Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature

By Laura R. Brueck

Writing Resistance is the first close study of the growing body of contemporary Hindi-language Dalit (low caste) literature in India. The Dalit literary movement has had an immense sociopolitical and literary impact on various Indian linguistic regions, yet few scholars have attempted to situate the form within contemporary critical frameworks. Laura R. Brueck's approach goes beyond recognizing and celebrating the subaltern speaking, emphasizing the sociopolitical perspectives and literary strategies of a range of contemporary Dalit writers working in Hindi.

Brueck explores several essential questions: what makes Dalit literature Dalit? What makes it good? Why is this genre important, and where does it oppose or intersect with other bodies of Indian literature? She follows the debate among Dalit writers as they establish a specifically Dalit literary critical approach, underscoring the significance of the Dalit literary sphere as a "counterpublic" generating contemporary Dalit social and political identities. Brueck then performs close readings of contemporary Hindi Dalit literary prose narratives, focusing on the aesthetic and stylistic strategies deployed by writers whose class, gender, and geographic backgrounds shape their distinct voices. By reading Dalit literature as literature, this study unravels the complexities of its sociopolitical and identity-based origins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9780231537568

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WRITING RESISTANCE

SOUTH ASIA ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

SOUTH ASIA ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

EDITED BY MUZAFFAR ALAM, ROBERT GOLDMAN, AND GAURI VISWANATHAN

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY, SHELDON POLLOCK, AND SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM, FOUNDING EDITORS

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press

For a list of books in the series, Series List.

WRITING RESISTANCE

THE RHETORICAL IMAGINATION OF HINDI DALIT LITERATURE

Laura R. Brueck

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS    NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-16605-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brueck, Laura.

Writing resistance : the rhetorical imagination of Hindi Dalit literature / Laura R. Brueck.

pages cm — (South Asia across the disciplines)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16604-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16605-8 (electronic)

1. Hindi literature—Dalit authors—History and criticism. 2. Hindi literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Dalits in literature. 4. Politics in literature. I. Title.

PK2038.B79 2014

891.4’309920694—dc23

2013028937

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

COVER DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

COVER ART: Bharti Dayal

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

FOR M., H., AND L.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A Note on Transliteration

Introduction

⁅ 1 ⁆ MAPPING THE HINDI DALIT LITERARY SPHERE

1. The Hindi Dalit Counterpublic

2. The Problem of Premchand

3. Hindi Dalit Literary Criticism

⁅ 2 ⁆ READING HINDI DALIT LITERATURE

4. Good Dalits and Bad Brahmins

5. Dialect and Dialogue in the Margins

6. Alienation and Loss in the Dalit Experience of Modernity

7. Re-scripting Rape

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IWAS AN undergraduate at Smith College when I read Dalit literature for the first time. As I sat in an introductory Indian cultures course on my bucolic college campus, my world was rocked by the explosive poems of Namdeo Dhasal, at that time among the very few examples of modern Dalit writing in any Indian language to be translated into English. I have never forgotten the way his words moved me and destabilized my previously received versions of India.

A couple of years later, in pursuit of my MA in Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Texas, I reached back to this formative moment in my education about the power of literary narrative to change the world, and I sought to uncover such voices in Hindi. That decision has led to more than a dozen years of research, fieldwork, reading, translating, writing, and presenting in the area of Hindi Dalit literature, years that have been the most fulfilling and exciting of my life. I have to thank first and foremost the incredible faculty in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin whose members inspired and shaped not only this project but also my entire approach to and appreciation for Indian literature. This list includes Patrick Olivelle, Edeltraud Harzer, Cynthia Talbot, Joel Brereton, Gail Minault, Herman Van Olphen, and Syed Akbar Hyder. Carla Petievich was not officially a faculty member of UT during my time there, but she was then and continues to be now an important mentor and friend. Martha Selby expertly guided me through my MA and PhD and remains a role model for her sharply intellectual as well as deeply emotive engagement with literature. Though Rupert Snell arrived at UT only after I left, in the years since he has quickly grown into the role of close friend, fount of knowledge regarding all things Hindi, and trusted critic upon whose support I have often depended. Kathryn Hansen, my PhD advisor, remains as steadfast a champion, critic, and trusted friend as anyone could ask for. For this book, and all of my work past and future, I owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude.

My years as a student at UT were also among my most exhilarating thanks to my wonderful crop of friends and colleagues, including Eric Beverley, Mark McClish, Karline McLain, Steven Lindquist, Lisa Owen, Kristen Rudisill, Neil Dalal, Jarrod Whitaker, Robert Goodding, Shannon Finch, Rais Rehman, Michael Bednar, and Julie Hughes. Other friends—Laura Crimaldi, Samantha Rukert, Elizabeth Brusie, Amy Ware, Michael Shea, Alfredo Garcia, Carey Cortese, Nicole Whitaker, Jonathan Lyons, and Justin Marx—also made those years memorable. Gardner Harris’s good humor and dear friendship sustained my soul through years of both intense Sanskrit study and equally intense unwinding, and my entire Texas experience is perhaps more deeply shaped by him than anyone else.

I also gratefully acknowledge the support of several institutions and funding organizations that made this project possible. First, the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship supported me through four years of graduate coursework and two summers in India studying Hindi. My time at The American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Hindi Language Institute, then in Udaipur, was particularly helpful not only in teaching Hindi but also in offering me a space to hone my project ideas. A Fulbright Fellowship in 2004–2005 allowed for the bulk of my field research to be accomplished, and a University of Texas Continuing Fellowship allowed me the space to write my dissertation. Subsequent summer and winter research trips to India funded by Hamilton College and the University of Colorado allowed for me to grow this project, keep my information current, and to strengthen my relationships with authors and friends in India.

After I left UT, I was extraordinarily lucky to be granted a Freeman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian Studies at Hamilton College and spent two very happy years both honing my teaching skills in the Department of Comparative Literature and beginning the process of transforming my dissertation manuscript into this book. Peter and Nancy Rabinowitz were tremendously supportive to me throughout this time, and I was buoyed by stimulating colleagues in the field of South Asia, particularly Lisa Trivedi and Chaise LaDousa. Other colleagues too provided sustaining friendship and encouragement, including Hye Seung Chung, Emily Rohrbach, and Andy Lewis.

In my years at the University of Colorado, the place where this project truly matured, I was extraordinarily lucky to be supported and challenged by a host of tremendous friends and colleagues. In particular, Deepti Misri, Haytham Bahoora, and Laurialan Reitzammer made Boulder and CU a very happy home. I also benefitted tremendously from the friendship and engaging intellectualism of my South Asia colleagues, including Loriliai Biernacki, Mithi Mukherjee, Dennis McGilvray, Kira Hall, and Peter Knapczyk. I owe a similar debt of gratitude to my colleagues and friends in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, in particular Janice Brown, Matthias and Antje Richter, Keller Kimbrough, Andrew Stuckey, Satoko Shimazaki, and Suyoung Son. As this book enters its final stages, I have enthusiastically joined the newly created Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. I particularly want to thank Rajeev Kinra, Laura Hein, and Paola Zamperini for their warm welcome and support of this work.

Other colleagues and friends across the country have stimulated my thinking and provided friendship and intellectual and emotional substance for years. Over time spent together in the plains of Iowa and the mountains of Colorado, Philip Lutgendorf has been an important mentor and friend. I’d also like to thank Christi Merrill, Toral Gajarawala, Ramnarayan Rawat, Beth Rohlman, John Nemec, Bali Sahota, Neil Doshi, and Pavitra Sundar. Their contributions to the field continuously inspire me to better my own, and I cherish our too-infrequent chances to commune.

Friends and supporters in India are all too numerous to mention here, but it is safe to say none of this would ever have been possible, or nearly as enjoyable, without all of them. In particular, Ramnika Gupta has generously provided me with a second home in New Delhi, regularly welcoming not only me, but also my family and friends, into her home. And her life and work continue to provide me with inspiration and insight into the importance of literature as a vehicle for liberation. Anita Bharti has always served as my most trusted source of information and a balanced perspective on the dynamic world of writers, activists, and publishers that make up the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, and in the meantime she and her family—Rajiv, Pavel, and Shantum—have grown into dear friends. Kusum Meghwal’s generous gifts of time, encouragement, and material paved the way for the beginning of this project, and Ajay Navaria’s constant friendship and stimulating literary work developed into a lodestar around which my own thinking about the originality and innovations of Hindi Dalit writing coalesced. I owe his family too—Neeta, Kanishk, and Jasmine—a huge thank you for their regular contributions to my happy homecomings in Delhi. S. Anand and his fantastic publishing house Navayana have offered me important opportunities to expand this project in new and exciting directions. Along the way, Omprakash Valmiki, Mohandas Naimishray, Surajpal Chauhan, Rajni Tilak, Sudesh Tanwar, Suraj Badtiya, Tej Singh, Jaiprakash Kardam, Sohanpal Sumanakshar, Susheela Thakbhaure, and so many others have given me everything they could—advice, direction, and materials out of their own personal libraries. I could not have done any of this without them.

I must also thank my two families here at home for supporting me throughout. My mother and father—Cynthia and Steven Brueck—have, in so many ways, made everything I’ve ever done possible. So too have Ann and Shelton Stromquist, who have opened their home and their lives to support me in ways I still find stunning. My siblings and all of our growing families: Jeff and Rebecca Brueck, Greg Brueck and Barbara Yien, Chris Stromquist and Mariana Lee, and the dearly missed Elizabeth Stromquist have punctuated these years with the joys of family.

Finally, by my side for this entire journey—from the moment we met in our introductory Hindi class in graduate school, to our seemingly endless hours of reading, studying, and writing together, to our travels together across the subcontinent and the world, to our many moves and time spent apart in the service of our dual careers, to our shared grief at the loss of loved ones and our shared joy at the arrival of new members of our family—has been my indefatigably supportive and constant companion, my husband Matt Stromquist. This book is for him, and for our two sons, Hugo and Lyle. Every day all three of these men (big and little) selflessly provide me with inspiration, wisdom, and balance—and always put it all in perspective.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

IN TRANSLITERATING words from Hindi in the book, I have generally followed common diacritical conventions. Exceptions to this are place names, caste names, and personal names; for all of these I have retained their popular spellings in Roman letters without diacritics. Generally, prose passages quoted from Hindi language literary and critical texts are not accompanied by the transliterated passage, except in chapter 5 where my analysis is specifically focused on the Hindi itself.

INTRODUCTION

ON JULY 31, 2004, members of the Bharatiya Dalit Sahitya Akademi (Indian Dalit Literary Academy, BDSA) publicly burned multiple copies of iconic nationalist-era Hindi author Munshi Premchand’s celebrated novel Rangbhūmi (1924).¹ The raucous crowd of nearly one hundred people gathered together in New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar park shouted, cheered, and snapped grinning photos of one another as a small pile of copies of Raṅgbhūmi went up in flames. They saw themselves as a righteous group making a powerful case for the need to fight upper-caste (savarṇ) prejudice in literature and education.² The provocation for the BDSA to burn Rangbhūmi, they said, came from a recent decision by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to replace Premchand’s novel Nirmalā with Raṅgbhūmi on the syllabus of twelfth-standard students in Delhi government schools.³ According to the BDSA and their supporters at the book burning, Raṅgbhūmi is offensive to Dalits and dangerous to the soft minds of young students, who may become biased against Dalits because of the novel’s constant repetition of caste-specific terminology, specifically the repetitive naming of the main character of the novel, Surdas, as Surdas Chamar. According to BDSA president Sohanpal Sumanakshar, the BDSA first petitioned NCERT to drop the book from the syllabus, or at least to delete the word Chamar from copies of the novel distributed to students.⁴ Then they lodged a case with the Delhi High Court arguing that the novel violated the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, passed in 1989, that is meant to protect Dalits from violence and public shaming on the basis of their caste.⁵ According to Sumanakshar, a lack of response to both of these pleas resulted in the book-burning protest.

The burning of Raṅgbhūmi should be seen as more than a zealous, reactionary response to a lack of administrative attention to the BDSA’s campaign to have the book replaced on a school syllabus, or a minor dispute over the use of a single word taken to extremes. Rather, what I refer to as the "Raṅgbhūmi incident" has a much deeper significance when seen in the context of an ongoing debate among Dalit writers and critics over whether or not Premchand’s literature can be considered Dalit literature, or whether non-Dalit writers can ever genuinely represent the lives and experiences of Dalits.⁶ It brings to the fore the fundamental dilemma of applying standards of authenticity to Dalit identity and experience as well as contested standards of legitimacy for literary representations of a Dalit perspective. It also treads an uncomfortable line between a justifiable demand for the inclusion of Dalit literary voices in a government-sanctioned curriculum and a crude recourse to the very same kind of censorship that has silenced those very Dalit voices for so long. Such a determined and violent banishment of Premchand, long celebrated as a pioneer in the realist representation of Dalits and caste-based injustice in Hindi-Urdu and, more broadly, Indian writing, demands a closer look at the political and social character of the contemporary Hindi Dalit literary sphere. Where are its boundaries? Who is included, and who is excluded? Who has the authority to make these decisions, and how are they contested? How do the social categories of gender and class interact with caste in negotiating these boundaries? These are all questions this book addresses.

What is perhaps most fascinating about the Raṅgbhūmi incident are the strong reactions and condemnations it has garnered from other Dalit writers, publishers, editors, and critics, as well as the vigorous literary debate it has engendered within the alternative discursive space of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, debate which is taken up in more detail in chapter 2. Important to consider as well is the impact of the discussions, debates, and performances of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere in more mainstream Hindi literary and political spheres. The performative act of burning Raṅgbhūmi provides a clear example of this intersection. On January 29, 2006, the Indian newspaper The Statesman ran an article whose headline read, NCERT plays it safe with Premchand prose. Almost a year and a half after the book burning, it appeared that the BDSA’s protest was successful:

New Delhi, Jan. 28. The National Council of Education and Research Training has decided to purge its textbooks of derogatory references to Dalits. The educational body has decided to remove the word Chamar from Hindi textbooks of class IX and XI. The controversial word used in Premchand’s Rangbhūmi has been replaced by the less offensive Dalit. The NCERT has also decided to incorporate chapters from famous Dalit writers in school textbooks. However, interestingly the word Chamar has not been replaced in their writings as has been done in Premchand’s works. In Omprakash Valmiki’s Khanabadhosh, for instance, a footnote has been provided stating that the word is constitutionally banned and should not be practised in social behaviour. Speaking to The Statesman, NCERT’s head of languages department, Professor Ramjanam Sharma, said the council has made a great effort to incorporate Dalit literature in the syllabus without raking any controversy. ‘We have edited a lot in the writings after witnessing hue and cry over the word Chamar in Raṅgbhūmi. We have edited out the word except in the opening sentence,’ he added. Elaborating on the need to promote Dalit writers in the syllabus of Classes IX and XI, Professor Sharma said efforts are being made to sensitise students towards the marginalised status of backward communities. He said these writers feel only they can truly understand the trauma of belonging to a backward community in a Brahmanical society. Commenting on the editing of these texts, Professor Sharma categorically stated that the use of the word Dalit was not approved by academicians, but they could not shy away from the social reality.⁷

I present this as an example of the influence the protest action of the BDSA ultimately wielded at the state level, but there is another aspect also worth pointing out. Although the word Chamar was largely edited out of Premchand’s novel, the author points out that this and other Dalit jāti, or caste, terminology is used liberally by Dalit writers, and that in those versions of their writings distributed to students, the terms are footnoted but not removed. This distinction of what kind of author is allowed to authentically use caste-specific terminology, that is, the author who embodies a Dalit identity, suggests that the state itself, in this case represented by NCERT, reifies the divide between authentic and inauthentic literary Dalit perspectives. The fraught politics of authorship and authentic representation will be revisited throughout this work.

In the wake of the Raṅgbhūmi incident and the evident achievement of its aims, I assert that the burning of the novel and the discussions about identity and authenticity it has engendered in the Hindi Dalit literary sphere should be given significant attention as a cultural performance, one which can provide insight into the ways in which this alternative public sphere engages, opposes, and redefines the limits of traditionally elite Hindi literary discourse.⁸ The incident stands therefore as an attempt, albeit a clumsy one, by Dalits to negotiate with a symbol of a discursive sphere that has always either spoken for them or ignored them completely. The public burning of Raṅgbhūmi in India’s capital city, pointedly enacted on Premchand’s 125th birth anniversary, was an attack by the BDSA on one of India’s most beloved and revered literary heroes. For the BDSA to take on the monumental figure of Premchand in such public, incendiary fashion testifies to the fact that their sense of self-definition and purpose has been constructed at variance with the normative North Indian public imagination.

A towering icon in the modern Hindi literary mainstream, Premchand has also come to inhabit special, and more contested, terrain in the Hindi Dalit literary sphere in subsequent years. A close analysis of the debates that have grown out of this radical symbolic act, considered in detail later in this work, allows us to understand the nature of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere. I assert that these debates raise important questions about the politics of collective identity formation among marginalized communities.

Throughout part I of this book, Mapping the Hindi Dalit Literary Sphere, I argue that the theoretical positioning of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere as a counterpublic can help to contextualize the communicative space in which the debates over Premchand and others have been performed in the last several years. Nancy Fraser has defined counterpublics as parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.⁹ Thus, I think it is misleading to characterize all of Dalit writing—be it poetry, fiction, autobiography, criticism, or journalism—as occupying a singular oppositional idiom. Rather, it is far more accurate and productive to consider the Hindi Dalit literary sphere to be a space for the exchange of different discourses that are all relevant to the contemporary Dalit experience in Indian society. The Hindi Dalit literary sphere is constituted by the existence of discussion about Dalit experiences, aesthetics, politics, consciousness, and authenticity. It is a space for discussion that is unlike more dominant public spheres for the very reason that it privileges above all others the voices of Dalits and entertains topics and issues that are often ignored in more mainstream discursive spaces.

I do not read the BDSA’s actions as a singular incident of angry protest, but rather as a cultural performance in the context of an ongoing debate within the Hindi Dalit counterpublic over the meaning of an iconic Hindi writer and the ramifications for Dalit writers in accepting or rejecting his works as Dalit literature. The interventions of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere in the analysis of mainstream literature are key to constituting that sphere as a provocative and powerful counterpublic. Thus, by choosing the potent and beloved cultural symbol of Premchand around whom to debate issues of inclusion and exclusion and authority and identity, Dalit writers are defining the parameters of the Dalit counterpublic sphere. Key issues that arise in the renewed debate over the significance of the BDSA’s action that erupted in the Hindi Dalit counterpublic after the book burning include the charge that Premchand’s literature lacks realism, that he privileges class over caste in his social critique (a perspective at odds with Ambedkarite politics), and finally that as a non-Dalit and a follower of Gandhi he is incapable of Dalit authorial authenticity.¹⁰ As the first chapters of this book will attest, in between the printed lines of debate and polemic, in the shadows of reasoned discussion, personal attacks, and sometimes outlandish claims, lies the negotiation of the boundaries of the Hindi Dalit counterpublic, as well as answers to questions of inclusion and exclusion that are fundamental to its construction.

THE MEANING OF DALIT LITERATURE

Over the last several years, scholarly attention to the subject of Dalit literature in India has increased almost as dramatically as the recent surge in the publication and translation of Dalit literature across India. The first significant example of Dalit writing in English translation appeared in Orient Longman’s anthology of the literature of the Dalit Panthers, Poisoned Bread (Dangle 1992), and although for almost a decade afterwards there was no significant publication of Dalit literary texts outside of India, save for the career work of scholars such as Eleanor Zelliot and Gail Omvedt, the dearth of wide access to Dalit texts and scholarly attention paid to them has recently turned around. A long period without English translation and sustained media and academic consideration of Dalit texts both literary and critical, as well as the nature of linguistic divides both inside and outside of India, have tended to restrict Dalit literatures in their various languages to a local audience. New English translations of Dalit literature now abound, however, thanks to a surge in interest by academic publishing houses in India and abroad as well as the rise of specialty publishing houses such as Navayana, based in Delhi.¹¹

Recent scholarship in the expansive new field of Dalit studies has also made important contributions to our understanding of the role of Dalit activism and public culture in modern Indian history and contemporary society. Yet there remain significant gaps that this book will help to fill. For example, Anupama Rao’s The Caste Question (2009) considers the politicization of Dalit identity, specifically how the transformation of the stigma of untouchability into a vibrantly contested political category has shaped the modern political history of Indian democracy. Although her study takes up fundamental questions of the construction of a Dalit public sphere, it is limited to the specific history of Maharashtra and further ignores literature entirely. Writing Resistance will allow for an important diversification of this and other such studies on the Dalit public sphere that privilege Western India by focusing analysis instead on works that circulate in the Hindi belt.¹² Even more importantly, I place literature at the center of my exploration of a contemporary North Indian Dalit public sphere, demonstrating that this is a critically important site for understanding modern and contemporary Dalit identity construction.

The overwhelming majority of Dalit narratives that have been translated to English are autobiographies or life narratives.¹³ Similarly, much of the recent scholarship that has dealt with Dalit-authored narratives has privileged the genre of autobiography. Sharmila Rege’s Writing Caste/Writing Gender (2006) suggests that the sociological and activist import of Dalit testimonio lies in the fact that the intention is not one of literariness but of communicating the situation of a group’s oppression, imprisonment and struggle (13). This is of course true, and there remains much to be explored in the genre of Dalit autobiography, but for both scholarship and the publishing industry to excessively favor autobiographical narratives over the rich body of fiction (short and long) and poetry that comprises the corpus of Dalit literature is to understand the impact of literary expression on the construction of Dalit identity and consciousness from a particularly narrow perspective. This study proposes instead to illuminate those texts whose very intention is literariness and examine how various literary styles and strategies are employed for creating consciousness.

Despite an ever-growing availability of Dalit literature and criticism in original languages and in translation, there has been scant attention paid to the ways in which Dalit writers consciously stylize their narrative form to construct social and political meaning. Indeed, from many corners comes an outright denunciation of the close critical analysis of Dalit narratives, regarding such narratives instead as authentic, and thus somehow quite literally untouchable documents of subaltern experience. For the most part, existing scholarly commentary on Dalit literature shows a staggering lack of attention to original language sources; others are content to translate mostly autobiographical texts to English and then comment cautiously on their thematic content, ignoring the formal structural and linguistic elements of these and other fictional and poetic genres.

The treatment of Dalit narratives as unmediated documents of authentic experience can be seen most clearly in the