Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives

Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds attempts to come to terms with the presence of caste in late modern India by asking two questions: How do we read caste today? Why is it no longer enough to brand caste as pre-modern and backward? The author argues that caste is less an essence responsible for India’s “backwardness” as an assemblage of a variety of secular and non-secular practices and affects that generate everyday life in India, while being in a constant state of flux—something that cannot be completely contained in a narrative of nation-building, modernization and development. In order to illustrate the importance of reading caste in this light, she turns her archival and analytical focus on both caste Hindu and dalit literary, mythographic and religious texts. The attempt is not to endorse either the caste-system or casteism, but to resist the reified ways in which caste continues to figure in social, scientific and nation-building discources.

Ganguly is in this work admirably cosmopolitan: she is at ease with different intellectual cultures, moving in sophisticated ways between the differect perspectives of social science, Historiography, Subaltern studies, theorists of the aesthetic, poststructuralism, postcolonialism. This is a very learned work, familiar with many fields, interdisciplinary in relaxed attentive ways.

- John Docker, Australian National University


Debjani Ganguly has chosen an intellectually ambitious project, one that demands both archival and interpretational skills. Her attention to caste as a social sign—text, narrative, discourse—stems from a desire, evidenced everywhere in her book to provide a language for the description of caste identifications and behaviours as part of the dalit `everyday’. This is an important move.

Homi K Bhabha, Anne F Rothenberg Professor of English and Americal Literature, Harvard University

Dalit Visions

Dalit Visions explores and critiques the sensibility which equates Indian tradition with Hinduism, and Hinduism with Brahmanism; which considers the Vedas as the foundational texts of Indian culture and discovers within the Aryan heritage the essence of Indian civilisation. It shows that even secular minds remain imprisoned within this Brahmanical vision, and the language of secular discourse is often steeped in a Hindu ethos. The tract looks at alternative traditions, nurtured within dalit movements, which have questioned this way of looking at Indian society and its history. While seeking to understand the varied dalit visions that have sought to alter the terms of the dominant order, this tract persuades us to reconsider our ideas, listen to those voices which we often refuse to hear and understand the visions which seek to change the world in which dalits live.

Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies and Considerations

This book is the first critical work by an eminent Dalit writer to appear in English, it is a provocative and thoughtful account of the debates among Dalit writers on how Dalit literature should be read.

Viramma: Life of a Dalit

This is the first Indian edition of this remarkable book which created a great impact in France and was subsequently translated into English and Italian. This edition carries a fresh Afterword by Jean-Luc and Josiane Racine.

Viramma, an untouchable woman by birth, and listed as one of the authors, narrated the story of her life over a period of ten years to Josiane Racine, a Tamil-born ethnomusicologist educated in France. This book is the result of that conversation.

A Corpse in the Well: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Autobiographies

The dalit autobiography is a literary form marked by a great quantity of writing equally matched by its quality. The autobiographies in this first English collection depict varying facets of dalit life: the struggle for survival; the man-woman relationship; an existence crushed under the wheels of village life; the experiencing of humiliation and atrocities—at times, abject submission, at other times, rebellion.

Homeless in my Land: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Short Stories

The short stories in this first English anthology forcefully convey the “differentness” of dalit literature. The protagonists of these stories are shown struggling for survival at their different levels – confronting limitations, abject poverty, misery and brutality – and fighting a brave battle.

No Entry for the New Sun: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Poetry

The poets, presented here in English translation, are nearly all of the most prominent figures in Marathi dalit poetry. Their impassioned cry against subjugation, humiliation and atrocities, and their intoxicated singing of the dawn of a new life, are what this first English anthology of dalit poetry is about.

Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature

Silenced for centuries by caste prejudice and social oppression, the Dalits of Maharashtra (formerly called ‘untouchables’) have only in the last forty years found a powerful voice in Marathi literature. The revolutionary social movement launched by their leader Dr Ambedkar was paralleled by a wave of writing that exploded in poetry, prose, fiction and autobiography of a raw vigour, maturity, depth and richness of content, and shocking in its exposition of the bitterness of their experiences. One is jolted, too, by the quality of writing by a group denied access for long ages to any literary tradition. This important collection is the first anthology of Dalit literature. The writers more than eighty of them—presented here in English translations, are nearly all of the most prominent figures in Marathi Dalit literature, who have contributed to this unique phenomenon.