In their 1973 Dalit Panther Manifesto, the Dalit Panthers famously defined the meaning of Dalit: ‘Who is a dalit? Members of scheduled castes and tribes, Neo-Buddhists, the working people, the landless and poor peasants, women and all those who are being exploited politically, economically, and in the name of religion’ (in Murugkar 1991: 237).

Similarly, ‘Dalit literature’ has been equated with texts produced by writers with a ‘Dalit consciousness’ (Muktibodh 1992: 267). What, then, determines this Dalit consciousness? How do you develop it? Is it different from simply being Dalit, i.e., can non-Dalits have Dalit consciousness? Are there Dalits who do not have it, and why not? Finally, how do we judge the authenticity of it, either its experience or its expression?

Limbale goes so far as to suggest that the character of Dalit consciousness is univocal. He writes, ‘The experiences narrated in Dalit literature are very similar. Untouchables’ experiences of untouchability are identical’ (2004: 35). This is precisely challenged by Navaria, who separates groups and classes within Dalits. He emphasises ‘Worlds within Worlds’. The key concept, as Brueck (353) points out, around which most Dalit authors and critics—Limbale, Valmiki, Naimishray—rally is the idea of ‘Dalit consciousness’. There is a sense in their work of a singular ‘consciousness’ that for them underlies the emergence of Dalit literature. Further, it is a gauge to test the authenticity of any given work. ‘The function of the theoretical concept of Dalit consciousness is articulated in the expressive and interpretive practices of writing and reading. Dalit consciousness has emerged in recent years in a large body of Dalit literary criticism as a theoretical tool with which the architects of Dalit literary culture are able to set boundaries for the growing genre of Dalit literature as well as launch a distinctly Dalit critique of celebrated works of Hindi literature’ (Brueck 353).

In many ways, Navaria echoes mainstream Dalit consciousness. He shows Premchand in a dream sequence, and refers to him in other places in a critical vein, similar to other Dalit critics. He speaks repeatedly about Ambedkar as the beacon light for Dalits from whom they derive, or should derive, their primary energy. However, in the same dream sequence, he shows many sleeping homes who do not respond to a call to rise in the name of Ambedkar. His constant comparisons with gender and feminism, class conflict and Marxism, and global inequality and postcolonial thought, all serve to argue further the point about internal differentiation, and the utter and total lack of any unity of consciousness.

Navaria must have worried about this:

…arbiters of Dalit literature are constructing a critical framework based on the rhetorical practice of strategic essentialism. Dalit consciousness is the Dalit literary sphere’s rendering of this practice for the political purpose of making an intervention into the mainstream literary-cultural sphere and claiming there a small space of their own in which they have the power to determine, by means of this essentialist concept, what authors and what texts may also share that space. (Brueck 355).

Brueck’s invocation of Gayatri Spivak’s 1985 piece on strategic essentialism is reminiscent of Marx’s emphasis on the singularity of the working class, which many subsequent Marxists challenged. Similarly for feminists, there is always a negotiation between the politically expedient one-ness of women, and by implication, men, and the existential and artistic reality of plurality, easily recoverable in research (see Kumar 1994, 2001.)

My own experience as a translator of this novel may contribute to the discussion of Dalit consciousness. If I am not a Dalit, should I feel diffident as a writer in translating and speaking for Dalit consciousness? I have never hesitated to write about the West (though from the East), about men (though a woman), about lower classes (though privileged), and about disabled or otherwise disadvantaged people while personally sharing none of their disadvantage.

Partly, I have treated ‘difference metaphorically. Thus, for me, the ‘wretched of the earth’ are not only the materially or politically dispossessed, which I am not, but the otherwise victimised as well, such as those who suddenly, unaccountably, lose their beloved, as I did. We, all the hurt and abandoned who experience that loss, are the true and authentic ‘wretched of the earth’. Partly, I have achieved an intellectual self-confidence where I can justify speaking for the ‘Other’ precisely because no one is essentially fixed in ‘one’ identity or category, either ‘the self ’ or ‘the other’. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover myself responsible for a novel in which all the characters are Dalit and everyone is judged by their caste, and no savarna voice can speak for lower castes or Dalits.

Really?

But if I plead the case that mine is as authentic a voice as anyone’s, am I saying that the author Ajay Navaria has not succeeded in depicting the existential suffering of Dalits but, once again, shown caste to be merely a discourse, a category, a weapon used differentially?

To some extent, yes. The author, just like the narratorprotagonist in the novel, is himself privileged. Not only is the narrator-protagonist educated, well-off and sophisticated in his consciousness, he is fair and good-looking. He has rich and successful friends. A Dalit is by definition downtrodden. Once you are not downtrodden, you are not a Dalit. It is analogous to my weeping of the woes of ‘women’ without acknowledging that, along with me, many women are, in fact, supremely privileged and powerful. And if the privileged insider can speak of their downtrodden communities, so can the intelligent, aware outsider who is not of the same blood lineage but shares the politics.

The author questions it all. One could wish that he would question yet more, or less, depending on one’s perspective.

There is, however, another dimension of pain. ‘I had not asked his caste,’ he says. ‘I had understood by now that people with my non-casteist thinking were in a tiny minority in our society.’ There is this tiny group that one may belong to. One may then feel marginalized and misunderstood by the majoritarian groups. To have no voice is painful no matter where you stand.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Worlds Within Worlds, Ajay Navaria, translated by Nita Kumar, Niyogi Books, 2024.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.