Dalit History Month Reading List: Home

In this explosive memoir, translated by Nivedita Menon from Hindi, Bhanwar Meghwanshi tells us what it meant to be an untouchable in the RSS. And what it means to become Dalit.

In Bengal, waves of Dalit literature arrived a little before the 1970s. This anthology makes Bangla Dalit literature about their struggles and joys known.

An anthology of more than 100 different dalit poets and lyricists.

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Interrogating My Chandal Life talks about his traumatic life as a child in the refugee camps of West Bengal and Dandakaranya, facing persistent want--an experience that would dominate his life. The book charts his futile flight from home to escape hunger, in search of work as a teenager around the country, only to face further exploitation. In Kolkata in the 1970s, as a young man, he got caught up in the Naxalite movement and took part in gang warfare. His world changed dramatically when he was taught the alphabet in prison at the age of 24--it drew him into a new, enticing world of books. After prison, he worked as a rickshaw-wallah and one day the writer Mahasweta Devi happened to be his passenger. It was she who led him to his first publication.

In this volume, the author talks of his life in Kolkata after leaving the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha. He takes up the post of a cook at a school, which provides work, albeit gruelling. Part I, School Shenanigans, describes how he carried out his duties, while being treated contemptuously because he is a Dalit, and became more determined to forge a new identity as a writer. Part II, The Right to Write, reveals how his persistence gradually resulted in his works being published in little magazines and, later, by mainstream publishers and how his fame slowly spread with television interviews and prestigious awards.

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The contributors to this major intervention into Indian historiography trace the strategies through which Dalits have been marginalized as well as the ways Dalit intellectuals and leaders have shaped emancipatory politics in modern India. Moving beyond the anticolonialism/nationalism binary that dominates the study of India, the contributors assess the benefits of colonial modernity and place humiliation, dignity, and spatial exclusion at the center of Indian historiography.

The book seeks to examine Gandhi's understanding of the caste and varna system, and his evolving strategies to abolish it.

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Dalit Ecologies explores the ecological experiences, histories, and perspectives integrated within Dalit writing, art, and culture. Aligning with theories of environment justice and ecological struggles experienced by Black populations, the book delves into six major themes: caste, earth and earthly environment, labour, and mobility, casteization of technology and industry, climate justice, Dalit Bahujan Anthropocene, and eco-literary tradition.

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The performing arts in India have traditionally been the domain of Dalit communities. To this day, these men and women continue to nurture and foster their chosen art forms in the face of discrimination and prejudice. We consider ourselves to be connoisseurs of art and culture. Yet, we fail to recognize the very communities who have shaped this culture. The Museum of Broken Tea Cups, using the symbology of the used, broken tea cup that upper caste households leave outside their doors for the use of Dalit workers, is an effort to recognize the immense cultural contribution made by Dalit communities through the stories of individual artists who languish in the forgotten gallis and mohallas of our villages and towns.

Dalit American activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan puts forth a call to awaken and act, not just for readers in South Asia, but all around the world. She ties Dalit oppression to fights for liberation among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, femme, and Queer communities, examining caste from a feminist, abolitionist, and Dalit Buddhist perspective--and laying bare the grief, trauma, rage, and stolen futures enacted by Brahminical social structures on the caste-oppressed.

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Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity.

This work is a well-researched study of the last decades of the networks in the Global Justice Movement (GJM) and World Social Forums. It offers a novel perspective on the traditions of protest, ethics, organizational forms, and visions among activists than is usually presented in the literature on GJM, which largely focuses on Latin America, the United States of America, and Europe.

"This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale" is a novella about trying to write a novella about a tea-estate worker turned Naxalite named Ramayan Chamar, who gets arrested during a worker's strike and is beaten up and killed in custody. But every time the author attempts to write that story, reality intrudes in various forms to create a picture of a nation and society that is broken down and where systemic inequalities are perpetuated by the middle- and upper-classes which are either indifferent or actively malignant. "When Color Is a Warning Sign" goes even further in its experimentation, abandoning the barest pretense of narrative and composed entirely as a collage of vignettes and snippets of dialogue, reportage, autobiography, etc.

Akhila Naik's Bheda (2010) has the distinction of being the first Odiya Dalit novel. It is set in remote villages of the Kalahandi district in western Odisha mired in poverty, drought, famine, child trade, and malnutrition. The novel traces the lives of the educated members of the Dalit community, who become conscious of their plight and rise up in revolt. Threatened by the collective, the upper castes unite to take revenge on the Dalits and their leader Laltu. After gruesome violence is inflicted on the community, the movement comes to an abrupt end with the connivance of the state, the police, the media, and civil society at large.

The stories in the volume first appeared in Malayalam as Njarukal (2014) edited by M. R. Renekumar and published by Sahitya Pravarthaka Cooperative Society Ltd., Kottayam.

When Bhakkiyam falls in love with a Dalit sub-inspector, death is the only punishment that will satisfy her village panchayat. Pazhani, her father, is ordered to kill her. But how can a father murder his own daughter?

Saroja and Kumaresan are young and in love. After meeting in a small southern Indian town where Kumaresan works at a soda bottling shop, they quickly marry before returning to Kumaresan's family village, where they hope to build a happy life together. But they are harboring a terrible secret: Saroja is from a different caste than Kumaresan, and if the villagers find out, they will both be in grave danger.

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Seeking to escape captivity, Lakshmi the temple elephant sets out on a stirring journey toward freedom. On her way, she briefly experiences life as a film star and encounters a colorful cast including a three-legged dog named Tripod Dog Baba, other elephants in the Bandipur Forest, a chameleon facing an existential crisis, a moon who dances with an elephant, and a flying fish called Alphonse.

An epic tale that spans fifty years, four generations, and two continents. Perched out of sight in a tree beside the road, Malika, a communist resistance fighter, prepares to assassinate the new governor in a village in the recently independent India. As she prepares to shoot, she recognizes the man riding in the car and hesitates. The man is Rayappa, who Malika had first met five years earlier in the village of Korampally. Both were deemed "untouchables". Yet, Malika toiled as a servant in a landowner's household while Rayappa worked for a visiting anthropologist. Fifty years later, Rayappa, now living in Canada as Irwin Peter, receives a letter asking for information about Malika. When he decides to return to India with his family, he is forced to revisit Korampally's turbulent history -- and his own.

In Mulk Raj Anand's finest and most controversial novel he conveys precisely, with urgency and barely disguised fury, what it might feel like to be one of India's Untouchables. Bakha is a young man, a proud and even an attractive young man, but none the less he is an outcast in a system that is now only slowly changing and was then as cruel and debilitating as that of apartheid. Into this re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and latrine-cleaner, Anand poured a vitality, fire and richness of detail that have caused him to be acclaimed as his country's Charles Dickens as well as this century's greatest revealer of the 'other' India.

Set in modern India, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife. Based on the author's own experience of marriage, soon the newly-wed experiences extreme violence at her husband's hands and finds herself socially isolated. Intellectual and physical cruelty is explored. Yet hope keeps her alive. Writing becomes her salvation, a supreme act of defiance and, as the subtitle suggests, the novel is also about the act of writing itself and the way that fiction and stories can help you escape.

Who can you love? What do you owe to love and what to the world at large? Such are the questions that drive the story of Ramu, a Brahmin man, and Ponni, a woman of the Dalit "untouchable" caste. Set against the backdrop of twentieth-century South India, the novel takes readers from the 1890s village where Ramu's grandmother grew up to the Emergency years of 1970s Madras.