Exploring the Margins: Caste, Class and Gender Identity

This book is an attempt to critically examine Dalit literature which as a distinctive form of writing not only mirrors the harsh realities of Dalit lives but also depicts their social, political, economic, cultural and geographical locations. The book surveys the nature and the scope of Dalit literature, traces its roots and illustrates authentically its evolution and significance in the present milieu. The conventionally muffled and marginalised Dalits use literature to voice their distress, indignation, and to register their collective resistance against discriminatory and dominant socio-economic and political forces. They reject the received literary conventions and aesthetic considerations and devote literature to waken, and mobilise suppressed Dalits. The issues such as caste-based violence, Dalitisation of poverty and Dalit women’s specific suffering come to frequent discussion and condemnation in the book. It brings out the Dalit strategies to liberate themselves, to smash discriminatory institutions and to initiate an egalitarian system in which all human beings may be treated as equal regardless of their caste, class, gender and religion.