented with markers of privation, degeneracy, abuse, crime and degrading violence; his is not an antediluvian world of childhood innocence.

By retelling communal lore, legends, intergenerational folklore and village gossip, Limbale acknowledges his creative debt to a long line of Dalit storytellers. This disruption of the logocentric drive for coherence and chronological linearity evidently marks a break from androcentric autobiographical traditions. Having no official historical record of his own birth, the child-narrator again employs the mode of fictionality to reconstruct his bleak childhood. Since he is outside of recorded history, he has no option but to frame the originary moments of his personal history in terms of fiction. Unlike conventional male autobiographers’ search for undocumented personal history, authentic facts and verisimilitudinous reproduction, Limbale deliberately frustrates the search for verifiable information. The conscious choice of inauthenticity, muddying of facts, inexactitude and mythopoesis shows the narrator’s design to structure the text as a story and not a historical document. In his use of dominant Maharashtrian myths and traditional lore from Mahar subculture to shape his life-in-text/life-as-text, Sharan is recycling fiction into facts since absence of factual details entails a fictionalized recreation of childhood. Unlike the omniscient sovereign subject of Western autobiography, the first person narrator is not all knowing. One of the self-conscious strategies used by Sharan to frame his ‘life-as-text’ as a story is the adaptation of populist romance narrative from Bollywood films. The cultural landscapes of Bollywood films permit the overcoming of caste barriers; similarly Sharan’s ill-fated and unrequited love for Shewanta obeys the stereotypes of Bollywood romance. Seeing her washing clothes, he is seized by the desire to strip himself and drench her; before leaving the village Shewanta reproaches him in the language of films ‘I will either marry you or drown myself in a well’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 54). But unlike reel life the hero of the self-narrative cannot transcend caste barriers successfully.

Autobiography as Historiography

Sharan’s testimony does not obey the disciplinary structures of historical recreation but rather performs a methodological violence on historical writing; the absence of chronological markers of objective, public and national events and the simultaneous proliferation of subjective, emotional and communal events makes the autobiography contra-historical. Sharan’s writing deliberately counteracts the authority/historical viability of official records such as the school records. In its insistence on parentage, facts and dates, the school record serves as a competing narrative form. The young narrator observes,

I remembered the hands of high-caste boys offering us their leftovers, the withered tree in whose shade we sat, the question my mother had asked, and the teacher calling me a son of a bitch and a beef-eater. How should I start writing the essay my teacher had asked for? (Limbale, 2008, p. 4)

This ‘essay’ can be seen as the pre-autobiography or Ur-autobiography but Sharan’s actual narrative in its self-appropriation of fiction invalidates legal/chronological registers. The construction of multiple textual realities ranging from devotional myths to superstitious lore to cautionary tales about caste contamination; as well as the appropriation of identities such as that of Karna or Shivaji from generational and communal folklore replace the factual registers of official records. The Dalit autobiography has a public and polemical character; political texts often subsume sectarian, regionalist and casteist differences under the monolithic category of the ‘nationalized citizenry’. The designative signifier ‘citizen’ contains plurality and specificity of embodied minorities reducing them to abstractions. In its focus on Dalit bodies and sexual mores, the autobiography recovers the embodied and enfleshed ‘subjects’ behind incorporeal abstractions since subjecthood is dependent upon ‘Lived Bodies’.

The grandmaternal inheritance of storytelling encourages the child-narrator’s creativity and ambition to narrate other people’s stories, ‘Sanatamai then told the story of Rohidasmama’ (p. 27). Thus, within the male Dalit self-narrative, one can locate pre-existing narrative forms such as the grandmother’s folklore. In documenting this subaltern cultural topography, The Outcaste accomplishes a figurative unveiling and historical retrieval of excluded Dalit subjectivities. Limbale’s autobiography thus becomes an informal biography of a wide array of characters who stroll in and out of it. The residual traces of these motley characters and intra-diagetic narrators intersperse Sharan’s multi-voiced, heteroglossiac narrative, ‘Granny told us the story of seven brothers who had shared a single grain of sesame’ (p. 97), and so on. By beginning the autobiography with father-son stories, those of Sangya and his father as well as Harya and his father, the narrator (mis)leads the reader to expect a similar tale of filial kinship between Sharan and his father, only to undercut expectations.

Most interestingly, The Outcaste also becomes a counter-historiography of post-independent Indian society, offering an alternative and subversive re-narrativization of the historical making of post-independent nationhood through the lives of non-elite marginalized personages. Dada’s life(history) retrospectively unveils a historical moment in the political past of Hyderabad when Muslims were persecuted by Hindus and a Hindu nationalist mob attempted to liberate the state from the Nizam’s rule. In recuperating this moment from the personal testimonial of a Muslim kotwal in Hyderabad, Sharan also restores those heterogeneous, insurrectionary and non-mainstream moments of national history which have been cast off to the margins of mainstream historiography, ‘This story is set during the time when India became independent. The Hindus and Muslims were rioting. The army was deployed to liberate Hyderabad from the Nizam’s rule. Jagannanth Patil was then the village chief and Dada the village Kotwal’ (Limbale, 2008, p. 39).

The Ending as Non-Closure

Illegitimacy can often serve as a narrative pivot since Limbale’s search for biological origins can get reduplicated in the procedural mode of life narration as a quest for beginnings. But strangely, The Outcaste teasingly offers the reader an awareness about the incomprehensibility of origins. Limbale is conspicuously absent from the autobiography’s opening vignette, which introduces us instead to a legitimate father-son pair; Harya ‘schooled’ as an indentured labour in Girmallya’s farm and his father who turns Harya into a priced ‘asset’ within the caste-based hereditary labour economy. Thus, The Outcaste overturns structures of conventional originary narratives where the foundling explores his true inheritance. The indeterminate ending of the autobiography wilfully denies historical completion of Dalit subjecthood and Limbale wilfully withholds the transcoding of his bios into autos. Like Limbale’s biological heredity, the autobiography too is left staggered, schizoid and incomplete. Despite social restructuring projects, the last section of the autobiography shows a complete undoing of emancipatory projects as Sharan conceals his Dalit identity fearful of militant Hindu retaliation. Forced to conceal his true identity, he ironically becomes a true out-caste (outside of caste as well as without caste). Thus, Limbale’s autobiography ends not on a note of heroic self-transcendence of the Dalit hero.