Subalternities in India and Latin America: Dalit Autobiographies and the Testimonio 9780367360979, 9780367360986, 9780429343797

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This book presents an interesting comparative analysis  – broad and nuanced  – between the already canonised Latin American testimonio and the autobiographical narratives of the Dalits, which, by overcoming the egocentricity of traditional autobiographical writing, are closer to testimonio as a literary genre, and record of historical memory and political involvement. In addition to similar experiences of exclusion, the chapters in the book highlight the differences: caste, diversity of languages, lack of recognition by the academia, poor dissemination. The volume creates bridges between both subaltern cultures, their narratives and imaginaries and their particular political activism, without simplistic homologations. The testimonial narrative has not disappeared, since the roots of exclusion remain; it has simply been transformed. Therein lies the importance of this book. It will be of immense interest to students of comparative literature, world literature, Latin American studies and South Asian studies. –Lucrecia Méndez de Penedo, member of the Guatemalan Academy of Language and professor and researcher of Latin American literature, Rafael Landívar University, Guatemala This edited volume offers a much-needed scholarly account of the aesthetics and the politics of subaltern life in India and Latin America. It, through a comparative canvass, opens up the possibility of an epistemology of the Global South. The cross-cultural context through which the volume proceeds  acquires an emancipatory thrust and suggests the need to address the question of caste and race/ethnicity as the precondition for the realisation of a democratic social order. –Gopal Guru, editor of Economic & Political Weekly and professor of social and political theory, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India This carefully composed collective volume builds an impressive literary bridge of solidarity in the Global South by linking the autobiographical genre of the Latin American testimonio with the life writings of the Indian Dalits – two important literary currents that convey the political and social resistance of subaltern individuals and their communities in an intensely personal and powerful way. Both currents are thoroughly explored in this book through their literary and intentional affinities and the manifold historical interconnections of mutual readings, translations, academic fields and theoretical findings. The examination of similar and different factors of intersectional discrimination, such as caste, enhances the awareness of the structural comparability of these writings and the urgency of mutual reflection. I  am convinced that these interwoven South–South views, which engage in a fruitful exchange in this highly committed book, contribute to the urgently needed changes of perspectives in academic and epistemological terms. Susanne Klengel, professor of Latin American literatures and cultures, Institute of Latin American Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany

This important book speaks to the challenging effort to speak across languages and continents to common issues in the Global South. It focuses on the powerful expression of marginalised peoples, whose self-writing is also a form of resistance to official invisibilisation. Along the way, the book makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing discussion in both Dalit and testimonio studies, where putting the two together illuminates each in new and exciting ways. The editor is to be commended for her work in bringing together an impressive group of scholars whose knowledge of many of the vernaculars reminds us that this kind of work too often languishes for lack of translation, and hence, lack of substantive analysis. Debra A. Castillo, past president, Latin American Studies Association; Emerson Hinchliff professor of Hispanic studies, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University, USA

SUBALTERNITIES IN INDIA AND LATIN AMERICA

This volume presents a comparative exploration of Dalit autobiographical writing from India and of Latin American testimonio as subaltern voices from two regions of the Global South. Offering frames for linking global subalternity today, the  chapters address Siddalingaiah’s Ooru Keri; Muli’s Life History; Manoranjan Byapari and Manju Bala’s narratives; and Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit; among others, alongside foundational texts of the testimonio genre. While embedded in their specific experiences, the shared history of oppression and resistance on the basis of race/ethnicity and caste from where these subaltern life histories arise constitutes an alternative epistemological locus. The chapters point to the inadequacy of reading them within existing critical frameworks in autobiography studies. A fascinating set of studies juxtaposing the two genres, the book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of Dalit studies, subaltern studies, testimonio and autobiography, cultural studies, world literature, comparative literature, history, political sociology and social anthropology, arts and aesthetics, Latin American studies, and Global South studies. Sonya Surabhi Gupta is a professor of Latin American studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.

SUBALTERNITIES IN INDIA AND LATIN AMERICA Dalit Autobiographies and the Testimonio

Edited by Sonya Surabhi Gupta

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Sonya Surabhi Gupta; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sonya Surabhi Gupta to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-36097-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-36098-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34379-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of contributors ix Acknowledgementsxii Introduction Sonya Surabhi Gupta PART I

1

Towards a conceptual and definitional framework

19

  1 The touch of the other: Testimonio and autobiographical writing in India and Latin America Francesca Denegri

21

  2 Some notes on the testimonio Jorge Fornet

44

  3 The testimonio in Latin America and India: Critical contestations of the collective voice Kavita Panjabi

54

  4 In defence of the “subaltern”: Tracing the concept through/across South Asia and Latin America Deepti

69

viii Contents

PART II

Autobiographies in the pluriverse of Dalit writing

85

  5 Autobiography and the defacement of the self: Siddalingaiah’s Ooru Keri87 Shad Naved   6 Muli’s life history as Dalit testimonio Raj Kumar

96

  7 Dalit writing in Bangla: A thematic reading of selected narratives by Manoranjan Byapari and Manju Bala Sayantan Dasgupta

111

  8 Opening the self or the other? On the emergence of Bahujan self-narratives on new media Shubham Solanki

122

  9 Studying caste up: Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit133 Purnachandra Naik PART III

Revisiting the testimonio with cross-cultural readings

145

10 At the threshold of literature: Testimonios after Menchú Vijaya Venkataraman

147

11 The small voice of history: Revisiting Biography of a Runaway Slave163 Sonya Surabhi Gupta 12 Resistance through recipes: Locating testimonial aspects in Dalit and Chicana food narratives Grace Mariam Raju

178

13 Testimonio as a repository of subaltern memory: Reading women’s narratives from Guatemala and India Smriti Handoo

195

Index209

CONTRIBUTORS

Sayantan Dasgupta is the head of the Department of Comparative Literature and

a joint director of the School of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He has edited a number of books of translation and edited critical anthologies such as  A South Asian Nationalism Reader (2007).  He most recently coedited  The Dalit Lekhika, the first such volume of Bangla Dalit writing by women in English translation. He is a member of the advisory board (English) of the Sahitya Akademi and a secretary of the Comparative Literature Association of India. Deepti is a PhD student at the Department of Psychology, Ambedkar University Delhi, India. She is working on Freud and Marx together, to understand communist groups through psychoanalysis. She did her MPhil at the Centre for Spanish and Latin American Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia. Her MPhil dissertation was an assessment of the subaltern studies moment in South Asia and Latin America. Francesca Denegri is a professor of Hispanic literature at Pontificia Universidad

Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru. She is the author of El abanico y la cigarrera. La primera generación de ilustradas en el Perú (1996, 2001, 2018) and Soy señora. Testimonio de Irene Jara (2000); editor of Ni amar ni odiar con firmeza. Cultura y emociones en el Perú posbélico (2019); and coeditor of Dando cuenta. Estudios de testimonios sobre la violencia en el Perú (2016) and Su afectísima discípula, Clorinda Matto de Turner (2000). Jorge Fornet is a research fellow and director of the Centre for Literary Research

of the Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, and an editor of the journal bearing the same name. He is a member of the Cuban Academy of Language. He received his doctorate in literature from El Colegio de México. Author of a dozen books on

x Contributors

Latin American and Caribbean literature and culture, he has been a visiting professor at universities in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Sonya Surabhi Gupta is a professor of Latin American studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. Her research interests centre on the cross-cultural dialogue between India and Latin America in the context of the Global South. She has played a pivotal role in the consolidation of Latin American studies in India as the founder director of the Centre for Spanish and Latin American Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia. Her publications include translations into Hindi of the works of Gabriel García Márquez, José Ortega y Gasset, Rodolfo Walsh, Camilo José Cela, and Carlos Fuentes, among others. She also coedited the anthology of stories by Indian women writers Lihaf: Cuentos de mujeres de la India (2001). Smriti Handoo teaches English literature and English language at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Sharda University, India. She completed a master’s degree in English literature at University of Delhi. Her areas of research interest include postcolonial studies and Kashmiri literature in English. Her MPhil research, completed at Jamia Millia Islamia, deals with conflict, power, and memory in Kashmir and Guatemala and is titled  Structures of Power, Bare Life and the Matrix of History and Memory: Tracing Literary Analogies from Guatemala and Kashmir. Raj Kumar is a professor in the Department of English, University of Delhi, India.

His research areas include autobiography studies, Dalit literature, Indian writing in English, Odia literature, and postcolonial studies. His book Dalit Personal Narratives: Reading Caste, Nation and Identity was published in 2010 and reprinted in 2011, 2015, and 2017. His English translation of Akhila Naik’s Bheda, the first Odia Dalit novel, was published in 2017. He is also the author of Dalit Literature and Criticism (2019). Purnachandra Naik is a PhD student in the School of Arts and Humanities, Not-

tingham Trent University, UK. His PhD project is on Dalit literature and focuses on underappreciated genres such as songs, poetry and short stories. He is also interested in Indian cinema and the caste question, in addition to Latin American literature. Shad Naved is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Ambedkar Uni-

versity Delhi, India. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, a master’s in cultural studies from the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad, and a master’s in women’s studies from the University of Oxford. His research interests include the comparative literary history of the Indo-Persianate world, medieval Urdu poetry, classical Arabic literary culture, and the philology of sexuality. He translates from Hindi, Urdu, and Arabic. He is currently working on a monograph titled Historical Eros: Sexuality in the Philology of Indo-Persianate Poetry.

Contributors  xi

Kavita Panjabi  is  a professor of  comparative literature and a coordinator of the

Centre for Studies in Latin American Literatures and Cultures at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is the author of Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s Movement (2017) and Old Maps and New: Legacies of the Partition (2005). She is the editor of the  Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature and of anthologies such as Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia (2011) and a coeditor of Women Contesting Culture: Changing Frames of Gender Politics in India (2012) and Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas (2011). Grace Mariam Raju is a doctoral student in the Department of English, Jamia

Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. She completed her MPhil on Chicana food narratives at the Centre for Spanish and Latin American Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia. She is currently working on Christian fisherfolk communities in Kochi, Kerala. Her areas of research interest include subaltern studies, food narratives, ecology, ocean studies, and gender. Shubham Solanki is a PhD student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. His research concerns the questions of memory, materiality, and architectonic. He is interested in Ambedkar’s vision of an anticaste world and is engaged with issues and debates in anticaste politics. Vijaya Venkataraman is a professor in Hispanic studies at the Department of

Germanic  & Romance Studies, University of Delhi, India. Her research interests centre on Latin American testimonio, detective fiction by female writers, and Cervantine themes in the 21st century. She has received research fellowships under Indo-Mexican and Indo-Spanish cultural exchange programmes, the Erasmus Plus Mobility Programme, and the Instituto Ramón Llull Translators Residency Programme. She has won awards for her short stories and translates fiction and poetry from Spanish into Hindi.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This edited volume is the culmination of collaborative academic initiatives among colleagues from various universities and institutions spanning several years. Our shared interest in testimonio and subaltern life writings in India and Latin America has been bringing us together in conferences, publications and research projects. I thank all the contributors for their engagement and rigour in the writing and revision of the chapters and for their commitment and spirit of solidarity throughout the making of this volume. I owe a special thanks to the editors at Routledge, who were patient and encouraging and who steered me through the editorial process. The anonymous reviewers provided useful suggestions that helped enormously in improving the manuscript, and the shortcomings that remain are entirely our responsibility. I personally thank Rahul for his deep involvement in this project; he and Shomit accorded me constant intellectual support. What has energised this collective project is the strength, the power, and the agency of the voices that tell us myriad stories of survival and struggle for human dignity. To them, we express our most humble gratitude.

INTRODUCTION Sonya Surabhi Gupta

Sometime in early 2000s in Hyderabad, my colleague Maya Pandit was beginning her work on the translation, from Marathi to English, of one of the most enduring works of Dalit autobiographical writing, Baby Kamble’s Jina Amucha (1986). Seeing my interest in the book, which was not yet out in translation into English and considering that I had no knowledge of Marathi, Maya provided me with a version in Spanish.1 I read Baby Kamble’s autobiography in Spanish, in a translation by Nicaraguan feminist anthropologist Milagros Palma as Nuestra existencia: La vida de una mujer intocable (1996, Our Existence: The Life of an Untouchable Woman). Subaltern life narratives from Latin America, such as the testimonios of MayaQuiché activist Rigoberta Menchú from Guatemala, of the Bolivian miner Domitila Barrios de Chungara, and Sandinista women from Nicaragua, had also been circulating in India since the early 1980s, particularly in women’s collectives, in their English translations, and even in translation into some of India’s vernacular languages.2 If the Latin American Boom novel offered a new Majority World idiom for what had hitherto been a predominantly Western bourgeois genre and if magical realism from the 1980s onwards became “the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world” (Bhabha 7), then the testimonio made its way into India, also in the 80s, through an organic intersubaltern dialogue on the intersections of academia and activism. The term testimonio and the generic configurations of Latin American testimonial writing have been used in India for some time now in discussions on Dalit autobiographies.3 This discussion, however, has not been sufficiently historicised and dealt with in detail. While life narratives of Dalit oppression and assertion have been compared to Black autobiographies and the Black American racial experiences (Limbale; Pandey; Mukhopadhyay), there is no systematic and detailed work on the Indian and Latin American experience of marginalisation as expressed in autobiographical first-person narrations and in testimonios. Juxtaposing subaltern

2  Sonya Surabhi Gupta

life narratives from these two locations, focusing on the retelling of local and global dimensions of the struggles of “the people without history,” this volume attempts to explore the politics and aesthetics of the narrativisation of subaltern life stories through a new genre in India and Latin America (two regions of the Global South), whose connected histories are only beginning to be studied (Klengel and Wallner). Our aim is to juxtapose Dalit autobiography and the testimonio, foregrounding their formal and aesthetic regimes and concomitantly looking at their value as social documents of the denunciation of untold histories of social exclusion and economic exploitation that continue even today in postcolonial societies. While these subaltern life histories are embedded in their local modes of orality and in their specific experiences of coloniality of power, even as they take on diverse forms, the shared history of oppression on the basis of race, ethnicity, and caste from where they arise and the shared history of resisting it constitute an alternative epistemological and literary locus that these chapters explore. One of the aims of this book is to look at the critical framework within which Dalit autobiographies have been read as testimonios, not only in terms of their narrative strategies and content but also, and mainly, in terms of how they are located institutionally in our university curricula and in the critical academic discourse in general and in terms of how they relate, to use a Benjaminian term, to the literary energies of the present. Another objective of putting together this volume is to contribute to a greater engagement between Latin American academia and Latin Americanists in general, on the one hand, and the powerful field of Dalit studies that has emerged in India over the past few decades, on the other. The book is divided into three sections. The initial chapters address conceptual issues related to the varied dimensions of subaltern life writings and the literary forms that they take in the two regions. The chapters in the second section explore Dalit autobiographies and testimonial writing. And the chapters in third section look at the foundational texts of Latin American testimonios and the contemporary reworking of the genre in the works of more-recent writers from India and Latin America from a comparative cross-cultural perspective. The study of the organic encounter between the uniquely Latin American genre of testimonio and the life narratives of the Dalits will, hopefully, open renewed vistas on the subaltern articulations and countercultures in the two regions and help create newer pathways of solidarity in the imaginary of the Global South, which is not just an economic or a geopolitical category but also an epistemic location.

Dalit writing as subaltern critique Dalit writers belong to what were once called the “Untouchable” castes in India. Their writings carry the experience of caste oppression as also that of their struggle against the stranglehold of caste hierarchy in Indian society which continues to privilege the caste Hindu echelons. They write from a Dalit consciousness – that is, from an awareness of this history of infamy that they challenge as they vindicate their own humanity by assuming the label “Dalit,” meaning the crushed ones. Dalit

Introduction  3

is a label of self-assertion, then, challenging the stigmatised identity of Untouchables imposed on them over centuries by the opprobrious institution of the caste system in India. As a term, it was first used by Dr B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) in the 1920s, to refer to the life conditions of those crushed under the upper-caste Brahmanical order, and it stands in stark contrast to the term Harijan (children of God) coined by Gandhi to refer to the “Untouchables” in what has been seen as liberal humanist largesse. Harijan, despite its according a place of pride to the “Untouchables” as children of God, carries within it the notion of caste’s being divinely ordained, whereas Dalithood as a category “derives its epistemological and political strength from the material social experience of its subjects” (Guru, “The Language” 102). In a most significant move, Ambedkar argued that the Dalits were, in fact, outside the pale of Hinduism and represented the forgotten history of Buddhism that had met a violent end at the hands of Brahmanism. Ambedkar put the caste question at the centre of the imaginary for a free independent India, making the Dalit “an inaugural figure of India’s political modernity” and a reminder of “an alternative political and ethical community that had been destroyed by Brahmanism” (Rao 13, 17). Ambedkar’s embrace of Buddhism as an indigenous model for an inclusive democracy is in the same vain as one of his contemporaries, the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), one of the most important Latin American Marxists, whose decolonial Indigenista thought has been recuperated by the Indigenous assertion in Latin America since the 1990s. Mariátegui placed the figure of the “indio” centre stage in his socialist politics and turned to “Andean socialism” with its strong collective traditions and modes of reciprocity as a resource for imagining an inclusive future socialist society, which he argued could not be a copy or an imitation but could be created in accordance with “our reality.” What is important here is the emphasis that both Mariátegui and Ambedkar put on addressing the problem of “caste” and “race/ethnicity” as requisites for a modern democratic society.4 As the chairperson of the Constituent Assembly and as India’s first law minister, Ambedkar tried to infuse this egalitarian ethos into the Indian Constitution once the country had attained freedom, the most salient step being the abolition of untouchability and the introduction of affirmative action for disenfranchised Dalits, thus marking the emergence of the Dalits as equal citizens with full rights in a modern democracy. While Ambedkarite thought has been a major driving force of the Dalit movement, a vast and diverse array of movements and thinkers have strongly critiqued the caste system and the exploitation of poor peasants and landless labourers and workers, chief among them were the following: the Satyashodhak Samaj, led by Jyotirao Phule (1820–90), who, along with his associates Fatima Sheikh and Savitribai Phule, in the 1870s worked to ensure that women and Dalits received education; the Self-Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu in the 1920s, led by E.V. Ramasamy Periyar (1879–1973), a movement that advocated for social equality and self-respect intercaste marriages; the Adi Hindu movement, led by Swami Achhutanand (1879–1933) in the 1920s, for the eradication of untouchability; and the anticaste struggles, led by Ayyankali (1863–1941),

4  Sonya Surabhi Gupta

in the erstwhile Travancore state (present-day Kerala) for marginalised castes to gain access to public spaces such as roads and schools, increased wages for agricultural workers, and women’s rights from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. The Dalit Panthers, a group of Marathi Dalit writers and intellectuals (the inspiration from the Black Panthers is evident in the name) invoked this long history of a strong subaltern critique of the Hindu caste system in the 1970s, when they popularised the term Dalit to denote the combative identity of the community that is today associated with Dalit assertion throughout the country. The 1970s in India were also marked by a growing disenchantment with the postcolonial state, when anger spilt onto the streets in a popular upsurge of protest movements. The Dalit movement5 articulated its radicalised identity in this deeply transformative period in India’s postindependence history, entering into a defining phase in the 1990s in the context of the dominant castes’ backlash against the Indian state’s extension of the constitutionally mandated reservation (affirmative action in education and employment) to other “backward” classes, on the basis recommendations of the Mandal Commission. “New modes of reproducing caste took place within the idiom of citizenship and merit” (Velayudhan 120) in the discussions that raged in the urban centres, universities, and institutions in the aftermath. In the same period, Babasaheb Ambedkar’s centennial commemorations in 1991 brought to fore the stark reality of the exclusion of Dalits from literacy, land ownership, employment, and citizenship rights. The Dalit feminist critique of the women’s movement and the efforts to internationalise the issue of caste discrimination at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 brought further focus on caste as an analytical category. Rawat and Satyanarayana, in the introduction to their seminal volume Dalit Studies (2016), have dealt with the consolidation of Dalit studies as a discipline since the 1990s, and they make the important point that a crucial fallout of this discussion on caste in the public domain was that it now became “a recognised legitimate political category and a modern and living one, as opposed to its prior representations as primordial, backward, and reactionary” (4). In other words, caste and the violence that it perpetrated, which was brushed aside as a vestige of feudal relations that modernity would overcome, were now demonstrated as very much a contemporary reality. The emergence of a body of Dalit literature needs to be seen in the context of the growth of the Dalit movement briefly delineated earlier and the explosion of creative energy that accompanied it. The veritable Boom beginning in the 1960s and 1970s expressed itself in various genres but mainly in poetry, short fiction, and life writing  in Marathi  – where Narayan Surve, Anna Bhau Sathe, Raja Dhale, Baburao Bagul, Arjun Dangle, and Namdeo Dhasal are significant names – and subsequently across India in different regions and languages, following different trajectories and timelines. Arjun Dangle’s landmark anthology of modern Marathi Dalit writing, Poisoned Bread (1992), unveiled critically acclaimed Dalit writers for the first time in translation into English. More recently, anthologies of Dalit writing have made available a huge corpus in English, particularly from South India.6 Given that “The exclusion and dehumanisation of Dalits and other oppressed is so complete

Introduction  5

in Hindu Brahmanical literature and imagery that a Dalit can never see his/her self-being reflected in that iconography” (Jangam, “Politics” 68), Dalit literature is where Dalit subjectivity comes into existence. The autobiographical mode has been most apposite for the articulation of Dalit selfhood. It has continued to be so in the decades that have followed, and the first Dalit autobiographies in some languages, like Punjabi and Gujarati, have come out in this decade. These autobiographies comprise an archive of subaltern life stories, which, like the testimonio, establish the discursive space where the subaltern identity is constituted in written textualities.7 Written in the regional languages of India, in the distinct dialects used by Dalit communities to which the particular writer belongs, only through the mediation of translation is this corpus made available to a Pan-India readership.8 In Bangla, for example, Dalit literature has only recently found visibility as a corpus, particularly with the iconisation of Manoranjan Byapari and his stunning autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life (2018). Sayantan Dasgupta in Chapter 7 puts the literary configurations of the works of Manoranjan Byapari and Manju Bala, another important Dalit voice in Bangla, in comparative focus and underlines the relationship between caste and class in the Dalit literature of Bangla. The authors are as diverse as their works. Although many of them are writers or middle-class people who had access to education, others’ entry into the “lettered city” has not been easy: Baby Kamble had to keep her autobiography under wraps for years before actually publishing it; for Manoranjan Byapari, prison was the school where he learnt to read and write. The overarching category of Dalit autobiographies thus covers a pluriverse. Given the predilection for colonial discourse, postcoloniality, and Indian Writing in English through the 1980s and 1990s, coupled with “the invisible role of caste in determining what constitutes literature” (Satyanarayana, “Dalitism” 79), the rich world of Dalit writing in general and the autobiography as a potent subaltern expression were barely studied in literary studies in Indian academia, but they have been gaining attention now, even internationally. Latin American testimonio, being written in Spanish, a metropolitan language, found easier circulation in international academic circles, and the discussions around the genre quickly found their way into critical discourse, though animated more by metropolitan interpretations than by its Latin American context. For those in Western, particularly US, academia, who favoured opening the canon during the intense debates of the 1980s, testimonio became the “desire called Third World literature”; this desire then waned, resulting in “the replacement of the Third World metaphor by the metaphor of postcoloniality” (Gugelberger 1). The paradigm of postcoloniality, of colonialism versus nationalism, Dalit scholars have argued, does not allow for those voices to be heard that have not been absorbed in the homogenous category of the nation. Colonial modernity, they argue, in fact, opened up spaces for Dalits, such as access to education, which had been denied to them in the caste Hindu order in precolonial times.9 The encounter between the Latin American testimonio and the Dalit autobiography did not happen through postcolonial itineraries, such as those taken by magical realism of the cosmopolitan Boom novel,10 but through more organic subaltern pathways.

6  Sonya Surabhi Gupta

Dalit literature, subaltern historiography, and postcolonial studies Editors Joshil K. Abraham and Judith Misrahi-Barak tell us in their introduction to Dalit Literatures in India (2015), the first significant collection of critical essays published by an international publisher on Dalit literary writing, that the volume came up because they perceived an absence of academic engagement with Dalit literatures in South Asian studies and postcolonial literatures internationally and in Indian literary studies as well. According to them, “Dalit literatures do not fit in the categories that the West usually resorts to when dealing with South Asian literatures” (13). In the companion volume, Dalit Text (2019), the editors once again ask, given the centrality of the concept of subalternity in postcolonial studies, how is it that Dalit literature is hardly dealt with in Western universities? “The apparent interest in silenced and oppressed people in postcolonial studies,” they say, “sits uneasily with the relative marginalisation of Dalit literature in this discipline” (1). We ask, how is it that despite a strong dialogue between the Latin American and the South Asian subaltern studies groups, caste has remained an absent category in the exchange? The Latin American Subaltern Studies Group was formed a decade after their South Asian counterpart, in the crucial year of 1992, the year of the quincentenary of the accidental “discovery” of the Americas by Columbus, who while looking for a shorter sea route to India reached the “New World,” an event that has been considered the “constitutive act” of modernity (Quijano and Wallerstein) and that set into motion the terrible genocide of Indigenous peoples, the destruction of their cultures, the human trafficking of slaves and later of indentured labour from Asia, and an extractivist economic model that still today exploits the regions’ resources. Consisting of Latin Americanists from US academia, the group members shared the political disillusionment caused by the dismantling of the radical projects of the 1980s in Central America and the fall of the Soviet Union, and they were looking for “new ways of thinking and acting politically” (110). The Founding Statement of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, in its first sentence, recognises the influence of the South Asian collective, in particular of Ranajit Guha. Whereas Indian nationalist historiography developed a critique of colonial historiography, the subalterns set out to look at the elitist bias in historiography by emphasising the popular agency of the subaltern, something that the Latin American Group found inspiring for their studies in the social sciences and humanities. Significant links were developed between the South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies groups, which have been crucial in the way subalternity in India has been perceived by Latin Americanists in US academia and in Latin American decolonial thought. Although both the groups had disintegrated by the turn of the century, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Collective’s approximation to the question of subaltern history in India, framed within the postcolonial critique of modernity, remains a significant signpost, and its influence continues in current critiques of Eurocentric epistemologies among the Latin Americanists, particularly of US academia. José David

Introduction  7

Saldívar, for example, in the preface to his book Transamericanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (2012), writes of the two collectives as “experimental spaces in which various agendas and cross-genealogical projects talk to each other around a common concern that is at the same time political, ethical, and pedagogic” (xviii). By the 1990s, the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group had moved away from Gramscian Marxism and a history-from-below approach that had been its hallmark in the initial days and had gravitated towards cultural studies and critiques of colonial discourse, conceptualising domination “overwhelmingly in cultural, discursive terms, as the power-knowledge of the post-Enlightenment West” (Sarkar 301–2). Despite their groundbreaking work on subaltern history, one severe limitation of the collective was their failure to address the caste question and the near-complete absence of theorisation on this crucial aspect of subalternity in India, except in the later phase. Recent Dalit scholarship has poignantly noted that if “Dalit histories remain untold in modern Indian history because autonomous Dalit organisations and groups could not easily be assimilated into the anticolonial nationalist narrative” (Rawat and Satyanarayana 11), the categories of elite and subaltern created by the Subalterns as a corrective to this narrative did not help either, in integrating Dalit histories, because these “misconceived categories” elide “the social and historical reality in terms of caste, class or community” (Jangam, “Politics” 65). Commenting on the absence of dealing with indigenous structures of domination in Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), Sumit Sarkar, in what can be called an insider’s critique, observed that “the book tells the reader nothing about the powerful anti-caste movements associated with Phule, Periyar or Ambedkar” (310). Echoing Sarkar’s critique, Rawat and Satyanarayana also note that “In the subaltern studies project, the subaltern was an unmarked subject, and caste inequity was not the core feature of its cultural and political formation” (14). Since the affinity between these two collectives has led to substantial dialogue in academia between and on India and Latin America, the few efforts there of studying subalternities in the two regions in a comparative cross-cultural matrix have barely looked at the caste question. Interest in postcolonial Indian Writing in English, particularly the international circulation of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), brought some attention to the caste issue.11 The two collectives met in 1998 in a conference at Duke University, but the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group disintegrated soon after. The formation, thereafter, of the Modernity/Coloniality research group, whose stated objective is to give epistemic privilege to ethnic and racial perspectives coming from Latin America, to produce a decolonial critique of Eurocentrism from subalternised and silenced knowledges, has attempted to incorporate perspectives from the Global South (Deepti in Chapter 4 overviews the two subaltern studies groups and the Modernity/Coloniality research group), but cross-cultural studies between India and Latin America have been dominated by the figures of Gandhi and Tagore as the quintessential expressions of Southern voices from India. In a rather scathing critique of what Bolivian intellectual Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Aymara activist and former director of the

8  Sonya Surabhi Gupta

Andean Oral History Workshop,12 considers a depoliticised culturalist postcolonialism in North American academia, she highlighted that The cultural studies departments of many North American universities have adopted “postcolonial studies” in their curricula with an academicist and culturalist stamp devoid of the sense of political urgency that characterized the intellectual endeavors of their colleagues in India . . . without altering anything of the relations of force in the “palaces” of empire, the cultural studies departments of North American universities have adopted the ideas of subaltern studies and launched debates in Latin America, thus creating a jargon, a conceptual apparatus, and forms of reference and counterreference that have isolated academic treatises from any obligation to or dialogue with insurgent social forces. (97–98) The limitations of this important intellectual exchange between the two regions, in our view, point more to the absence of alternative voices in academia to represent India in the concert of the Global South than any other factor. The emergence of Dalit studies over the past two decades and the entrance of Dalit voices in the “lettered city” of Indian academia are potent challenges to existing epistemic foundations on which the edifice of Indian literature and social sciences is constructed. Significantly, “the rise of Dalit studies and new attention paid to B.R. Ambedkar . . . also coincided with the formal end of the subaltern studies collective” (Rawat and Satyanarayana ix). The entrance of these new subaltern articulations can provide the epistemological alternatives that Latin American decolonial thought seeks in its project to establish linkages between decolonial projects coming from different subaltern experiences.

Dalit autobiographies and the testimonio: An ongoing discussion While the women’s movement and feminist anthropology and theory in India were the first to juxtapose women’s testimonial literature and its social function in India and Latin America (Panjabi), historian M.S.S. Pandian was, perhaps, the first to bring the structural similarity of form and politics of Dalit autobiography and the Latin American testimonio into critical discourse when in his brief piece on Bama’s Karukku titled “On a Dalit woman’s testimonio” (1998), he asserted that Bama’s text was indeed neither an autobiography nor a novel but rather a case of “wilfully violating genre boundaries” such that the autobiographical “I,” an outcome of bourgeois individualism, was depleted and displaced by the collectivity of the Dalit community (54). In Sharmila Rege’s Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios (2006), which would be most influential in Dalit life narratives being read as testimonios, Rege pointed out that autobiographies of modern middle-class women were usually life sketches of their husbands, a companionate

Introduction  9

marriage, or at most marital discord but completely unmarked by caste, as was the case with caste Hindu autobiographies in general, which is why they barely ever decentred the subject of Brahmanical patriarchy (49–50). She argued that Dalit life narratives have established themselves as a distinct genre and challenge the bourgeois genre of autobiography by forging “a right to speak both for and beyond the individual and contest explicitly or implicitly the ‘official forgetting’ of histories of caste oppression, struggles and resistance” (13). One of the issues raised by Rege is of singular importance in the context of the present volume, that of an appropriate nomenclature for Dalit life narratives: “Can the dalit life narrative be called an atma charitra (autobiography)? Is it better described as dalit atmakathan/svakathan (defined as narratives of dalit self and community)?” (12). Rege concluded that Dalit life narratives are testimonios and underlined how Dalit women’s testimonios in India agitated their way into the public sphere in the 1980s, engaging us in processes of “rememory” or “restructuring of histories of institutions and practices in a nation actively invested in forgetting them” (75). For Gopal Guru, the use of the term implied not a victim providing witness, as that would wrest away agency from the Dalit women, but rather stood for another radical sense, that of a “powerful moral medium to protest” (“Afterword” 160). “Coming Out as Dalit is primarily an act of bearing witness to what it means to be Dalit in a grossly unfair society,” writes Yashica Dutt in the epilogue to her 2019 memoir (180), vindicating the moral value that Guru had invested in the idea of witnessing. Clearly, for Rege and Guru, these life narratives had much more in common with testimonio, the voice of resistance from Latin America, than with the autobiography as it existed. Was it an imposition of an academic fashion since testimonio studies had stormed North American academia in the 1980s? In a recent interview, when asked by the interviewers whether the book by the women’s collective Stree Shakti Sangathana, We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana People’s Struggle, was influenced by Western feminism, K. Lalita, one of the editors of the book, emphasised that “What influenced our group in this effort were the two books on Latin American women’s struggles alone” (Lalita is referring to Let Me Speak! and Sandino’s Daughters). The intersection of caste and gender was at the heart of Rege’s argument, which is why the framework of testimonio has been used to refer to Dalit women’s autobiographies more often in subsequent scholarship (Nayar, “Bama’s Karukku”; Ganguly; Mukhopadhyay; Thomas 2018), though it is increasingly being used to read Dalit autobiographies in general (see Satyanarayana “Dalit Autobiography”; Nayar, “The Poetics”; Raj Kumar, Chapter  6). Kavita Panjabi (Chapter 3) therefore makes the significant point, while discussing Bama’s Sangati, that the voice of the narrator in the testimonio is not an undifferentiated representation of a projected collective perspective and that it instead calls for hearing the individual voices – for example, of women – even as these individual voices stand for and within the collective. She outlines how the genre has been so fecund in South Asia and overviews the rich debates in India on the testimonio, especially those that have taken place since a 2007 seminar organised by the Latin American

10  Sonya Surabhi Gupta

Studies Programme of the Jamia Millia Islamia on testimonio as a subaltern voice in India and Latin America. The seminar brought together scholars from different disciplines, including those from Latin America and Dalit intellectuals and writers such as Bama and Om Prakash Valmiki. These debates around Dalit life writings and testimonio then continued in a special issue of the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature (2009). Some of the chapters in this volume have developed from those discussions and their different iterations thereafter, while others emerged from the small but growing corpus of research by Dalit scholars, Indian Latin Americanists and comparatists in this transnational literary genre. A consensus emerged from these discussions: the inadequacy of reading Dalit autobiographies within the existing critical framework of autobiography studies. In Chapter 5, Shad Naved offers a nuanced reading of the autobiographies of the Kannada Dalit intellectual Dr Siddalingaiah, titled Ooru Keri (1996), by questioning Paul de Man’s critique of the possibility of the representation of the subject. For de Man, as articulated in his influential essay “Autobiography as defacement,” the autobiographical “I” exists only through the trope of defacement in the text. Naved argues that “Dalit autobiographer Siddalingaiah uses the trope of defacement as one of the necessary categories for mass politics and for overcoming the subjective limitations of the autobiographical genre.” The way that the Dalit subject is narrated in Siddalingaiah’s Ooru Keri, Naved shows, should make us think about whether Dalit autobiographies can at all be read in the framework of a pre-existing genre. Testimonios emerged in Latin America in the specific historical context of the insurgent 1960s and 1970s as an alternative narrative form of a new historical subject. Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1966), by Miguel Barnet and Esteban Montejo, and I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983), by Rigoberta Menchú and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, are considered among the famous foundational texts of the genre, though in recent times, Argentinian Rodolfo Walsh’s Operation Massacre (1957) is increasingly being seen as the first work of testimonio.13 As Jorge Fornet explains in Chapter 2, though the testimonio has had antecedents in the Latin American literary tradition since colonial times, in its modern version, it is associated with Mexican Ricardo Pozas’s Juan Pérez Jolote (1948) and Walsh’s Operation Massacre (1957), thus representing the two fundamental dimensions that coalesced in the genre: the ethnological and the political. Fornet underlines the role of Casa de las Américas, the Cuban cultural institution in the consolidation of the genre since 1970, when this prestigious institution recognised the testimonio as a specifically new genre at a time the values of the nascent genre were being recognised, but it was denied the recognition of possessing literary prestige. These narratives of self-representation by women, Indigenous people, former slaves, favela dwellers, political activists, and guerrilla combatants, most often mediated through a socially committed interlocutor or compiler, became a new post-fictional form of literature allowing for the entrance of those voices that would normally be excluded from the “lettered city.” The chapters in the third section of this volume (Chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13) revisit some of these foundational texts and read testimonios from India and Latin

Introduction  11

America in a comparative framework through the prism of autobiography studies, memory studies, food studies, and decolonial thought. In Chapter 10, Vijaya Venkataraman offers a close reading of Rigoberta Menchú’s second book, Crossing Borders (1998), and underlines its collaborative and combative framework of testimonio against readings that consider it to be a personal memoir. She unpacks this controversy through a detailed consideration of the key questions relating to the production and reception of the testimonio as a genre and its reworking in contemporary novels like Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness (2004). In Chapter 11, Sonya Surabhi Gupta revisits Miguel Barnet and Esteban Montejo’s Biography of a Runaway Slave (1966) from a decolonial framework arrived at by juxtaposing race and caste in the trope of the rebel slave. In Chapter 12, Grace Mariam Raju attempts a comparative reading of Dalit and Chicana food narratives and looks at recipes in food narratives as sites for articulating resistance against conformist eating practices. She identifies similar patterns of exclusion and discrimination that are articulated in the recipes of two food memoirs: Taco Testimony: Meditations on Food, Family, and Culture (2006), by Denise Chavez, and Isn’t This Plate Indian? Dalit Histories and Memories of Food (2009), by Sharmila Rege et al. In Chapter 13, Smriti Handoo offers a reading of three testimonio texts: I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), by Rigoberta Menchú from Guatemala; Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell Their Stories (1988), by Sumitra Bhave; and Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? (2016), by Essar Batool et al. from India. The chapter explores the role of memory in testimonio’s dynamics through Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory). A recent acerbic debate around testimonio has centred on the use of memory, or rather postmemory, which refers to intergenerational transmission of memory. In the context of the “children of the disappeared” in Southern cone countries like Chile and Argentina, it refers to the use of memory by children of those who had suffered violence and trauma, to recover family histories for the construction of their subjectivities. Beatriz Sarlo, a well-known Argentinian intellectual, critiqued this “subjective turn” (2005) and privileged the construction of public memory over the private memory of family members. The question here is about the legitimacy of such memory in recent testimonios in post-dictatorship Argentina, which critics such as Sarlo argue should not be based on affective familial bonds but rather on political affiliation. The recent polemic around Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants (2017) clearly posits similar questions (e.g. in Jangam “How Not to Write a Dalit Memoir”). As these chapters show, the genre of testimonio has had a robust growth since those early days, when it was recognised as a specifically Latin American literary expression by Casa de las Américas. The emphasis on literariness has once again recently been argued by Arturo Arias, against what he calls “a US-centric understanding of this critical category” (253), reminding us that the origins of testimonio were “eminently literary” (254), even if the genre was positioned as post-literature or extraliterary. The decision, in 1969, by Casa to institute the award was prompted by the jurors who, confronted with entries of several “un-disciplined” texts that did not fit into the usual categories of novel, short story, poetry, and essay, considered

12  Sonya Surabhi Gupta

suggesting a new category. Among the various nomenclatures discussed, such as nonfiction novel, documentary novel, factography, and reportage, the term testimonio prevailed. In contrast to the nonfiction novel of the 60s, with its claim of neutrality and objectivity on part of the novelist, testimonio asserted the individuality both of the narrator and of the mediator, and it vindicated the inalienable relationship between narration and experience in a partisan manner by both, as also the resultant transformation of narrative forms and literary language that this relationship entailed. Francesca Denegri (Chapter  1) examines the literary form of the testimonio and the Dalit autobiography and suggests that it is marked by the specific history of subalternities in each case. Denegri’s thesis is that while the testimonio is a product of the “contact zone,” a space of collaboration and contestation in colonial Latin America, Dalits did not have such collaborative histories with caste Indians, and therefore, mediation, which is the central feature of testimonio, is absent in the Dalit autobiography, which is a direct first-person account. However, the role of a socially committed translator of the Dalit autobiography written in the vernaculars of India, is akin to that of the interlocutor of the Latin American testimonio, though the recent arrival of Dalit autobiographies written in English by diasporic Dalit women, such as the aforementioned Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants (2017) and Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit (2019), erodes such a need for mediation. In Chapter 9, Purnachandra Naik reads Dutt’s memoir, as a ‘new’ note that exposes the systemic casteism in contemporary India, particularly its perpetuation “in/through ‘modern’ institutions today.” Naik maps how “the first person narrator of the memoir examines her formerly ‘performed’ Brahmin identity from the vantage point of a present consciously assumed Dalit identity.” The new media has become another site for various modes of articulations of the Dalit self that emerges online, doing away with mediation substantially. Shubham Solanki in Chapter 8 looks at the emergence of Dalit self narratives on various platforms of the new media, which he sees as a decentred and liberatory space “where the contemporary radical Dalit subject is in-(formed).” Solanki’s chapter examines the modes of articulation of the self asserted by Dalits on new media and examines them in Hatred in the Belly (2015) and What Babasaheb Ambedkar Means to Me (2019), published in print form, after the polemics around the 2014 publication of Navayana’s edition of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, annotated by Arundhati Roy. One of the reasons why several Dalit writers had transitioned from the genre of poetry to that of autobiographical narratives in the 1980s is because they did not want to be fettered by existing literary conventions and parameters (Devy xxii). O.P. Valmiki, author of internationally acclaimed Joothan (1997), mentioned that the biggest challenges when he set out to write his autobiography were the established notions about not only the genre but also who can write an autobiography, as also the general perception that writing about his experiences in short story or a novel would be more fruitful than writing an autobiography (2007). A  stagist approach seems to suggest that Dalit autobiography is an early stage of writing coming out of Dalit consciousness, which can now forgo its language of affect and

Introduction  13

find a more analytical mode of expression in what are considered more-evolved literary forms, such as the novel. Examining two Dalit texts in Tamil, Bama’s Karakku (1992) and K.A. Gunasekhran’s Vadu (2006) to demonstrate how caste is written in social science theory in India, M.S.S. Pandian had flagged the issue raised by Gopal Guru and other subaltern intellectuals in India about the privileging of the theoretical over the empirical in creating hierarchies of knowledge. Pandian argued that representational forms such as autobiography or testimony, not being fettered by “the evidentiary rules of social science, the privileged notion of teleological time and that claims to authorial neutrality” can, in fact, “produce enabling re-descriptions of life-worlds and facilitate the imagination of the political” in a way theory cannot, constrained as it is to adopt modes of distancing that do not allow for the language of affect or experience. He concluded that the discourse of causality in theory and the discourse of participation that is based on affective communication of experiences are two different modes, producing different forms of truth and knowledge (“Writing Ordinary Lives” 34–40). While Dalit literature is diverse and will not limit itself only to the autobiographical form, Sipra Mukherjee points out (in her translator’s introduction to Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life) that more-recent Dalit autobiographies will themselves more likely become palpably mainstream as the ravages of neoliberalism and mass migrations change the contours of our cities as well as of the erstwhile borders separating the mainstream from the margins. Such metamorphoses and migrations have also pushed the boundaries of the Latin American testimonio, 50 years since after its emergence (Detwiler and Breckenridge). At the same time, despite pronouncements of the obsolescence of the testimonio in a new neoliberal Latin America, some of the most established Latin American novelists have in recent times turned to writing testimonio-like texts: “Although it may not seem to be, though it may not want to be, this is a work of fiction”; this is the disclaimer at the start of the Guatemalan Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novel El material humano (2009, Human Matter). Aware of the specificity of each context, contributors’ chapters in this volume are not bound in a comparative framework but instead juxtapose these life writings from two important subaltern constituencies of the Global South, whose organic encounter through a shared experience of resistance has percolated rather spontaneously into academia. The volume is not meant to be an exhaustive study of this encounter, but located at the intersection of Latin American studies and South Asian studies, to the extent that it can facilitate an understanding of the subaltern voices of the two regions through life writings, the volume contributes to a decolonial pluriversal episteme for our times.

Notes 1 Maya Pandit’s translation into English, The Prisons We Broke, came out in 2008. Writing about the genesis of this translation, Pandit recalls that “When . . . I realized that Baby Kamble’s Jina Amucha had been already translated into some other Indian languages and even Spanish, I decided that an English translation was a must” (153).

14  Sonya Surabhi Gupta

2 The Hyderabad-based Stree Shakti Sangathana, a women’s collective, in their seminal volume of life stories of women who had participated in the Telangana peasants’ rebellion (1946–1951), titled We Were Making History: Women and the Telangana Uprising (1989), acknowledges its debt to the Latin American testimonio (280). In an interview given in January 2015, one of the editors, K. Lalitha, recalls that the book Sandino’s Daughters, about the women in the Nicaraguan Revolution, came out in 1981. At about the same time in 1983, the Hyderabad Book Trust brought the life story of a Latin American woman, Domitila Barrios de Chungara, called Maa Katha. . . . It is a story of Bolivian women in struggle. . . . We understood that across the world there were new attempts to reproduce women’s life stories as they were told. This understanding inspired us to undertake this project. Apart from the Telugu translation of Maa Katha: Porata Pathamlo Bolivia Mahilalu, mentioned by K. Lalita, Shireen translated Domitila’s testimonio into Hindi – Suno Meri Kahani: Meri Zubaani (2011) – published by a small Madhya Pradesh–based women’s collective, Madhya Pradesh Mahila Manch. Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio translated into Malayalam by Rajan Tuvvaara as Njan Rigoberta Menchu was published by Samatha Books (2015). The reception of Latin American testimonios in translation into India’s vernacular languages is a fascinating project, and it will hopefully be taken up in future research. 3 See Pandian, “On a Dalit Woman’s Testimonio”; Rege 2006; Gupta and Venkataraman; Guru, “Afterword”; Satyanarayana, “Dalit Autobiography”; Ganguly 2012; Nayar, “Bama’s Karukku,” “The Poetics”; Thomas 2018. 4 For a comparative reading of Ambedkar and Mariategui, see Sirohi and Gupta. 5 The term Dalit movement does not refer to a homogenous whole but rather encompasses various political and intellectual strands. 6 Other anthologies include M. Dasan et  al., The Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Dalit Writing. Oxford UP, 2011; Ravikumar and Azhagarasan, editors, The Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing. Oxford UP, 2012; Satyanarayana and Tharu, editors, No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India. Dossier 1: Tamil and Malayalam. Penguin Books, 2011. Satyanarayana and Tharu, editors, Steel Nibs Are Sprouting: New Dalit Writing from South India. Dossier 2: Telugu and Kannada. Penguin Books, 2013. K. Purushottam et al., editors, The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. Oxford UP, 2016. 7 For a detailed study on Dalit autobiographies in the context of autobiographical writing, see Raj Kumar. 8 One of the foundational texts of Dalit autobiography, such as Daya Pawar’s Baluta (1978), appeared in Jerry Pinto’s translation into English in 2015, 37 years after its initial publication in Marathi. Even Sahitya Akademi’s award-winning autobiographies, such as Laxman Mane’s Upara (1980; translated by A.K. Kamat as Upara: An Outsider in 1997) and Laxman Gaikwad’s Uchalya (1987; translated by P.A. Kolkarkar as The Branded in 2009), both written in Marathi, had to wait some time before they appeared in English. Baby Kamble’s Jina Amucha, also in Marathi (serialised in 1982 and published in book form in 1986; translated by Maya Pandit into English as The Prisons We Broke in 2008) actually has a much longer history in that it was published some 25 years after it was written. Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi (1984; translated by Santosh Bhoomkar as The Outcaste in 2003) is yet another foundational text of the genre. Appearing in the 1990s, Bama’s Karukku (1992; translated by Lakshmi Holmstorm into English in 2000) in Tamil and Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan (1997; translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee into English in 2003) in Hindi are today considered classics of the genre. Another important autobiography in Tamil is K.A. Gunasekhran’s Vadu (2006; translated into English by V. Kadambari as The Scar in 2009). Balbir Madhopuri’s Chhangya Rukh (2002; translated by Tripti Jain into English as Chhangya Rukh: Against the Night in 2010) is the first Dalit autobiography in Punjabi. B. Kesharshivam’s Purnasatya (2002, The Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth: A Dalit’s Life; translated from Gujarati by Gita Chaudhuri in 2008)

Introduction  15

is the first autobiography of a Dalit in Gujarati. Manoranjan Byapari’s Ittibrite chandal jeevan (2014, Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit Life; translated by Sipra Mukherjee, 2018) in Bangla has been hailed as a masterpiece of Dalit autobiography. Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (2017) and Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit (2019) heralded the arrival of Dalit autobiographies written in English. This indicative list shows the diversity, newness, and current vitality of the genre of Dalit testimonios, particularly as a corpus available in English. 9 Colonialism was indeed Janus-faced as far as the Dalits were concerned. While colonial modernity opened up spaces for Dalits’ education in missionary schools and gave them entry into the rights discourse, colonial policy simultaneously often disenfranchised them from land and commons and “freed” them to sell their labour power, placing them under a regime of exploitation by landlords and capitalism (Prashad). In Sujatha Gidla’s prelude to her autobiography Ants Among Elephants, she gives a vivid account of how her ancestors lost the land that they cultivated because of the collusion of the British with the local landlord. 10 For the South Asian reception of magical realism, particularly of García Márquez, see Gupta and Naved. 11 See José David Saldívar’s essay (2012), which takes up the caste question in Arundhati Roy’s novel in a comparative context with Chicana writing. 12 Rivera Cusicanqui, along with Rossana Barragan, also edited a volume on subaltern studies that included several well-known essays by South Asian Subaltern Studies Group members in translation into Spanish. 13 Walsh’s book was translated into English only in 2013. My Hindi translation of it – Operation Qatle-aam – is forthcoming from Granthshilpi Prakashan.

Works cited Abraham, Joshil K., and Judith Misrahi-Barak, editors. Dalit Literatures in India. Routledge, 2015. Arias, Arturo. “Enunciating Alleged Truths: A Response to Ana Forcinito.” Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought, edited by Martínez-San Miguel et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 253–59. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. Routledge, 1990. Byapari, Manoranjan. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit. Translated by Sipra Mukherjee. Sage, 2018. Dangle, Arjun, editor. Poisoned Bread. Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature. Orient Blackswan, 1992. Detwiler, Louise, and Janis Breckenridge, editors. Pushing the Boundaries of Latin American Testimony. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Devy, G.N. “Introduction.” The Outcaste: Akkarmashi, edited by Sharan Kumar Limbale and translated by Santosh Bhoomkar. Oxford UP, 2003, pp. xiii–xxvi. Dutt, Yashica. Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir. Aleph, 2019. Ganguly, Debjani. “Dalit Life-Stories.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, edited by Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana. Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 142–62. Gidla, Sujatha. Ants Among Elephants. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Gugelberger, Georg. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Duke UP, 1996. Gupta, Sonya Surabhi, and Shad Naved. “South Asian Readings of Gabriel García Márquez.” The Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Gene Bell Villada and Ignacio López-Calvo. Oxford UP, Forthcoming. Gupta, Sonya Surabhi, and Vijaya Venkataraman. “Living to Tell the Tale: Testimonio as Subaltern Voice in India and Latin America.” Contemporary Perspectives: History and Sociology of South Asia, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 186–93.

16  Sonya Surabhi Gupta

Guru, Gopal. “The Language of Dalit-Bahujan Political Discourse.” Dalit Identity and Politics, edited by Ghanshyam Shah. Sage Publications, 2001, pp. 97–107. ———. “Afterword.” In The Prisons We Broke, by Baby Kamble. Translated by Maya Pandit, 2nd ed. Orient Blackswan, 2008/2018, pp. 158–70. Jangam, Chinaiah. “Politics of Identity and the Project of Writing History in Postcolonial India: A Dalit Critique.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. L, no. 40, 2015, pp. 63–70. ———. “How Not to Write a Dalit Memoir.” The Wire, 22 May 2018, https://thewire.in/ caste/how-not-to-write-a-dalit-memoir. Accessed 8 Feb. 2020. Kamble, Baby. Nuestra existencia: La vida de una mujer intocable. Translated by Milagros Palma. Trilce, Indigo, 1996. ———. The Prisons We Broke. Translated by Maya Pandit. Orient Blackswan, 2008. Klengel, Susanne, and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, editors. Sur/South: Poetics and Politics of Thinking Latin America and India. Iberoamericana, Vervuert, 2016. Kumar, Raj. Dalit Personal Narratives: Reading Caste, Nation, and Identity. Orient Blackswan, 2011. Lalita, K.“Language of Silence: Interview with K Lalita.” Interview by Gogu Shyamala and A. Suneetha, 23 Jan. 2015, www.anveshi.org.in/language-of-silence-interview-with-klalita/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2020. Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. “Founding Statement.” Boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 3, 1993, pp. 110–21. Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature. Orient Longman, 2004. Misrahi-Barak, Judith et al., editors. Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Reimagined. Routledge, 2019. Mukhopadhyay, Arpita Chattaraj. “Literatures of Suffering and Resistance: Dalit Women’s Testimonios and Black Women Slave Narratives – A Comparative Study.” Dalit Literatures in India, edited by Joshil K. Abraham and Judith Misrahi-Barak. Routledge, 2015, pp. 260–72. Nayar, Pramod K. “Bama’s Karukku: Dalit Autobiography as Testimonio.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 41, no. 2, 2006, pp. 83–100. ———. “The Poetics of Postcolonial Atrocity: Dalit Life Writing, Testimonio, and Human Rights.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 42, no. 3–4, 2012, pp. 237–64. Pandey, Gyanendra. A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States. Cambridge UP, 2013. Pandian, M.S.S. “On a Dalit Woman’s Testimonio.” Seminar, no. 471, Nov. 1998, pp. 53–56. ———. “Writing Ordinary Lives.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 38, 2008, pp. 34–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40277974. Accessed 6 June 2020. Pandit, Maya. “Translation: A Case of Border Crossing in the Global Village.” Translation Today, vol. 7, no. 1–2, 2010, pp. 147–57. Panjabi, Kavita. “The Generic Location of Women’s Testimonial Literature and Its Social Function in India and Latin America.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 30, 1992, pp. 58–65. Prashad, Vijay. “Cataracts of Silence: Race on the Edge of Indian Thought.” Claiming Power from Below: Dalits and the Subaltern Question in India, edited by Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus. Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 133–50. Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal, vol. 29, 1992, pp. 549–57. Rao, Anupama. “Who Is the Dalit? The Emergence of a New Political Subject.” Claiming Power from Below: Dalits and the Subaltern Question in India, edited by Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus. Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 11–27.

Introduction  17

Rawat, Ramanarayan S., and K. Satyanarayana, editors. Dalit Studies. Duke UP, 2016. Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Gender. Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios. Zubaan, 2006. Rey Rosa, Rodrigo. Human Matter. Translated by Eduardo Aparicio from the Spanish original El material humano (Anagrama, 2009). U of Texas P, 2019. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. “Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A  Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 111, no. 1, 2012, pp. 95–109. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, and Rosanna Barragan, editors. Debates post-coloniales: una introducción a los estudios de la subalternidad (Postcolonial Debates: An Introduction to Subaltern Studies). Sephis, Aruwiyri, 1997. Saldívar, José David. Transamericanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico. Duke UP, 2012. Sarkar, Sumit. “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies.” Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi. Verso, 2000, pp. 300–23. Sarlo, Beatriz. Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión. Siglo XXI, 2005. Satyanarayana, K. “Dalitism: Critique of Telugu Literature.” Refiguring Culture, edited by Satish Poduval. Sahitya Akademi, 2003, pp. 78–89. ———. “Dalit Autobiography as a Testimonial Narrative: Reading Narendra Jadhav’s ­Outcaste.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 46, 2009, pp. 139–54. Sirohi, Rahul A., and Sonya Surabhi Gupta. “The Political Economy of Race and Caste: Revisiting the Writings of Mariátegui and Ambedkar.” Journal of Labor and Society, vol. 23, no. 3, Sept. 2020, pp. 399–413. Thomas, Sara Sindhu. “Witnessing and Experiencing Dalitness: In Defence of Dalit Women’s Testimonios.” Dalit Literatures in India, edited by Joshil K. Abraham and Judith Misrahi-Barak, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2018, pp. 248–59. Valmiki, O.P. “Dalit Atmakatha.” Unpublished Manuscript of the Paper Presented at the Writers Panel in the Seminar “Living to Tell Their Tale: Testimonio as Subaltern Voice in India and Latin America”. Centre for Spanish and Latin American Studies, Jamia ­Millia Islamia, 24 Mar. 2007. Velayudhan, Meera. “Linking Radical Traditions and the Contemporary Dalit Women’s Movement: An Intergenerational Lense.” Feminist Review, vol. 119, 2018, pp. 106–25. Walsh, Rodolfo. Operation Massacre. Translated by Daniella Gitlin. Seven Stories Press, 2013 (Original in Spanish Operación Masacre, 1957).

PART I

Towards a conceptual and definitional framework

1 THE TOUCH OF THE OTHER Testimonio and autobiographical writing in India and Latin America Francesca Denegri1

Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness but by the style in which they are imagined. (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6)

From a Latin American perspective, the robust emergence of Dalit testimonial and autobiographical narratives over recent decades is both inspiring and intriguing. The diversity of the genre of the oppressed in its Indian form, comprising as it does texts written in different languages and from diverse positions that reflect on regional and on subcastes histories, can be overwhelming indeed. Besides the traditional regional and cultural distinctions of north and south and east and west, there is also the unequal impact on Dalits of recent political developments and legislation, the most discussed of which is the reservation system that has allowed access to higher education, government jobs, and upward socioeconomic mobility to some, but not all, of four generations of Dalits since the new constitution of independent India banning untouchability was adopted in 1949. The emergence of a new profile of a university-educated, urban, middle-class Dalit writer of autobiographical and testimonial narratives, who stands in sharp contrast with the stereotype of a poor, voiceless, unlettered rural Dalit, adds to the complexity of the picture. Notice that the word I use here is writer of testimonial and autobiographical narratives, not oral informant. This is because one of the prominent features that this diverse corpus of Dalit literature presents from its inception, and which differs from the classical form of Latin American testimonio, is that it is mostly authored directly and without mediation by Dalit writers who neither need nor wish to depend on upper-caste Indians to tell their stories to the world. There are few exceptions to this rule, of which Viramma and Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell Their Story – examined in this volume – are well known. Both

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texts fall into the classical ethnographic tradition based on oral life stories that is central to the development of the Latin American testimonio, and they are by and large exceptions to the mainstream Dalit genre. The fact is that Dalits have entered vigorously into the Indian literary sphere not just as “witnesses” or “informants” but as writers in their own right, whereas Latin American testimonio narrators like Rigoberta Menchú, Esteban Montejo, and Domitila Barrios remained until recently, by choice or necessity, largely in the oral tradition, and had to resort to mediation by the intellectual middle class, or letrado, if they wanted their stories and that of the community whom they represented to be available in book form. However, this Latin American “literature of the subaltern” that emerged in Cuba in the 1960s after Castro’s 1961 “Words to the Intellectuals,” has recently ceased being by definition an oral narrative in the first person told by an illiterate narrator and recorded/edited by a letrado.2 As new forms of unmediated testimonio developed in the aftermath of armed conflict and truth commissions at the end of the 20th century, where the victim of violence, typically an Indian Quechua speaker, was invited to give their testimonio directly before a national audience, the figure of the editor responsible for bringing together and giving shape to the story of their informant appears to have faded away as a figure of the past.3 Apart from the impact of public hearings on the victims of political violence, economic growth, and the expansion of university studies in the past three decades have propelled the children of erstwhile-unlettered citizens in Latin American to take up the pen to tell their stories directly, as autobiographical narrators, instead of as testimoniantes or informants.4 Examples of this development in Peru include, first, Lurgio Gavilán’s Memorias de un soldado desconocido (Memories of an Unknown Soldier, Lima, IEP), which tells the story of the author, who as an eight-year-old Andean Quechua speaker campesino from Ayacucho, the poorest region of the country, joined first the Shining Path guerrilla in the 1980s, then the army, where he was formally educated, then a Catholic monastery in Ocopa, before finally becoming a PhD student of anthropology at the university in Mexico, where he wrote his celebrated book and, second, Salvatierra/Méndez Núñez’s La vida ya no era vida (Life Was Not Life Anymore), written by the children of the ANFASEP mothers, an association of relatives of the disappeared from the Quechua-speaking communities of Allpachaka, Chiara, and Quispillaqta, also in Ayacucho (Lima, Paz y Esperanza). The different shades of meaning evoked by a mediated testimonio – like the classical Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1982), an unmediated account; like Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan (1997); or like the more recent Memorias de un soldado desconocido of Lurgio Gavilán, and the contrasting set of energies and emotions that are mobilised distinctly in the realms of orality and writing – are some of the features that I intend to discuss in this chapter. In the case of India, even as more and more Dalits gain access to that bastion of privilege which literature symbolises, the practice of reading Dalit testimonial narratives within the critical framework of the classical Latin American testimonio still seems enticing – not least because of the endeavours within the Dalit writing community itself to look beyond the confines of the Indian literary tradition

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and into paradigms provided by subaltern movements elsewhere in the world as a source of empowerment and identity. The Dalit Panthers in the 1970s adopted not only the name but also the use of autobiography as a counter hegemonic literary genre from the Black Panthers in the United States. Ambedkar’s interest in the Black US-American struggle became, over the years, a source of social and even racial identification among many Dalits who began to see themselves as Asian Black people and to write about their African ancestry. In search of an acceptable identity and history outside Hinduism and outside their native India, Dalits made visible efforts to include themselves in the concept of Pan-Africanism and to connect with Black and African movements around the globe. To understand Dalits’ need to look beyond native cultural traditions in India, one must consider that, if literature in its written form is universally drenched in elitist connotations, this is particularly insidious in India. It is so because Hindu sacred scripts – the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Gita and the Manusmriti – contain the blueprint for the present caste or varna system responsible for the exclusion of Dalits from the fabric of human society and from – to use a common Latin American image – the walled “Indian lettered city.” A concept proposed by Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, la ciudad letrada, or the lettered city, explores Latin American cities as spaces of transculturation where diverse communities, marked by a colonial, vertical, but somewhat-porous hierarchy, constantly intervene in the creation, recreation, and renewal of hybrid cultural practices. A different case is that of the Indian lettered city, which traditionally, following the Vedas, allowed only Brahmins, not outcastes or Shudras, to learn and practise from the sacred scripts. The fate of Shambuk and that of Eklavya are good reminders of what happens to those from below who transgress the boundaries of the lettered city. This exclusive aspect of Hindu ideology as it appears in the sacred scripts has propelled massive conversion movements among Dalits, not only to Buddhism but also to Christianity, Sikhism, and Islam, which, in theory if not in practice, represent egalitarian ideologies.5 Conversely, and to problematise Ángel Rama’s terminology, the entrance of the Latin American subaltern into the lettered city is also fraught with conflict, as Rocío Silva Santisteban argues in El factor asco (The Disgust Factor 2006) with reference to Georgina Gamboa’s testimonio at the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s public hearing in April 2002. Gamboa’s words were misinterpreted publicly by a commissioner who made of her story an exemplum of sacrificial motherhood, despite her insistence of contradictory feelings for the daughter she had as a result of multiple rapes in prison. In Kavita Panjabi’s essay on “Transcultural Politics and Aesthetics,” she refers to the impact of Sandino’s Daughters, a collection of Nicaraguan women’s testimonies, on Indian feminist historiography in general, and on the Telangana’s We Were Making History in particular.6 Panjabi views women’s testimonies as a transcultural genre narrated across “the divides of the indigenous and the metropolitan, the subaltern militant and the middle-class academic, the collective and the individual, and often across nations too.” Furthermore, she highlights how the experience of mediation with Telangana female fighters’ oral culture impacted the sense of identity of the

24  Francesca Denegri

middle class women’s collective Stree Shakti Sangathana (“constantly with us was the feeling . . . that we had been there before ourselves. We matched incidents in their lives with those in ours: ‘oh! She’s like you or X or Y’ we’d comment. . . . Gradually these stories became part of our own mythology” 280). Panjabi points out that the space created in the process of testimonio production provided a particularly solid bridge where women of different classes (Panjabi doesn’t specifically address how the social categories of caste and class interact here) at either end of the divide meet and recognise each other and where a collective antipatriarchal identity and consciousness is developed between interlocutors in the act of telling (2007). This point has become particularly visible in recent gender-focused scholarship, which identifies a common antipatriarchal subtext in Dalit women’s autobiographical writing, such as Susheela Thakbhaure’s The Pain of the Trap (2011), which is not accidental or “organic” but is instead politically configured in the act of writing (Rege 2006; Brueck, 2019). Panjabi’s argument strikes an important chord with readers familiar with Latin American testimonio, where the voice of the subaltern campesino is rendered audible by middle-class intellectuals who, in the process of textual production, undergo an intersectional experience vis-à-vis the perception of the “other,” as the fabric of that “other” subaltern community becomes increasingly intimate and familiar to the compiler. Elena Poniatowska’s comments regarding the transformative process that she experienced in the writing of Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969, Here’s to you, Jesusa 2001) poignantly reveal the transcultural, transclass, transidentity power that mediated testimonio exerts over the interlocutors, who by definition represent contrasting class origins. Poniatowska, whose quintessentially upper-class Mexican background is well known, declares that Josefina (Jesusa in the text) offered her the opportunity to come into contact with a social dynamic that she couldn’t even have imagined within her crystal tower. Josefina Bórquez, says Poniatowska, allowed her to become, once and for all, part of her own country, something that she as a privileged French-speaking girl had yearned for ever since her arrival in Mexico, when the war in Europe broke out. “Something is being born inside me, something new that wasn’t there before,” says Poniatowska, in the introduction. “What was growing was my Mexican being, my becoming Mexican – feeling Mexico inside me, the same one that was inside Jesusa” (xiv). Not unlike the Telangana women’s stories becoming unwittingly part of Stree Shakti Sanghatana’s personal mythology, Bórquez’s Mexico eventually, through the process of interviewing and editing, becomes Poniatowska’s world. If the classical testimonio’s transformative powers deeply affected Cuban Esteban Montejo’s interviewer Miguel Barnet, Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú’s Elizabeth Burgos, or Bolivian Domitila Barrios’s Moema Viezzer, to name but a few, then testimonies given in the context of truth commissions in Peru, Guatemala, and Chile have also had a unique, transformative effect on the campesino testimoniante, the peasant witness, who became empowered through the act of public speech before the nation (e.g. “I hereby say,” “I hereby tell you,” “I hereby speak”), as suggested by Sofía

The touch of the other  25

Macher in her article “Quechua Women: Agency in the Testimonies of the CVRPeru Public Hearings” (2019). In a similar vein, and after exploring the nomenclature available for women’s Dalit autobiographies, Sharmila Rege concludes that the category testimonio, in its original Latin American form and context – an antihegemonic direct-participant account which saw its heyday in the popular struggles against dictatorial regimes of the 1969s and 1970s in Central and South America – is appropriate to the corpus in question, because Dalit women’s narratives are produced, like their Latin American precursors, in line with the firm ideology and vantage point of a liberation movement. Against the arguments emerging from some sections of the Dalit middle classes, for whom these texts are a “source of embarrassment” because they tell stories of shame that they would rather forget (Rege, Writing Caste 12), testimonio, a term suffused in legalistic and political connotation, is seen to empower – rather than embarrass – the oppressed subject as it confronts and questions the official pretence that caste oppression is no longer an issue in secular India. Following some of John Beverley’s points in his foundational essay “The Margin at the Centre” (1996), Rege argues that Dalit testimonial narratives problematise, just as Latin American testimonios before them, two questions. The first one concerns the potentially conflicting relationship between personal truth and empirical factuality, and the second one addresses the representation of the individual and the collective self in a genre normally associated with the bourgeoisie’s reverence for the self as a discrete entity. Although identifying the common structures that give meaning to both Indian and Latin American testimonial narratives is important, so is not neglecting the structural differences that make classical testimonio a distinctly modern Latin American genre and Dalit testimonio a specifically modern Indian one. Rege’s use of Beverley’s definition intriguingly excludes two of the central points that Beverley explores at length in his essay, which have been pivotal in debates on Latin American testimonio for the past two decades. These are, first, the question of mediation addressed earlier and the relation established between narrator and editor in the production of the narratives, which Beverley describes as “one of the more hotly debated theoretical points in the discussion of the genre” (27) and, second, a crucial corollary to this, the conflicting relations negotiated between orality and writing, as distinct sources of knowledge, in the act of producing the testimonio. On the other hand, while Kavita Panjabi’s discussion on the transcultural nature of testimonio illuminates the Telangana women’s narratives, the other texts studied in her paper are nonmediated memoirs and dairies written individually by their authors, and in this sense, they follow an entirely different dynamic to that of We Were Making History.7 The paucity of discussion around the concepts of mediation and orality in the context of Dalit testimonios seems self-explanatory: With the universalisation of education and reservation policies, Dalit writers, as pointed out earlier, have now cracked open the walls of the lettered city without ever having had the need of

26  Francesca Denegri

mediation from upper castes. However, the fact that such a momentous event was not preceded by periods when voices of the Untouchables could be heard within any quarters of the Indian lettered cities suggests the vapidity of a transcultural zone or “contact zone” where those inside and outside their walls could engage in productive exchange. I suggest that the history of Latin American and Indian subalternities and testimonio is encoded in the specific history of literary forms that testimonial narratives, as the “genre of the subaltern,” adopted in each case.

The contact zone and mediation Subalternity is a relational condition. Dalits today are subaltern in relation to upper-caste Indians, as the Indigenous K'iche' and Quechua campesinos descendants of Mayas and Incas are today subaltern in relation to the dominant ladino or creole of Spanish origin. Testimonio as it is known today is an expression of Latin American subalternity within the contact zone produced at the time of conquest. Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zone as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (4). Contact, conflict, and confrontation, then, primarily define the contact zone, but, argues Pratt, there is also long-term, concrete collaboration between the conquered and the conqueror in the form of mediators, interpreters, scribes, and assistants to the state apparatus who act as a productive nexus between the clashing cultures. This is what Pratt calls “the arts of the contact zone” and even the “joy of the contact zone” (29). The contact zone evokes a model of community based on “transculturation, interculturality, mediation, critique, denunciation and instability.” Because it is also a zone that dwells in unequal conflict and hierarchy, the threat of an upturn of the status quo – the threat of war and revolt – is also a feature of the contact zone. It spells danger, but it can be artful. The rise of Latin American testimonio can be read as a result of two factors that converged in the late 1960s: first, the existence in the region of a rich and continuous ethnographic tradition within the contact zone, going back to the chronicles, with a strong interest in the oral accounts of Indigenous peoples, and second, the social liberation movements that swept across the continent after the Cuban Revolution, which mobilised the interest of the middle-class intellectual to give voice to the Indigenous campesinos, who were seen as allies in the common struggle against authoritarian states. Upon the Spanish chroniclers’ arrival in the cities of the “New World,” they registered in meticulous details Indigenous customs, belief systems, social structures, military history, road layouts, organisation of the land, and imperial architecture, all of which involved intense work with the oral cultures of the Indigenous peoples. Likewise, the need to establish political alliances between the Spaniards and the Indigenous aristocracy involved an extensive network of intermarriage between women of the royal lineages and Spanish soldiers and chroniclers. The historiography of the Spanish conquest is arguably founded on accounts and practices

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of mediation and negotiation on one hand between orality and writing and on the other between Indigenous and Western systems of knowledge represented by the major interlocutors, the Spanish vencedores and the Indigenous vencidos (Wachtel 12). The terminology emphasises a society founded on conquest and war, a humanmade scenario with its aftermath of domination, inequality, discontent, and above all permanent instability, in opposition to the Hindu varna system, which claims to be a god-made society as revealed through the books of divine inspiration, the Vedas, and therefore static, permanent, incontestable. The memory of this deeply conflictive original encounter is crucial to understanding the fraught attempts in which Latin American nations have engaged time and time again in the project of defining their cultural identities. In literary terms, the projects of mestizaje and indigenismo, in their various shapes and colours, have saturated the Latin American literary corpus, from Romantic indianismo in the early 19th century, to realist indianism 50 years later, to all brands of 20th-century indigenismo and neo-indigenismo. Politically, both indigenismo and mestizaje have had deep impacts on modern political movements in the region, from the APRA in Peru to the revolution in Mexico, both of which endeavoured to challenge the established political and social order of the “white” elites by reclaiming power for the Indian and the mestizo. Howsoever “white” this elite might perceive themselves, the “whiteness” does not operate in isolation from the subaltern. From the first encounter in the contact zone  – and despite the ideology of racism and purity of blood in which the Spaniards were steeped in the wake of the expulsion of Moors and Jews from their territory – exogamy was the norm. In this, as in other practices, metropolitan laws in the colonies were “observed but not obeyed,” and colonials soon learnt to improvise and push the frontiers of what was lawful in order to live day by day in their new and strange world (Denegri, “Testimonio and Its Discontents” 73–86). This initial interactive and improvisational dimension of the contact zone, which continues in time through a series of sociopolitical events and cultural forms, of which testimonio as a mediated genre between the unlettered subaltern and the intellectual elite is but one example, stands in contrast with the Indian caste system, where untouchability and its corollary of enforced separateness among castes is common practice. This explains why the burning of Premchand’s novel by members of the Bharatiya Dalit Sahitya Academy (BDSA) might signal the will of Dalits, as Brueck suggests, “to negotiate with a symbol of a discursive sphere that has always either spoken for them or ignored them completely” (Brueck, Writing Resistance 4). Opening up the contact zone might have been the first achievement of Dalit politics. In India, writes Gopal Guru, the discourse on untouchability is built up around the “moral economy” of the idea of touch, “which achieves fragmentation with no investment of power; that is to say, it is withdrawal from, rather than engagement with, bodies that creates the other: the untouchable” (16). Untouchability demands that upper castes protect their pure, sacred bodies from the ritually defiling bodies of the Untouchables, through insulation rather than assimilation – hence the location

28  Francesca Denegri

of Dalits in discreet sociospatial units outside villages and the strict regulations that are enforced even today to separate access to water, tea, food, classroom space, temples, burial grounds, and so on. The opening scene of Stalin K’s documentary India Untouched: Stories of a People Apart (2007) is poignantly revealing of this ideology that prevents the construction of a contact zone between castes in India. In the first sequence, we see a group of children laughing and playing about on a hot, dusty village road as they are walking home from school, as any ordinary group of children in any ordinary place in the world would do. However, the ordinariness of this image soon gives way to an uncanny, unfamiliar scene, as the children suddenly baulk at what seems like an invisible barrier, an invisible cordon that prevents them from going any further. When the documentarist asks why they have stopped, we hear their innocent voices answering in a matter-of-fact tone, as in a classroom rotta, “Because this is the Dalit’s quarters.” The silence that follows is then broken by a boy who flashing an innocent but painful smile explains, “If we go in, we get polluted.” The ambiguity of the smile suggests that it is not clear whether the boy really understands the meaning of his answer. What is clear is that this is a rule that he and his friends know they must not break. In insulating the upper castes from the touch of the other, Hinduist ideology has constructed the realm of the Untouchable as repulsive and polluting. The first images offered by Dalit testimonial narratives of their neighbourhoods adds depth to the scene described in the documentary. After a detailed mapping of the different caste communities that occupy a distinct and separate space in her village in Tamil Nadu, Bama muses, I don’t know how it came about that the upper-caste communities and the lower-caste communities were separated like this into different parts of the village. But they kept themselves to their part of the village, and we stayed in ours. (6) Apart from that invisible cordon that demarcates the frontier between her Parayar community and the others, Bama warns of a more perceptive and polluting demarcation at work in her Dalit quarters: “in the darkness and the mire, you had to watch out for shit as you came and went” (76). Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan (a word connected to the ideology of pollution in that it refers to food contaminated by having been eaten before, the leftovers that his community earned as payment for their labour) likewise begins with a description of his Chuhra basti as distinctly separate from the village by a pond-cum-sewage. Writes Valmiki, On the edges of the pond were the homes of the Chuhras. All the women of the village, young girls, older women, even the newly married brides, would sit in the open space behind these homes at the edges of the pond to take a shit. Not just under the cover of darkness but even in daylight. . . . They

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sat on Dabbowali’s shores without worrying about decency, exposing their private parts. (1) Intertwined with the description of physical separateness from the rest of the village is the memory of disgust and shame at women’s exposure of their genitalia (why he remembers only women, not men, defecating in the shores is a question that Valmiki avoids) and, again, shit. These are traumatic memories in which not even that quintessential symbol of purity across cultures represented by the bride is spared of associations with a ritually defiling body. The description continues: All the quarrels of the village would be discussed in the shape of a Round Table Conference at this same spot. There was muck strewn everywhere. The stench was so overpowering that one would choke within a minute. The pigs wandering in narrow lanes, naked children, dogs, daily fights, this was the environment of my childhood. (2) Shame, more than rage, is the overwhelming emotion provoked by a life of abjection condensed in images of shit, pigs, female genitalia, and quarrels. Despite the Dalit writers’ agendas to help in the reinvention of their identity through a process of the resemanticisation of symbols and experiences that would reinvest them with positive signs, these endeavours are laden with conflict. Thus, although pigs, which the dominant Hindu discourse defines as polluting and associates with Dalits, are described elsewhere in Valmiki’s narrative in a positive light as symbols not of filth but of prosperity, the images conjured up remain deeply ambivalent. Likewise, in Surajpal Chauhan’s Tiraskrit, after having described the catching, killing, and eating of a pig in celebratory mode, he writes, Today, remembering those days fills me with hate. Eating raw pig’s meat is such an uncivilized and repulsive thing. Our hands and mouths used to be covered with fat. A lot of flies used to swarm around my face and hands. Yuk! Thinking about it now makes me feel nauseous! (Beth, “Hindi Dalit Autobiography” 555–56) Not only has this insidious ideology of purity and pollution managed to produce, over the millennia, the spatial structures of exclusion that Valmiki, Surajpal, Bama, and other writers describe, but it has also instilled in a number of Dalit writers an identity steeped in shame and guilt that borders, as Valmiki himself writes, on an inferiority complex. An inflexion on this point is offered by recent Dalit fiction, such as Shyamala G’s “Raw Wound,” which if read as a narrative of atrocity provides an antiestablishment idiom of rage, not shame, that aims at the

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shaping of a new India (Satyanarayana), just as the 2004 burning of multiple copies of Rangbhumi in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar hints at the positioning of the Hindi Dalit literary sphere as a counterpublic. The ideology of pollution and disgust has indeed also been deployed by the state in times of crisis and war in Latin America, as a way of instigating and justifying violence against the Indigenous subaltern, as Silva Santisteban (2006) clearly argues in her work about Peru’s “terror years” (1980–2000). However, such ideologies in Latin America are successful, especially in times of armed confrontation and civil war, and consequently, they do not necessarily constitute the status quo. Hence, more than shame and guilt, narrators of Latin American testimonio oscillate between rage for the exploitation suffered and melancholia for the loss of a glorious past, as in Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio, where she records her culture’s past, celebrating rituals, customs, and traditions with wonder, mystery, and pride, always evoking reverence, never disgust.

Memory and identity in Indian and Amerindian subalternities One of the visible narrative tensions of earlier Dalit testimonies is provided by the writers’ explicit adherence to a Dalit identity that, however, appears enmeshed in a negative cluster of emotions associated with humiliation and pollution. The question then was how to undergo a cleansing process from the memories of pain, hate, and shame associated with Dalithood, without submitting to acculturation or sanskritisation, as Baburao Bagul (1992) and others point out. “To focus singlemindedly on education to improve the caste” (29) is the message signposted at every intersection, as the narrator’s Pitaji insists in Joothan. While each step taken in this direction is indeed a step farther away from the scene/sin of original abjection, it also risks being a step farther away from the narrator’s basti. Turning back to face the path that led him away from the stench of the Dabbowali, the narrator in Joothan reconfirms his commitment to “improve the caste.” Thus is configured the field of conflicting forces in which this unresolved crisis of identity will remain, with no relief, at play. Over and over again, Valmiki will come back to his village to question, from his educated urban, middle-class vantage point, his jati’s traditions and rituals, the pigs rooting in the compound, the pujas, the consumption of alcohol, the rows, the din, the bantering, the small talk of “the poor illiterate” (32), the humiliating “salaam,” and the stench, always, always the stench. The more “separated from these conventions” he becomes, the more he seems to offend his family, the more he takes refuge in his books. Conversely, from the point of view of the others in the basti, and despite the consensual mantra that only education will improve caste, the more committed the narrator becomes to his studies, the more often he is seen as a “Chuhre pretending to be a Brahmin” (62). Alas, there seems to be no escape from this wrenching identity conflict. The tensions between the now-educated, middle-class Dalit narrator and the uneducated, poor Chuhre left behind in the basti is enacted in the sliding, within single, discreet scenes, of the grammatical first-person we/us to the third-person

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they/them. This grammatical sliding is enacted when the clash between Dalit collective ideology (urging Chuhre values and practices to be upheld) and personal, intimate emotion (the feeling of humiliation and shame at evoking these practices) reaches a point of saturation, as in the scene that gives the title to the book. Here the narrator describes the routine field and housework that Chuhras must do to get food. This paragraph is written in the first-person plural, closing thus: “To compensate us for all this work, we got five seers of grain. . . . Sometimes the joothan, the scraps, would also be put in the basket with the rotis for us.” Suddenly and without warning, the narrator slides from an inclusive us to a distanced, exclusive they: After the baratis had eaten, the dirty pattals or leaf-plates were put in the Chuhra’s baskets, which they took home, to save the joothan sticking to them. The little pieces of pooris and a little bit of vegetable were enough to make them happy. . . . Poor things, they had never enjoyed a wedding feast. So they had licked it all up. The representation of scenes with pigs at the centre reveals the same sliding mode: The pigs rooting in the compound were not the symbol of dirt to us but of prosperity and so they are today. Yes, the educated among us, who are still very minute in percentage, have separated themselves from these conventions. It is not because of a reformist perspective but because of their inferiority complex that they have done so. The educated ones suffer more from this inferiority complex that is caused by social pressures. (13, emphasis added) As Dalits escape poverty by pursuing high standards of education and by moving to cities in search of better employment opportunities and better schools for their children, new problems emerge in the face of social pressures. The need to sanskritise and hide the caste slowly but surely erodes the collective identity. The temptation to hide the caste is enormous, because As long as people don’t know that you are a Dalit, things are fine. The moment they find out your caste, everything changes. The whispers slash your veins like knives. Poverty, illiteracy, broken lives, the pain of standing outside the door, how would the civilized Savarna Hindus know it? (134) Revealing caste in Omprakash Valmiki’s narrative seems to be as utterly momentous as coming out of the closet is for a gay individual, because what is at stake is nothing less than being rejected or accepted for what one really is. Valmiki’s heart is not wrong when it pounds fiercely at the suspicion that he will be rejected, in horror, by a budding sweetheart after revealing his caste. Upon coming out, the

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lacerating realisation is that all links with this friend have been snapped, the overriding feeling is not pain but relief at having confessed: “Immersed in the uproar that was going on inside me, I could feel that the tension was dissipating. As though a great burden had lifted off my chest” (99). Being a Bhangi, or a Chuhra, keeping pigs and killing them for a wedding, collecting joothan to eat, being forced to sweep the school during class hours, and having the resilience to come out at the other end with a good degree in their hands after so much humiliation and exploitation are all experiences that Dalit writers attempt to resemantise and invest with a positive sign. However, after millennia of relentless untouchability and invisibility, the memory of an ancient, proud past necessary to prop up Dalit’s new political identity is elusive. Such is the magnitude of the problem that some Dalit activists call for the shedding of traditions and for the adoption of a fresh Western identity. Writes Chandra Bhan Prasad, columnist of the English language daily Pioneer, Dalits have a distinct culture. But we should not glorify it. Neither do we want Brahman/Shudra culture. We want European culture, which is the best. When [the] West’s economic model is turning out to be the standard model for most nations, why not their culture? Every Dalit who is happy today, it is because he is Westernised. With which culture was Dr Ambedkar more close to? Was it not Western? (Prasad) Ambedkar was clearly concerned with Dalits’ possible temptations to acculturate. Thus, he urged Dalit writers to give lustre to their history by developing new symbols from political rereadings of Indian’s ancient mythology: The Sita in your novels and stories is now crossing the “Lakshmanrekha” – the forbidden line. Draupadi’s clothes are being taken away in the court of Duryodhan – Dushyant does not recognise Shakuntala, she is getting exiled. That is why I  earnestly want to tell the writers: manifest in your literary forms [our] noble life-values and cultural values. If Ambedkar’s suggested path appears today as one that is fraught with ambiguities for Dalit writers whose work begins to circulate in the contact zone, his directive translates well in another, entirely different field of Dalit literature, where noble cultural values and glowing history abound. This is the field of pamphlets, studied in careful and illuminating detail by Sarah Beth Wilkerson in her thesis on Dalit Hindi literature. Sarah Beth defines the field, after Nancy Fraser, as a “subaltern counterpublics,” which is staged, she argues, in “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses to withdraw, regroup and train and to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs” (123–24). Pamphlet writers such as Swami Achutanand of the Adi Hindu movement, influenced by Jyotiba Phule, maintain that all

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lower-caste communities are non-Hindu descendants of the Indus valley’s original inhabitants (71–80). They were a peace-loving, egalitarian, honest race, who upon being invaded by the Aryans were forced into accepting the caste system. In this alternative scenario, Hindus are foreign invaders and Sanskrit is a foreign language, and therefore the legitimacy of the sacred Sanskrit scriptures needs to be seriously questioned. Claims about Dalits’ being the original and legitimate inhabitants of India are interwoven with recent archaeological evidence of pre-Aryan civilisations like Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, which Dalit pamphlet writers believe were built by their ancestors. Umesh Kumar’s “Bhartiya Achambha” explains contemporary divisions of Dalit ancestors into Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Scheduled Castes (SCs), and Scheduled Tribes (STs) in a way that unifies them as victims of the same invasion and its aftermath. According to this theory, upon being invaded, a group fled to the forest and later became the Adivasis, another group submitted, thus becoming the servants or Shudras, of the Brahmin invaders, and the third group, the SCs, fought them and therefore were excluded from Hindu society (78). The aftermath was social division and regression and, above all, such severe mental enslavement that the conquered began to attribute their situation of unspeakable oppression to the will of gods, which would explain Dalit’s difficulty with asserting their identity today. To counteract these divine voices, counterreadings of the Ramayana, following Periyar’s “The Characters of the Ramayan” (1930), also circulate in pamphlet form. In these, King Ram, far from being the ideal ruler, is portrayed as corrupt and immoral, a lazy, meat-eating womaniser who beheads Shambuk not really because of his being a lower-caste member who practices meditation thereby contravening the laws written in the Vedas but because he dares to speak out against Ram. And just as in this version, where Ram is vilified and Ravanna, conversely, is glorified, endless other pamphlets deconstruct the Manusmriti, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Mahabharata and turn symbols of humiliation and exploitation into symbols of Dalit protest and pride (Beth, Hindi Dalit Literature 92).8 Despite my rushed summary, I hope that I’ve made clear that pamphlet literature unequivocally endeavours to empower Dalits with liberative historical motifs. And, as probably suspected by readers, this literature, unlike Dalit testimonial narratives, is excluded and silenced by the official, public sphere. Indeed, argues Sarah Beth, the entire literary circuit in which pamphlets move, from the production stages to the printing and from the distribution networks to the reading practices, is strictly confined to the Dalit counterpublic sphere. In other words, the steady and vibrant flow of Dalit pamphlet literature circulates entirely outside the contact zone as it is written by Dalits for a Dalit audience, and it circulates exclusively in Dalit festivals, political meetings, rallies, and melas, standing firmly outside the contact zone and public debate. Conversely, the conflict-laden Dalit testimonial narratives discussed earlier enjoy healthy visibility on the list of major publishers in India and are featuring in the reading lists of universities in the US, France, and the UK. In pamphlet literature, the conflict between the personal and the collective that permeates Joothan and Tiraskrit is necessarily absent, as it constitutes the counterpublic sphere

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in which Dalit’s history is reconstructed to invest the caste with a much-needed distinct and superior socioethnic identity. The notion of a counterpublic sphere, so important to understanding the production of an unambiguously positive literature among Dalits, may also be relevant in the case of Latin American subalternities, but only to a certain extent, as knowledge of a glorious imperial past is densely documented within the contact zone. The first documents available in a long and continuous series of mediated sources are the chronicles of conquest, accounts about life in the “New World” before and during the invasion of the Spaniards, told orally by Indigenous narrators who acted as interpreters for the Spanish cronista. The most famous interpreter and mediator is no doubt La Malinche, or Malintzin, a Nahua woman who accompanied Cortés on his long march from Tabasco to Tenochtitlan, playing the role of go-between for Spaniards and Indigenous peoples. Although most early chronicles are written by Spaniards, first-generation mestizos and Quechua Indians also produced their own accounts on the basis of oral stories told by their elders. Prominent examples in Peru are Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess and author of, among other books, Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentaries) about life in his native Cusco before the invasion, and Guaman Poma de Ayala, a converted Christian Indian, who wrote one of the most provocative chronicles in the “New World,” Corónicas de buen gobierno (First Chronicle of Good Governance) in the shape of a letter written in Quechua and Spanish to the king of Spain, to raise awareness of the plight of Indigenous peoples under colonial rule and to reposition his community away from the periphery and into the centre of the Christian world. This earliest genre of testimonial narratives enjoyed a continuity throughout the colonial period, a time when Indigenous foundational books, such as the Popol Vuh (Guatemala) and Dioses y Hombres de Huarochiri (The Huarochiri Manuscript, Peru) emerged, also in the contact zone, revealing the complex creation myths of the K'iche' and the Yunga peoples to the colonists. While the former was translated from the Maya Codex and the latter was collected from oral accounts in Quechua, both books represent the endeavours of mestizo and Spanish scholars to delve into accounts of Indigenous cosmogonies. Their motivations, different as they were, throw light onto how Indigenous unlettered societies interacted with the colonial Spanish and mestizo ruling classes in those earlier days. The Popol Vuh, originally written from memory by a group of K'iche' Maya right after conquest in their bid to save it from the pyre of the evangelical zeal, was translated by Francisco Ximénez, a Spanish Dominican friar who so admired and respected the K'iche' culture that he learnt the language and, later, at the end of the 17th century, when shown the hitherto-hidden K'iche' manuscript by Indigenous friends, translated it into Spanish. A far cry from this labour of love is the story of Francisco de Avila, who, backed by the Spanish Inquisition, re-collected the rituals and myths of the people of Yauyos to “extirpate idolatries” and destroy the Andean pantheon. However different the motivation of Avila and that of Ximénez were, both cases exemplify how encounters in the Latin American contact zone generated documents that

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represent the history of the vencidos, thus keeping the proud memory of Indigenous gods, kings, rituals, and social traditions alive in the contemporary imagined communities. The density and depth of available documentation that covers over five centuries can be read, then, as part of the productive even if hierarchical and violent interaction between the lettered and the unlettered, the oral and the written, the colonist and the colonised that takes place within the contact zone in Mesoamerica, Mexico, and the Andes. Whether examined, celebrated, or contested, the Popol Vuh, the Chilam Balam, Guaman’s Corónica, the Huarochiri manuscript, and the Nahua codices, among others, make up part of the national canons of Guatemala, Peru, and Mexico and thus cannot be ignored or pushed away from the contact zone. These documents have survived wars and genocides, and the knowledge contained in their pages has remained intact in the hearts and minds of Indigenous peoples, providing an ontological basis for their struggle. Says Rigoberta Menchú in the context of her struggle, I used to spend three hours a day reading, that’s how I  got to know the Popol Vuh, the Chilam Balam, and other history books. And that’s how one becomes focused on America, because one’s heart and one’s navel are buried here (Interview, 49) In her Nobel Peace Prize speech in Stockholm, Menchú focuses on the content of Maya codices as a source of knowledge not just to her community but to the entire world. “The significance of the Maya cultural heritage,” she declares proudly, “continues to astonish the learned,” “like the The Codex of Dresden, which contains the results of an investigation on eclipses as well a table of 69 dates, in which solar eclipse occur in a lapse of 33 years.” Just as Menchú invokes the wisdom and power of her heritage to legitimise the plight of her community today, there is a constant demand for native symbols by politicians in Latin America, which shows that Indigenous cultures are perceived as legitimising agents for contemporary social movements and political parties. In Mexico, the Aztec icon of an eagle capturing a snake occupies the central place in the national flag, and Cuauhtémoc, not Cortés, is visible in monuments around the cities. In Peru, President Toledo (2001–6) adopted the chakana, an Andean icon, as his party’s symbol, and his followers called him by the name of the great Inca Pachacutec. In Bolivia, Evo Morales’s first Indigenous president, who inaugurated his third term in office in the pre-Columbian archaeological site of Tiwanaku, adopted 18th-century Indigenous  rebel Túpac Katari’s legacy as a symbol of his government. Opportunistic or not, Quechua, Aztec, Mayan, and Aymara symbols, among others, are parts of a long political tradition in the region that inscribes itself with Indigenous histories of oppression and resistance in order to legitimise themselves (Dangl). Just as Latin American states cannot indulge in denying their Indigenous past, the Indigenous communities cannot forget their history of struggles

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against imperialism because it circulates in school textbooks, tourist brochures, press stories, essays, and books, and it is visible in archaeological monuments whose Inca, Maya, or Aztec authorship is beyond any question. This is all part of an Indigenous though subaltern material culture that is there for anyone to see and admire in the contact zone.

Orality and subalternity: Bama Once we see the continuities that connect the pre-Hispanic and colonial Indigenous texts with classical testimonio and with more-recent autobiographical forms of writing, we learn that that these contemporary genres are part of a cultural heritage based primarily on interculturality, mediation, critique, denunciation, and instability in the contact zone. Parallel to this dense literary corpus in the public sphere, there is a long oral tradition transmitted through ritual dances, theatre, and myth in the counterpublic sphere and in the margins of the contact zone where discourses of war and resistance are formulated.9 One of the features that link testimonios to this counterpublic sphere is that a number of them were produced in times of war. One of the better-known Latin American testimonios, Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, is a case in point, as it constitutes part of campesino’s resistance to the war generated by the US-backed military dictatorship in Guatemala, which was to last for over 30 years, until 1996. This led to Rigoberta’s insistence in the text on protecting her community from counterinsurgency forces by keeping secrets “which no one should know, not even anthropologists or intellectuals.” Menchú’s testimonio – such as Sandino’s Daughters, Omar Cabezas’s Fire from the Mountain, Roque Dalton’s Miguel Mármol, and Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s Let Me Speak! – emerge like many others in the context of war and state violence. The war context should not be forgotten as it is propitious ground for the articulation of narrator and compiler in what John Beverley calls “an ideological figure or ideologeme,” a figure which represents the possibility of a union of a radicalised intelligentsia and the poor and working classes of a country (71). That classical testimonio gave voice to the voiceless “in such a way that the intellectual or professional, usually of bourgeois or petit bourgeois background, is interpolated as being part of, and dependent on, the ‘people’ without at the same time losing his or her as an intellectual (31)” cannot be overemphasised. Without denying the inescapable contradictions and conflict inherent in this relation, the focus here is not on the difference between the subaltern and the compiler but instead on the sense of “mutuality” that is thus produced and that allows for the production of the testimonial genre (33). One of the questions intensely addressed in the discussions of testimonio is how orality and writing are by necessity negotiated in this relationship of mutuality. Conversely, this is a question mainly absent from the discussion of Dalit testimonial narratives, authored as they are by Dalits who have migrated and opted for capitalist forms of print culture. At present, this migration seems to be mainly a one-way

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road, as Dalit travellers who choose to walk down the path towards education and literariness find going back to the jati, without encountering the deep sense of ambiguity and alienation discussed earlier, difficult. Education among the subaltern as it stands in India and Latin America today seems to be an individualising experience that produces new inequalities and tensions and thus risks fragmenting the Dalit and campesino communities (Ciotti). Above all, it is an ideology associated to social, economic, and cultural capital that brings about consumption patterns and lifestyles that clash with traditional practices of oral cultures. Today, three generations after the implementation of reservation policies, one of the divides within Dalit communities seems to be found between the large number of illiterate members and those with varying levels of education.10 If in the past only Brahmin priests had the authority to read the sacred scripts and preside over Dalit rituals of worship, today the educated Sanskrit literate Dalits are those called upon. This might seem a liberating state of affairs, except that in a predominantly oral society, this new practice marginalises older or poorer members who might have the practical knowledge to officiate but not the status quo of a better-educated neighbour. From a Latin American perspective, the question is whether the figure of unlettered Dalit intellectuals is relevant in the Indian context. Dalit authorities who, like the Andean apumisayoq or the Mayan elders whom Rigoberta evokes with reverence in her testimonio, are intellectuals who entirely lack scholarly education but who, having been locally trained in their cultures’ oral tradition and having accumulated orally transmitted knowledge, hold the intellectual and moral authority and prestige that lettered Amerindians might lack in the same community (Montoya). As the Latin American narrator of classical testimonio at the time of telling their story is still firmly rooted in campesino soil and oral culture, the identity conflict pervasive in Dalit narratives is not an obvious issue. The rooting is not just social and cultural but also physical and corporeal. In Menchú words, the heart and navel are buried in that soil. Hence, the middle-class compiler will need to migrate to the narrator’s campesino world rather than the other way round. Poniatowska’s complying with Bórquez’s request that she climb to her rooftop shack and take the hens for a walk before every session and Burgos’s participating in the daily tortilla making ritual with Menchú are illustrations of the kind of commitment that the mediator needs to make to meet the narrator on their turf, not the other way around.11 The figure is equally valid for Viramma. In the introduction to the English translation of the text, Josiane Racine describes how she went to Viramma’s ceri, outside the boundaries of the village, and how meeting her interlocutor involved sitting and listening to her repertoire of songs, meeting her family, and eventually developing a lifelong relationship. The journey undertaken to meet the narrator is also linguistic, in that in these texts, great care is taken by the compiler to remain as faithful as possible to the oral tradition and rhythms of the narrator’s culture. Steeped as Viramma is in her traditional Paraiyar way of life, with all the oppression and abuse that this implies, the discourse captured in the text strikes the reader with its particularly vibrant, proud, lively chords. This is surprising given the context of unspeakable violence endured by a Paraiyar and in particular a Paraiyar woman. If in Viramma

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there is room for the kind of joy and celebration that the reader misses in Joothan and Tiraskrit, it is because at the moment of narration, there is no sense of alienation from her oral community or from community’s form of language. Viramma, at the time of speaking, is a Paraiyar who continues with her life struggle as an unreconstructed Paraiyar. Folklore specialists suggest that India remains to a large extent an oral society that operates in the participatory, practical, and dialogical modes of orality, but scholars are generally more interested in studying written discourses (Handoo). Dalit life has traditionally found its highest expressions in oral traditions such as folk songs, riddles, proverbs, rituals, spectacle, poetry, and folklore, which is the language of Viramma but which has been sidelined, by and large, not only by academics but also by middle-class Dalit writers of testimonial narratives. These oral expressions are also the sources that Bama taps with particularly contagious energy and gusto in her three books Karukku, Sangati, and Kisumbukaaran. Bama’s life trajectory is important in understanding her poetics. As narrated in her autobiographical Karukku, she left her village for high school and then college to finally enter a Catholic convent, where she was able to live a comfortable life as a nun. However, gnawed by the guilt of her individual escape from poverty, she resigns and goes back to her village to settle down as a teacher, this time assuming her female Dalit identity without any ambivalence or guilt. As it turns out, this act and this mode of returning mark her writing as a veritable passage to freedom. The return journey that Bama makes is both bold and unusual in the panorama of Dalit testimonial writers. Bama’s journey back accounts for her choice of spoken Dalit Tamil, not only for her characters but also for her narrators. With and through this language, which is considered obscene, vulgar, and ungrammatical by many, Bama stages her option of reinventing herself as a Dalit woman. Writes M.S.S. Pandian, In a spirit of defiance[, her literary language] obviously challenges the authority of literacy over orality, a divide which was ratified and nourished by Tamil Saivism. . . . But at an equally important plane, it is an effort by Bama to break free from her proficiency in standardized written Tamil, a result of her privileged education in schools and colleges, and to lose herself in the community of Dalits. (Pandian 132) For ideologues Raj Gauthaman and Unjairajan, Dalit literature is a great vehicle for reclaiming Dalit culture as an alternative to mainstream Hindu print culture, and in this sense, it is seen as the harbinger of a “politics of liberation.” What Bama offers, I suggest, is a full blown “poetics of liberation,” which has orality as its major ideological and structural support. Instead of a narrative of relentless community oppression channelled through the voice of a single, educated, middle-class narrator, Bama offers, as Pandian notes, “a site for the criss-crossing of multiple voices” (133), a splendid chorus of resilient, sharp-tongued women, old and young, who sing, banter, quarrel, whisper, and gossip as they go about their daily lives working and having

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babies in the fields under the scorching sun, cooking, eating, collecting wood, fetching water, bathing, dancing, spitting, playing tricks on each other, and telling stories, lots of stories. This is a strong, proud chorus, which at a stroke erases the authorial “I” of the autobiography in irreverent, carnivalesque, Bakhtinian notes. The language of the female body as sung by Bama’s confident choristers, with its loud expletives, its frequent naming of genitals, and its sexual innuendos, functions as an effective instrument to enact a day-to-day parodic struggle against authority of all hues, whether of violent Dalit husbands who are “only fit to drink a woman’s farts” (61) or of upper-caste women who “submit to their husbands like cobras shrinking back into their boxes” (67). The oral inscriptions that traverse this narrative manage to perforate the walls between testimonio and autobiography, suggesting a literary project that celebrates hybridism, heterogeneity, dialogism, and above all the fact that “each of us [has their] own talking,” as Peruvian writer José María Arguedas was reminded by artisan Jesus Urbano in his testimonio (Denegri, Soy señora). In this life of relentless toil, poverty, and domestic violence (“we only toil in fields and in the homes until our vaginas shrivel!” [7]), endured every day by Parayar women, there is no time for self-pity. The narrator’s grandmother Vellaiyamma, a resilient and proud storyteller who refuses to be crushed by her oppressors, tells the story of her daughter, married off when still a child, who, after having “seven, eight babies in a row” (10), was beaten to death by her husband. The grief, in the centre of a mother’s body, is still deep: “My womb, which gave birth to her, is still on fire” (10). But instead of dwelling on the emotions of loss and beating her chest in despair, she closes the story with a simple admission of guilt conveyed in the visual, unambiguous language of fables: “I reared a parrot and then handed it over to be mauled by a cat” (10). The multilogic, participatory mode of orality prevalent in Dalit society is always at work in Bama’s text. When Vellaiyamma compares the white pigs that she has seen in the back of the church to her own black pigs, explaining that it is because the nuns rear them “on wheat and mild powder and biscuits” instead of “eating shit like our pigs” (12), one of her interlocutors interrupts to complain about the fibbing: “She seems to think we are all just stupid cunts here” (13). Although the narrator stands back to reflect on the “ugly” words used by Dalit women in their quarrels and of why they should “derive a sort of bitter comfort using these terms of abuse which are actually names of their body parts” (68), there is no sense of disgust, shame, or alienation, only sadness for what she interprets as a sign of sexual frustration. As the accent in Sangati is not in the past of oppression but in the present of resistance, the narrative moves forwards, not backwards, revealing in the process new forms of struggle grounded in dayto-day oral, parodic communication. Writes Bama in the preface to the English translation, “Sangati changed me as well . . . the urge grew to demolish the troubles and to live happily. To bounce like a ball that has been hit, and not to curl up and collapse because of the blow” (vii). This oppositional portrait of life written in a specifically oral female language, often suppressed by the deep sense of modesty and propriety that is at work in the Indian public sphere, is indeed empowering and transformative.

40  Francesca Denegri

Recently, a student in a Latin American testimonio seminar at San Marcos University in Lima argued in class that testimonial writing, whether or not autobiographical, wasn’t in the least counterhegemonic, because once the narrator’s oral discourse has been processed through the machinery of print culture, it stops challenging the privileges of literacy over orality, and it thereby submits to the hegemony of colonial values. One could counterargue that a degree of negotiation between orality and writing is essential in the context of processes of cultural modernisation and that print capitalism, despite the perils of codification and control, remains one of the most effective instruments for community-building projects. However, Bama’s work gives another turn to the screw with its triggering of further questions regarding the emergence of new, organic intellectuals as agents in that negotiation. As the classic Latin American dual ideologeme of middleclass compiler-subaltern narrator is condensed in the figure of one Dalit narratorcompiler who becomes a “site for the criss-crossing of multiple voices,” new and promising ground for rethinking about the concept of cultural mediation in India seems to be emerging with extraordinary force.

Notes 1 This chapter is a revised version of the essay “Testimonio and Subalternities in India and Latin America,” which appeared in the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, no. 46, 2009, pp. 25–50. 2 The sequence of events can be summarised thus: With the rise of ethnography and anthropology as academic disciplines in Latin America, the genre was invigorated and its boundaries pushed further in order to include the urban poor and the Indian campesinos. Ricardo Pozas’s Juan Pérez Jolote: biografia de un tzotsil and Oscar Lewis’s Los hijos de Sánchez, both published in Mexico in the 1950s, were to inspire key testimonio writers like Elena Poniatowska, author of Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) and La noche de Tlatelolco; testimonios de la historia oral (1971). With the struggles for national liberation in the 1960s and 1970s in South and Central America, testimonios were produced in great numbers to record the stories of guerrilleros, resistance fighters, organised workers, community leaders, and miners in Bolivia, Peru, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, and Brazil. Fidel Castro is considered by some critics to have acted as an inspirational force to testimonio compilers when in his speech “Words to the Intellectuals,” he confronted his largely middle-class audience, suggesting that no one could describe life under slavery better than a slave could (Sklodovska 1996). Barnet’s claims that the new genre was the alternative to elite and creole literary traditions is considered by many as the definitive poetics of testimonio (Gonzalez Echevarría). Testimonio was subsequently given institutional legitimation when the genre was included in its own right in the Casa de las Américas prestigious literary contest (Denegri, “Testimonio and Its Discontents”). Indeed, one of the most popular testimonies, Menchu’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú), received the Casa de las Américas award in 1982. 3 One general definition of classical testimonio is that it is an oral narrative in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist of the story. As the narrator is by definition illiterate, the narrative is recorded, transcribed, and edited by an interlocutor who is normally a university trained intellectual, or letrado (lettered). For many critics it is a genre which represents the struggle for hegemony between illustrated elites and the subaltern groups (Yúdice 1991), or more generally between postcolonial societies and Western postmodernism ( Jameson 1991). This narrative produced by the Majority World subaltern seemed to provide an optimistic answer to Gayatri Spivak’s suggestive question “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988).

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4 Latin American truth commissions are official bodies established by national governments to investigate crimes of internal war and human rights violations and to produce a final report, which includes recommendations for reparations to victims and judicial processes to perpetrators, in order to restore justice and prevent the repetition of atrocities in the region. In their search for knowledge regarding violence perpetrated to citizens, truth commissions relied heavily on the testimonies, both private and in public hearings, produced by those who had had direct experiences of violence. The first truth commission was held in Argentina after the fall of the Junta in 1983–84, followed by Chile in 1990–91, El Salvador 1992–93, Guatemala 1997–99, Peru 2001–3, and most recently Colombia 2018–today. 5 An interesting development in the Dalit Christian community is the recent emergence of a Dalit liberation theology, which shares a number of themes with the Latin American liberation theology that arose in 1968 in Chimbote (Peru), including a reinterpretation of the Exodus, where Dalits take the place of God’s chosen people, the view that Jesus was a Dalit or outcaste and where the experience of suffering is highlighted as a foundational concept for a theological understanding of Jesus. 6 We Were Making History collects the memories of women who participated in the communist-led uprising (1945–51), which started with hundreds of peasants’ revolting against the Nizam of Hyderabad and which eventually involved three million people in Andhra Pradesh. 7 Sister, Are You Still Here? (1977) is the prison diary of Akhtar Baluch, a Sindhi female prisoner held in Pakistani jails in 1970 for her participation in the protest against the detention of a Sindhi nationalist and peasant leader; Hanyaman (1989) is the prison memoirs of Communist Party activist Joya Mitra; and Meenakshi Sen’s Jailer Bhetor Jail (1993) is another prison testimony of the Naxalite period. 8 Sarah Beth explores national themes and motifs that go beyond ancient mythology into modern India, where the lives of Dalit heroes of independence, such as Matadin Banghi, are told and where Ambedkar, not Nehru or Gandhi, is held as the first father of the Indian nation. Although Beth’s study is focused on Dalit Hindi literature, pamphlet literature abounds in other Dalit communities and languages as well. 9 Indigenous resistance to the new order imposed by the Andean invaders is well documented, from the ill-fated movement led by the last Inca Tupac Amaru in Vilcabamba, near Macchu Picchu, to the numerous messianic revolts led, among others, by Juan Santos Atahualpa and José Gabriel Condorcanqui, in the 18th century. Later, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the resistance was carried on first by montoneros and later by the armed struggle of campesinos in the Southern Andes. In the now-classic Europa y el país de los Incas: la utopía Andina (Lima, Tarea, 1986), Peruvian historian Alberto Flórez Galindo, explores how the Indigenous Andean communities of Peru read the Christian Bible in line with messianic interpretations. Thus, the resurrection of Christ was seen as the return of the Inca and of its people, to whom the Spanish ill submit, thus inverting the social order once again. Messianic utopias are re-enacted in the Taki-onkoy and in the myths of Inkarri and the Pachacuti, among others. 10 See Yadav, Manohar’s “Dalit ‘Sahibs’ and Masses,” where he claims that despite reservation policies, Dalit culture is still largely oral. Deccan Herald, 28 June 2003. 11 Although Burgos meets Menchú in her Paris apartment, in Burgos’s introduction, the effort to cross the cultural barrier between her metropolitan culture and Rigoberta’s campesino culture was principally Burgos’s. Hence, the tortilla making ritual is a symbol of Menchú’s trust in Burgos.

Works cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983. Bagul, B. “Dalit Literature Is but Human Literature.” Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature, edited by Arjun Dangle. Orient Longman, 1992, pp. 270–89.

42  Francesca Denegri

Bama. Karukku. Translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom. Macmillan, 2000. ———. Sangati. Translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom. Oxford UP, 2005. Beth, Sarah. Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation. Dissertation submitted for PhD degree at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, June 2006. ———. “Hindi Dalit Autobiography: An Exploration of Identity.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, 2007, pp. 545–74. Beverley, John. “The Margin at the Center.” The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Duke UP, 1996. Bhave, Sumitra. Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell Their Story. Indian Social Institute, 1988. Brueck, Laura R. Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature. Columbia UP, 2014, p. 4. ———. “Narrating Dalit Womanhood and the Aesthetics of Autobiography.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 54, no. 1, 2019, pp. 25–37. Ciotti, Manuela. “ ‘In the Past We Were a Bit “Chamar” ’: Education as a Self and Community Engineering Process in Northern India.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), vol. 12, 2006, pp. 899–916. Dangl, Benjamin. The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia. AK Press, 2019. Denegri, Francesca. Soy señora: Testimonio de Irene Jara. IEP-El Santo Oficio, 2000. ———. “Testimonio and Its Discontents.” Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, edited by Stephen Hart and Richard Young. Arnold, 2003, pp. 228–38. Gavilán, Lurgio. Memorias de un soldado desconocido (Memories of an Unknown Soldier), IEP, 2012. Guru, Gopal. “Power of Touch.” Frontline, vol. 23, 25 Dec. 2006. Handoo, Jawaharlal. “The Palace Paradigm and Historical Discourse.” Folklore as Discourse, edited by M.D. Muthukumaraswamy. National Folklore Support Centre, 2006. Holmstrom, Lakshmi. Introduction to Sangati. Oxford UP, 2005. Jameson, Frederic. El posmodernismo o la lógica cultural del capitalismo avanzado. Paidós, 1991. Kumar, Umesh. Bhartiya Achambha. Kushwaha Publishers, 1996. Macher, Sofía. “Quechua Women: Agency in the Testimonies of the CVR-Peru Public Hearings.” Rethinking Transitional Gender Justice Transformative Approaches in Post-Conflict Settings, edited by Rita Shackel and Lucy Fiske. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 239–57. Menchú Tum, Rigoberta, y Elizabeth Burgos-Debray. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia. Casa de las Américas, 1983. ———. “Interview with Ignacio Ramirez.” Revista Proceso, Seccion Cultura 833, 19 Oct. 1992. ———. Address to the Nobel Peace Committee, Jan. 1993, https://www.nobelprize.org/ prizes/peace/1993/ceremony-speech/. Montoya, Rodrigo. Multiculturalidad y política (Multiculturality and Politics). Sur, 1997. Omprakash, Valmiki. Joothan: A  Dalit’s Life. Translated from the Hindi by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. Samya, 2003. Pandian, M.S.S. “On a Dalit Woman’s Testimonio.” Gender and Caste, edited by Anupama Rao. Kali for Women, 2003. Panjabi, Kavita. “Transcultural Politics and Aesthetics: Testimonial Literature.” Living to Tell Their Tale: Testimonio as Subaltern Voice in India and Latin America. Paper presented at Jamia Millia Islamia Conference, 23 Mar. 2007. Poniatowska, Elena. Here’s to You, Jesusa! Translated by Deanna Heikkinen. Penguin, 2002 (Original in Spanish: Hasta no verte Jesús mío. Era, 1969). Prasad, Chandra Bhan. Interview with S. Anand. Dalit Media Network, Chennai, Feb. 2001, www.ambedkar.org/chandrabhan/interview.htm. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Ways of Reading, edited by David Bartholome and Anthony Petroksky, 5th ed. Bedford, St. Martin’s, 1999.

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Rama, Ángel. La ciudad letrada. Ediciones del Norte, 1984. Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Genre: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios. Zubaan, 2006. Salvatierra, Felimón, Honorato Méndez, y Oseas Núñez. La vida ya no era vida: Un homenaje a la vida y memoria de las víctimas de Allpachaka, Chiara y Quispillaqta Ayacucho-Perú (Life Was Not Life Anymore: A  Homage to the Life and Memory of the Victims of Allpachaka, Chiara y Quispillaqta Ayacucho-Perú). Paz y Esperanza, 2016. Satyanarayana, K. “The Political and Aesthetic Significance of Contemporary Dalit Literature.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 54, no. 1, 2019, pp. 9–24. Sen, Shoma. “The Village and the City: Dalit feminism in the Autobiographies of Baby Kamble and Urmila Pawar.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 54, no. 1, 2019, pp. 38–51. Silva Santisteban, Rocío. El factor asco: basurización simbólica y discursos autoritarios en el Perú Contemporáneo (The Disgust Factor: Symbolic Garbaging and Authoritarian Discourses in Contemporary Peru). Lima, Red para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Perú, 2008. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 271-313. Sklodovska, Elzbieta. “Spanish American Testimonial Novel: Some Afterthoughts.” The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg Gugelberger. Duke UP, 1996, pp. 84–100. Stree Shakti Sanghatana. We Were Making History: Women and the Telangana Uprising. Edited by K. Lalita et al. Zed, 1989. Upadhyay, Shushan B. “Meaning of Work in Dalit Autobiographies.” Studies in History, vol. 26, no. 1, 2010, pp. 31–60. Viramma, Josiane Racine, and Jean-Luc Racine. Viramma: Life of a Dalit. Verso, 1997. Wachtel, Nathan. La visión de los vencidos. IEP, 1972. Yudice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991, pp. 15–31.

2 SOME NOTES ON THE TESTIMONIO Jorge Fornet1

We seldom have the opportunity to study the emergence and consolidation of a genre as clearly as we do in the case of testimonio. Of course, to track its sources, we can go as far back in time and space as we may choose. In fact, we find a clear consensus that in the testimonio, one can discern a coalescing of aspects already present in the Spanish American narrative tradition. Mabel Moraña, for example, mentions among them las técnicas del relato de viajes, la biografía romántica, los relatos de campaña, el documentalismo de la novela social e indigenista, el ensayo sociológico, el estudio etnográfico y la relación costumbrista, así como recursos tomados de la poesía y la narrativa popular (techniques of travel writing, romantic biography, campaign narratives, the documentarism of the social and indigenist novel, sociological essay, ethnographic study and costumbrista description, as well as resources taken from poetry and popular fiction). (491) However, when referring to the Latin American testimonio as we understand it today, the most recognisable antecedents in our literature seem to be Juan Pérez Jolote, of the Mexican Ricardo Pozas (published for the first time in 1948 in the scientific publication Acta Antropológica and four years later as a book), and Operación Masacre (Operation Massacre) of the Argentine Rodolfo Walsh, which appeared in 1957. Both examples, emerging in the extreme north and south of Latin America, mark the two fundamental aspects that would come together in most of the later testimonios. If Pozas’s work focuses on the biography of a Tzotzil Indian from an ethnographic perspective, Walsh’s book – which in particular interests me – is already overtly political.

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1 In 1956, when he was not 30 years old yet, Walsh was a journalist of little renown, author of a dozen stories and three detective nouvelles, who dreamed of writing a great novel that would fetch him money and prestige. At the end of that year, however, his life took an unexpected turn. Until then, the young writer was a regular patron of a café in the city of La Plata, where he used to go to play chess. At the café, as he would recount some years later, there was more talk about famous chess players than about politics, and the only military manoeuvre that enjoyed a reputation, he recounted, was the attack of chess pieces in the Sicilian opening. However, his peaceful game was about to turn serious because of unforeseen events. In the prologue to the book that he was about to write, even though he did not know then that he would be doing so, Walsh recounts how the story told there came to him almost accidentally. And if until then he was not interested in politics, which was something alien to him, he would soon become involved in it to the extent that he would end up writing one of the greatest political indictments of our times. The facts, in broad terms, are as follows. The year 1955 witnessed one of those violent events that abound in the turbulent history of Argentina: a military coup overthrew the government of Juan Domingo Perón and forced him into exile. Not even an event of such enormity had any great effect on those chess players, but on June 9, 1956, the calm ended. That night, they were surprised by a shooting nearby, provoked by an assault on a police station by elements opposed to the new regime. Walsh then witnessed the confrontations: He saw a soldier die right in front of the door to his house and another man with his brains hanging out. However – as he would recall – he preferred to forget those details as well as the voice of the radio announcer who had the same morning announced the extrajudicial execution of 18 people and the wave of blood that drowned the country following the so-called Valle Revolution. None of that moved Walsh, and he would later sum it up with the following words: I’m not interested in Valle, I’m not interested in Perón, I’m not interested in revolution. Can I go back to playing chess? I can. Back to chess and the fantasy literature that I read, back to the detective stories I write, back to the “serious” novel that I plan to draft in the next few years. (2) Indeed, Walsh forgot that story. Six months later, however, someone approached him in the café and said, “One of the executed men is alive.” The news of the survivor of the executions who was willing to recount the experience changed everything for him. Without knowing why, Walsh decided to meet that man. He recounted his incredible story, and from that began an investigation which led him to other survivors. The investigation itself was worthy of narrative material.

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After the executions, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Argentine Nation “passed one of the most shameful rulings in our judicial history” and left the massacre “forever unpunished” (141). In the spirit that justice be done, Walsh wrote the story; he did it under pressure, anxious that someone would do it before him, but he soon discovered that no one was inclined to tell that story and that no one wanted to publish it, either, when he finished writing it – until he found someone who dared to publish it. That book, Operation Massacre (1957), would be the founding act of modern testimonio in Latin America, and it came, certainly, before nonfiction novels like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966). With Operation Massacre, Walsh invented a genre and produced a classic piece of literature. He found, in addition, the practical solution to a dilemma that had anguished Bertolt Brecht, for whom the political novel as we know it was impossible after Auschwitz. Operation Massacre did not have much impact after its publication by a small publisher. But, throughout the 1960s, the book was gradually read and appreciated in the context of political radicalisation. Seven years after its first edition – that is, in 1964 – the second edition appeared with a notable change: It had a prologue, to which I have just referred, in which Walsh explained how he learnt of the story and why he decided to write it. That year, the influential weekly Primera Plana declared the book as a model for investigative journalism. I want to highlight the fact that 1964 marked a significant moment in the taking off of what would later be recognised as the Boom of Latin American narrative. That is, the recognition of the work of Rodolfo Walsh – which entailed the establishment of the testimonial genre – coincided with the maturity of the novel on a continental level. While names that were already or would soon be internationally famous, such as those of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and many others, were getting established in the literary firmament and were scaling the peak of recognition, Walsh worked against the grain, burrowing through that same mountain as the old mole of history. But Rodolfo Walsh’s place in the Latin American testimonio is associated not only with his pioneering role as the founder of a genre but also with deeper questions implicit in his texts: What is literature for? What are its limits? Who should be in charge of telling the story? What form should political literature adopt? In his zeal, Walsh staked his life on finding answers to these questions. On March  24, 1976  – that is, 20  years after this massacre that prompted the transformation of Rodolfo Walsh and opened the way to a new literary genre in Latin America – another tragic event took place in the history of Argentina. The armed forces carried out a new coup d’état. With it a military junta assumed command, which carried out a systematic repression at a scale never before seen in the country. Tens of thousands of people were arrested, tortured, and killed. Most of them remain missing even today. Under these circumstances, many writers fled into exile or were killed. Rodolfo Walsh preferred to remain in the country, went underground, and confronted the dictatorship. Thus, he resumed his intellectual and activist work, as part of which he established the Clandestine News Agency (ANCLA) and which became a weapon of resistance. In that climate of repression and

Some notes on the testimonio  47

censorship, Walsh also resorted to an unexpected means of expression and denunciation. Instead of the newspaper article or the agitator’s pamphlet, he used the open letter. This allowed him to address a precise recipient and at the same time to elaborate a text that he wanted to make available to everyone. We present three relevant examples of such texts. The first of these was “Letter to Vicki,” dated October  1, 1976. It is a particularly tragic letter because Walsh wrote it to his daughter María Victoria on the day that he learnt of the tragedy of her death that happened, coincidentally, on her 26th birthday. The second letter was written three months after that death. In this one Walsh offered details of his daughter’s last moments of life, “after a battle with army forces.” In this “Letter to My Friends,” he revealed the clandestine militancy of his daughter, who, as pointed out by her father, “could choose other paths that were different without being dishonourable, but the one she chose was the most just, the most generous, the most reasoned.” The third text, better known than these ones, was the “Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta,” signed on March 24, 1977 – that is, coinciding with the first anniversary of the coup d’état. In this, Walsh took stock of the actions of the dictatorship throughout that year. The day after writing it (written on March 24) – that is, on March 25 – both Rodolfo Walsh and his partner Lilia Ferreyra began distributing copies of that letter. Shortly after noon, on his way to an agreed upon meeting with another activist, Walsh was ambushed by forces of the dictatorship. Armed with a small pistol, he tried to resist his abduction. He was killed, and his body was disappeared. This writer of detective stories, the chess player who, in a café, came face to face with the nightmare of history by chance, decided to delve into it. From that decision, as I have already mentioned, an emblematic book and a new genre was born – the testimonio – that would fertilise Latin American literature during the following decades. And 20  years after the appearance of that already legendary volume, the nightmare of history would return to engulf its author, who even in that brutal context believed that literature could be an effective means to disturb consciences and confront the military regime.

2 The literary genre that was just taking shaping in the emerging work of Pozas and Walsh would witness a remarkable burgeoning in the 1960s, after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and the immediate impact that it caused not only in the arena of politics but also in the cultural field. As mentioned earlier, at the same time that an exceptional group of novelists and their works were gaining unprecedented international recognition (that well-known surge known by its marketing name of the Boom, which gave the impression that Latin American fictions and imagination were attaining unbelievable heights), this apparently marginal genre was developing, adding new voices and concerns to the literary universe of the continent. Thus, while the public was being introduced to the pioneers of the new novel, it also became acquainted with authors such as Miguel Barnet and Elena Poniatowska

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and, what is more surprising, with characters such as the cimarrón – that is, the runaway slave (Esteban Montejo) and Jesusa Palancares.2 The fact is that those subjects who until then had been denied a voice, those who used to be represented as objects rather than as subjects of history, seized the word. Actually, to be precise, and this is one of the most discussed topics around the testimonio (to which I shall return), these characters are often expressed indirectly, by someone who lends them a voice. Even so, a new subject was beginning to take shape and acquiring visibility in the public space. In general they were deliberately chosen as people who had not even attained the status of citizens and who remained at the margins of society and its institutions. Many of them had suffered an exclusion that the witness was trying to expose. In the “Preliminary Note” of another of his books ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (Who Killed Rosendo? 1969), Rodolfo Walsh made clear who the characters in his stories were and, in doing so, drew a sharp dividing line against the notion of citizenship recognised by the media, the police, and judicial institutions: “Para los diarios, para la policía, para los jueces, esta gente no tiene historia, tiene prontuarios” (For the newspapers, for the police, for the judges, these people have no history, they have criminal records). Understood as such by many of its authors, testimonio had, among its most important missions, the rescuing of characters and stories that society had obscured, and the media had overlooked, subjects whom other literary genres did not usually treat with respect. Undoubtedly, the genre’s popular reception from the 1960s was because of its ability that had not been extended until then to serve as a sounding board for subjects who had been previously neglected and to become a spokesperson for their aspirations and interests. In the years when, especially in Latin America, radical changes were being heralded, the testimonio emerged as the representative of those changes in the literary field and inevitably was identified as the genre par excellence of the new – and the seemingly imminent – society. The appearance in 1966 of Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave), by Miguel Barnet, became an immediate publishing event and provoked intense discussion about its literary status. The weekly Bohemia, the journal with the largest circulation in Cuba, dedicated a special issue to it with an eloquent title: “Cimarrón. An Unprecedented Book in Cuban Literature,” which included opinions of writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Onelio Jorge Cardoso, Juan Pérez de la Riva, and Lisandro Otero and an interview with Barnet himself (32–34). The truth is that since then the theoretical discussions around testimonio have generated an expansive bibliography. While the exciting character of Esteban Montejo caused a stir, this work unintentionally posed a challenge in terms of its literary genre, an issue which Barnet’s contemporaries did not ignore. Montejo is a captivating character for more than one reason; not only is he a Black man who because of his racial and class position had suffered a peculiar experience that moves us, but he had also been a slave and, that too a cimarrón – that is a slave who, in an act of resistance, escaped slavery in order to live a free life in the jungle. This runaway slave has, in addition, another peculiarity that is usually ignored which is his age. More than a hundred years old, he is a survivor, an exceptional

Some notes on the testimonio  49

witness of a moment that has no traces left other than those appearing in history books or in oral narrations transmitted from one generation to another. He, however, lived to tell at first hand his exceptional tale. Amid a nascent revolution led by the youth, unprecedented in itself, this old man lent a historical dimension to the changes that were happening; he had seemingly come from another world to legitimise the nascent Cuban Revolution and to draw a continuous line between the resistance that he had forged and that which the new society was trying to bring about. In Esteban Montejo, the great history and the small merge into one, connecting with the transcendental events that have woven the epic of the Cuban nation and to the most insignificant anecdotes that integrated in a deep and inescapable way the lives and beliefs of individuals who were displaced for centuries from the centre of history. This helps explain that despite the attractiveness of the protagonist of the book, as well as his voice and his story, the readings generated after its publication have mostly revolved around the genre to which it belonged. Its impact was assessed to some extent, to the degree to which it turned to the history of the nation from an unusual perspective, and due to which it was read as a new literary manifesto. In this sense, the text was able to synthesise a rereading of the past with an unprecedented style of storytelling (at least that is how it was understood). However, a paradox emerged when the book was “stripped” of its testimonial status. Although the author conceived of it as an ethnographic account on the same lines as Pozas (the similarity between the subtitle of the latter – Biography of a Tzotzil – and the title of the former makes it obvious), and although the first edition was published by the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, soon the readers, and fundamentally those singular readers who are writers, began to recognise its novelistic qualities. “Some writers consider this book an artistic work, a novel,” says the journalist at the Bohemia magazine. The journalist then asks, “What would you say?” – to which Barnet responds bluntly, “It is not a novel. It is a book with another purpose: a scientific purpose.” Barnet would later reconsider his views and would rename this and his subsequent books testimonial novels. The paradox lies in that when the new genre exhibits literary qualities – that is, when it departs from the rigorous transcription of the words of the informant and acquires an aesthetic value – the attempt is to classify it within a prestigious and legitimising genre as that of the novel. In other words, the values of the nascent genre are recognised, but it is denied the recognition of having literary value and is thus not granted such prestige.

3 In any case, the truth is that the works of the Latin Americans such as Pozas, Walsh, Barnet, Poniatowska, and several others and those of US-Americans such as Oscar Lewis and Truman Capote shaped a genre that would soon have its values reinstated. The Casa de las Américas Literary Award gave it, at least in the Spanish language, an identity that eluded it, in response to concerns that had been emerging for several years.3 Until 1969, the books that to a certain extent corresponded to the

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characteristics of the testimonio competed in the traditional genres, fundamentally as novels or essays. The controversy gained momentum when in 1968 the book Manuela la mexicana (Manuela, the Mexican), by the Cuban Aida García Alonso, received a mention in the essay category. On February 4, 1969, the jury and the organisers of the award met to make suggestions and propose changes; one of the fundamental issues discussed was, precisely, the “creation” of the testimonio genre. This collective reflection resulted in its inclusion as a category in the following year’s call. At the beginning of the meeting, testimonio was thought to possess a transgeneric value or transgeneric function; the fact of giving testimony was privileged over considering the relevance of a “new” genre. Little by little, however, the idea that it was something different, though it made use of resources of some of the other genres, gained credence. This chapter highlights the intervention of the Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, who understood it as resulting from a wilful act, a form that can be commissioned, a clearly ancillary form of expression. From then onwards, it became a concrete proposal and a direct call to the writers of the time. Thus, as per Ángel Rama’s proposal, the Casa de las Américas and its literary award were not to be limited to making space for a seemingly spontaneous movement but were to encourage, promote, and popularise the genre. What Rama effectively proposed was a cultural policy aimed at relaunching the testimonio: I think there should be a collection that recognizes these materials and that expressly suggests to other writers in America: “Write a testimonio about such and such thing, write about what is happening in such and such place.” That is, try to show the outline of the task and the struggle of Latin America through literature. . . . I would like a book by Gonzalo Rojas to present to me the Chile that is burning. I would like the best books that can be done and that can be asked for from many writers, and very many writers would say: “Yes, of course, I am ready for that! I agree.” As a result of these discussions, the Casa de las Américas included for the first time in 1970, the testimonio  genre, which had not been canonised until then. The Cuban cultural institution did not “create” the genre but was rather forced to take note of it, and in doing so, it legitimised it and provided it a new context. Although there is no intrinsic feature of the testimonio makes it a genre at the service of the dispossessed or inimical both to bourgeois society and the bourgeois genre par excellence, the novel, the truth is that la literatura testimonial tiende a echar luz sobre las contradicciones del sistema imperante, a revelarse contra el statu quo o a solidarizarse con reivindicaciones o luchas populares que cuestionan el ‘orden’ de sociedades autoritarias, discriminatorias y excluyentes (testimonial literature tends to shed light on the contradictions of the prevailing system, to reveal itself against the status quo

Some notes on the testimonio  51

or to stand in solidarity with popular demands or struggles that question the ‘order’ of authoritarian, discriminatory and exclusionary societies). (Moraña, 488) Gayatri Spivak has asked, can the subaltern speak? – a question relevant, as Moraña reminds us, to the case of the Latin American testimonial narrative, because it is a genre that is determined to open a space from which the subaltern can be heard. No literary genre has proposed to such an extent to serve as a means of expression of that Other, often invisible to the rest of society.

4 One of the most recognised and celebrated examples of the genre – also linked to the Casa de las Américas Literary Award, which it won in 1983 – is I, Rigoberta Menchú, by Rigoberta Menchú and Elizabeth Burgos. The book has an antecedent: Let Me Speak: Testimonio of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines, by the Brazilian Moema Viezzer (1976, English translation 1978). The most obvious similarity is that in both cases, they are the testimonies of the personal experience of poor women who experienced oppression and played a role in the resistance. But there is another, less-evident similarity, and that is in the language they use, a rudimentary Spanish marked in the case of Domitila by traces of Quechua, her mother tongue, and in that of Rigoberta’s by K'iche'. The well-known paradox of Caliban4 is produced in them, because they need to use the language of the colonisers to transmit their message, to be heard, to oppose an unjust reality, in a word, to “curse.” Rigoberta’s book generated, as we know, a wave of sympathy that ended up leading the protagonist, many years later, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but at the same time, it triggered a lot of discussion – mainly in academia – that addressed both the authenticity of the book and its authorship. Of course, behind these discussions lay more or less veiled political concerns. The authorship is problematic for more than one reason, because although the book was signed by Elizabeth Burgos-Debray, an uncertainty plagues it that applies to many of the books of the genre: Who is the author  – the one who offers her testimony or the one who collects it? Is this a mere editor of the text or also one of its creators? But in this particular case, the discussion ran deeper because, apparently, more than one person was involved in the completion and correction of the interview, which was the basis of the volume. Years after the publication of the book, the Guatemalan anthropologist Arturo Taracena confessed that he was the one who had introduced Rigoberta to Elizabeth Burgos, so that she would record the voice that would ultimately be the protagonist of the book. Taracena also confessed to have carried out part of the recordings and corrected the deficient Spanish of Rigoberta. According to his words, “El modelo era el libro de Domitila Chungara. Ahí queda muy claro que la autora es Domitila, y la persona que hizo la entrevista, la introducción, las notas, explica muy bien cuál fue su papel” (the model was Domitila Chungara’s book.

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There it is very clear that the author is Domitila, and the person who did the interview, the introduction, the notes, explains very well what was her role) (Aceituno 131). Taracena refused to appear as coauthor because his political ties at that time would have become a liability for the book; neither he, Rigoberta, nor Elizabeth Burgos wanted the book to be identified with any particular political dispensation. Greater was the controversy that occurred in North American academia when the anthropologist David Stoll questioned – on the basis of interviews and some evidence – the veracity of many of Menchú’s statements. Taracena considers that what Stoll does not understand is the narrative voice of the book, that an Indigenous person handles the individual context and the collective context, and that these are intermingled. He is unable, as an anthropologist, to see that dimension of which Carmack speaks, because in the end what he did was a journalistic survey such as one for a Truth Commission, and not an anthropological analysis. (Aceituno 134) That is to say, in order to verify facts as more or less precise, Stoll ignored the general sense of the testimonio, Rigoberta’s appropriation of certain kinds of collective knowledge of the community and her capacity to express herself as a spokesperson for a human collective. In this sense, the word of the testimonio takes on a value that far exceeds that of the pure witness to become representative for certain groups/sections. At the end of the day, a genre so dependent on memory – of a memory subordinated to the passage of time and the weight of the community to which it belongs  – bases its effectiveness more on the truth that it wishes to transmit than on individual experience alone. This helps us understand the popular ­dissemination and the growing prestige of the genre at a time when the resistance of the marginalised was a central point of the political agenda on the Latin ­American continent. Testimonio, to sum up, shows  how facts and people at the precise moment when the world opens before them find expression; it is even a medium to which these people contributed their voices and in which they could “curse” (in the Calibanesque sense of the term). I cannot conclude these notes without mentioning an element that testimonio helped consolidate and that, in return, endorsed it with its support. Here I mean the readers, both those who witnessed in amazement the gestation of the genre and those who recognised themselves in the stories and the characters that the testimonio was revealing. These readers contributed to model a genre whose slow decline ran parallel to that of a model of society that did not come to pass. Paradoxically, recent years have witnessed a revival of the genre, of so-called self-writings, and of scholarly interest in both. Perhaps in reaction to the forces of rampant neoliberalism, against the attempted oneness in thought, globalisation, and the overwhelming power of new technologies, the testimonio has come back to tell us other stories, those that again and again resist being silenced: the forgotten, the dissonant, the uncomfortable ones.

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Notes 1 This chapter was translated from the original in Spanish, by Sonya Surabhi Gupta and Vijaya Venkataraman (editor’s note). 2 Jesusa Palancares is the protagonist of the 1969 testimonial work Hasta no verte Jesús mío (Here’s to you Jesusa, 2002) by one of Mexico’s most-celebrated and best-known writers, Elena Poniatowska. The character is modelled after Josefina Bórquez, a real woman from the margins of Mexican society, who narrates her story from her childhood to her participation in the Mexican Revolution, a violent marriage, and her later life experiences from which she emerges as an independent and autonomous woman. The book is a reconstruction of her life and is based on interviews with her by Poniatowska for over a year (editor’s note). 3 See the dossier “La Casa de las Américas y la ‘creación’ del género testimonio” (The Casa de las Américas and the ‘creation’ of the testimonio genre), which I had the occasion to prepare. The citations in this chapter were taken from there. 4 In William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, which postcolonial readings have linked to the colonization of the New World, Caliban is the original inhabitant of the island taken over by Prospero. Caliban’s paradox is that in order to curse his masters, he has no other means but to use their language, the one that has been imposed on him (editor’s note).

Works cited Aceituno, Luis. “Rigoberta Menchú: libro y vida. Arturo Taracena rompe el silencio.” Casa de las Américas, vol. 214, 1999, pp. 129–35. Arias, Arturo. Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America. U of Minnesota P, 2007. Carpentier, Alejo, et al. “Cimarrón. Un libro sin precedentes en la literatura cubana.” Bohemia, 16 Sept. 1966, pp. 32–34. Fornet, Jorge. “La Casa de las Américas y la ‘creación’ del género testimonio.” Casa de las Américas, vol. 200, 1995, pp. 120–25. Moraña, Mabel. “Documentalismo y ficción: testimonio y narrativa testimonial hispanoamericana en el siglo XX.” América Latina: Palavra, Literatura e Cultura, edited by Ana Pizarro, vol. 3. Fundação Memorial da América Latina, 1995, pp. 479–515. Walsh, Rodolfo. ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? Editorial Tiempo Contemporáneo, 1969. _________. Operation Massacre. Translated from Spanish by Daniella Gitlin. Seven Stories Press, 2013.

3 THE TESTIMONIO IN LATIN AMERICA AND INDIA Critical contestations of the collective voice Kavita Panjabi1

Generic transformations can often be a reflection of political change – and deserve recognition as such if genres such as the testimonio are indeed to continue to be harbingers of change. The testimonial genre that represents eyewitness accounts of collective struggles from below, and specifically antihegemonic accounts of marginalised or exploited peoples, has been well established in Latin America since the 1970s as the testimonio,2 especially with its legitimation as a literary genre by Cuba’s cultural centre, the Casa de las Américas, in 1970. Pioneering examples of women’s testimonios from Latin America include Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines (1978); Sandino’s Daughters about women revolutionaries in Nicaragua (1984); and I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), the narrative of a Guatemalan Mayan woman who gained international recognition for her organisation of the Indigenous peoples of Central America long before she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Before the emergence of the testimonio, there was no recognised genre for representation of political transformations from the subjective standpoint of activists involved in political struggles. Thus, the emergence of the testimonio as a crucial site for the generation of collective and oppositional consciousness and as a genre that foregrounds a critique of oppressive state rule from below has fulfilled a critical generic lacuna. The testimonial genre has been shaped by the political struggles that it represents. However, political struggles do not remain static in nature; rather, they evolve in different ways, as does the genre representing them, and, as I argue here, so must our readings of the genre, not in abstract theoretical ways but in relation to the struggles. As the emergence of the testimonial genre was a harbinger of sociopolitical transformations, so too may the transformations of the genre be a harbinger of new changes in political struggles. One distinguishing feature of the testimonial genre is that it is structured by the experience of a collective involved in active struggle, and the collective voice of the community informs the text through the voice of the narrator. Thus, as the locus

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of the autobiography is the individual, the locus of the testimonio is the trajectory of a collective (Beverley; Sommer). The other defining feature of the testimonio is that it communicates, centrally, the political perspectives of a marginalised community: It is a history from below narrated by a participant (Beverley; Gusdorf; Sommer) who functions as a Gramscian “organic intellectual,” laying out a critical interpretive history – which could be just a contemporary history – of their community. A third critical feature of the testimonio is that it also communicates a combined vision for the future, the collective political imperative of the community. Thus, the generic conventions of the testimonio urge the reader to identify the collective voice as opposed to that of the individual in a novel or autobiography, the political standpoint of the community in struggle, and the needs, constraints, and future visions of the community. Active engagement with these generic conventions facilitates thoughtful engagement with the political aspects of the narrative and thus with not just the imperatives but also the nuances of the struggle itself. The advent of the testimonio as a narrative genre in the 1970s also ushered in a period of reorientation in modes of interpretation. Mainstream cultures of individualism had to shift gears in order to understand the locus of the collective represented by the narrator of the testimonio, and all the critical essays cited earlier contributed to this effort, which is still ongoing. However, what was overshadowed in this critical move to learn how to grasp the perspectives of collective cultures was the perspective of the individual, which of course does not necessarily amount to an individualist perspective. We lost sight of the testimonio’s being as much a personal narrative as a testament to a collective history. The individual voice stands in for and represents the collective in a testimonio, but this does not mean that the personal is necessarily and fully subsumed by the political imperatives of the collective. Rather, the question to ask would be, does the community represent one monolithic collective? We must acknowledge, as we do in mainstream cultures, that there are collectives within collectives, and often there can be individual voices, such as those of women or of subcaste groups, fractured across the collective imperatives of intersectional loyalties and allegiances. If we are to begin grasping the internal challenges in the community of the testimonio, then we cannot continue reading the voice(s) of the narrator(s) as merely undifferentiated representations of a projected collective perspective, which in fact may actually be fractured by internal challenges. Also, rather than ossifying the political consciousness of a collective, if are we to grasp its evolving nature, then that demands careful attention to individual perspectives too, to the internal challenges to what is “permissible,” because, as V. Geetha puts it so perceptively, “ultimately, political consciousness is honed by the actual movement of experiences and people beyond the ken of the known, the permissible” (2008). Further, in the context of forging future transformations in the community, Veena Das asserts that the “complete ownership that every community now seems to be in the process of establishing over all its members will not allow the experimentation that is needed to create genuinely new forms” (158). She explains that

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“Collective experience is necessary because one’s capacity to make sense of the world presupposes the existence of collective traditions,” but selfhood “depends upon our capacity to break through these collective traditions or to be able to live at their limits” (158). One is reminded of Aijaz Ahmad’s trenchant critique of Jameson’s penchant for reading all Majority World cultural productions as national allegories at the cost of eliding individual human imperatives and his pithy comment about Jameson’s thus denying the Majority World intellectual “luxury of the Sartrean blink” (95–122). On a different but related note, Dorfman too has cautioned against viewing the testimonio as a representation of an always-already-forged community unity. He asserts that “the very concept of unity . . . can be a comfortable albeit useless disguise to judge a work that does not intend to unify but rather to pour out a multifaceted, unwieldy and uncontrollable reality” (154). Historically, now is the time to hear the individual dimensions of the narrative voice too, and I make this claim, ironically, from a context in which the testimonio has not yet gained official recognition as a genre. The testimonio, which has flourished for over four decades in the Indian subcontinent, as I will show in the next section, has not yet been recognised officially by national publishing academies such as the Sahitya Akademi or prestigious awards granting institutions such as the Bharatiya Jnanpith; nor are major publishing houses comfortable with this generic designation; paradoxically, in the proliferation of testimonios in this context, one can see critical transformations of the genre. I argue my case here by drawing primarily on Tamil feminist writer Bama’s testimonio Sangati: Events and on other chapters in this volume. Given that the testimonio is usually about contemporary movements, it also carries the unique potential of not just documenting and raising consciousness about struggles from the antihegemonic perspective of its participants but also thus of drawing more participants into them from among its readership, in struggles that also involve a literate membership. The testimonio is hence a genre that can both document struggles and play an active role in enhancing them. Indeed, Bama expresses this hope in her testimonio of cross-generational Dalit women’s perspectives, which she introduces thus: “In Sangati, many strong Dalit women who had the courage to break the shackles of authority, to propel themselves upwards, to roar (their defiance), changed their difficult, problem-filled lives and quickly stanched their tears” (vii). She further describes Sangati as an account of women in revolt: “Sangati is a look at a part of the lives of those Dalit women who dared to make fun of the class in power that oppressed then. And through this they found the courage to revolt” (vii). The role that the testimonio can play in augmenting the struggle, and in this case inspiring more women into breaking the shackles of patriarchal and class authority, is articulated clearly in the acknowledgements section of Sangati: Events, the English translation of her testimonio. She says, “Sangati grew out of the hope that the Dalit women who read it will rise up with fervor and walk towards victory as they begin their struggles as pioneers of a new society” (ix). The thrust of Sangati also centres on the collective dynamics of women’s voices; what is unique in Bama’s reflections, however, is the simultaneous attention to

The testimonio in Latin America and India  57

internal transformations in the individual too. In fact, she draws attention to such processes of individual transformation right at the beginning of Sangati and in relation to herself; in the preface to the book, she says, Sangati, which has as its theme the growth, decline, culture, and liveliness of Dalit women, changed me as well. Even in times of trouble, boredom and depression, the urge grew to demolish the troubles and to live happily. To bounce like a ball that has been hit has become my deepest desire, and not to curl up and collapse because of the blow (vii). The subtitle of Bama’s book in English is Events, and one of the dimensions of social transformation that Bama addresses is that of the impact of events on human beings that brings about such transformation. Here Bama indicates how her engagement with other women represented in Sangati, with their varying graphs, not just of decline but also of the agency underlining their “growth . . . culture and liveliness” inspired her to fight to be able to “live happily . . . to bounce like a ball that has been hit . . . and not to curl up and collapse because of the blow.” Coming back to the question of generic transformations and political change, there is a plethora of individual women’s voices in Sangati that challenge not just the tyranny of the upper castes but also Dalit patriarchy in their community. That Bama can also populate her testimonio with multiple voices of internal feminist resistance and without breaking ranks with the Dalit solidarity that they all continue to uphold seems to indicate that Dalit movements have moved into a phase of confidence in which they can withstand such internal challenges and hopefully transform too. These generic transformations seem to indicate that Dalit movements have come of age  – and that is precisely what makes such developments possible both in real life and in the genre. In recent years, a body of scholarship on the pedagogical potential of the testimonio in empowering students in relation to issues of social justice has grown, especially in Latina, Chicana and Mexican/Mexican American contexts in the US. Such scholarship finds representation in Chicana/Latina Testimonios as Pedagogical, Methodological, and Activist Approaches to Social Justice (2018), the important volume edited by Bernal Delgado, Rebeca Burciaga, and Judith Flores Carmona, and in essays by other scholars, such as Allarie Coleman and Fabiola Rosiles. In India too, testimonies, especially by Dalit women, are being taught in progressive universities and colleges and even in some schools, aiming to facilitate sensitivity to the realities of Dalits and to empower Dalit students. What Delgado et al. observe about the growing importance of the testimonio in US classrooms in the face of cuts in ethnic studies and Mexican American studies programmes finds an uncanny resemblance in India too in relation to the crisis of funding for departments and centres of Dalit studies. They say, testimonio is becoming more popular in the field of education just when institutions of learning are banning ethnic studies and Mexican American studies programs. . . . As such, we believe the growth of testimonio into the

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field of education is a challenge to the status quo – a reclamation of intellect that would otherwise have been dismissed by power structures in academia. (8) As they rightly point out too, the testimonio carries great significance for social justice education. However, the matter is more than one of a reclamation of marginalised intellect; it is equally a matter of engaging with the lifeworlds of people of marginalised races and castes, and V. Geetha makes an astute observation about the complexities of such engagement across bilingual contexts, one that would apply as much to the Latina and Mexican American contexts in the US as they do to Dalit lives in India. She asserts that “the discursive contexts that produce critical speech about caste, if they happen in English, are not engaged with the lifeworlds of castes, but with a register of rights.” So the experience of being Dalit, as that of being Latina or Chicana, gets eclipsed in classroom discussions because of the differences in the uses and conceptual apparatus of languages: the subject who speaks gender or caste, and who seeks to understand experience has to reckon with a conceptual apparatus that has not emerged from the critical practices and uses of the language that is widely present around her, but English; students from vernacular contexts seeking to examine ‘reality’, are thus expected to make that crucial move from what is richly familiar into the alienated world of social science concepts that strain at that reality. . . . Thus, it is not surprising that self-conscious reflections on caste, when they happen, are almost always tinged with political correctness, rather than with a sense of lived realities. (Geetha, 2008) Thus, the testimonio can play the critical role of bringing into the classroom some understanding of the lifeworlds of people from marginalised backgrounds. And lifeworlds, even in the testimonio, are accessed through the experiences of individuals who comprise a community, of their humiliations and hopes, of their desires and determinations, of their struggles for internal transformations as much as collective transformation. This brings us back again to the importance of retrieving the personal in the collective voice in the testimonio: There remains one more question – that of the transformations in the realms of interiority that undergird all political transformations but are rarely discussed. Close attention to individual narrators’ voices may also offer insights into the formation of political subjectivities; it may enable some understanding of the sources of strength and processes of personal affirmation that enable such political resilience. If social justice is indeed a concern, then understanding the sources and processes of social resilience that the personal, individual voice can share most affectively, as well as effectively, is imperative. What, then, enables one to bounce back in the face of oppression rather than “curl up and collapse”?

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The debate about a “new” genre in India – late arrival demands new modes of reading The testimonio has had a long life in the Indian subcontinent, beginning in the late 1970s, although the reception of Latin American influences became evident only in the late 1980s. One of the first instances of Latin American influence on Indian women’s writing was that of Sandino’s Daughters and Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines on the Stree Shakti Sangathana collective’s We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana People’s Struggle, published in 1989.3 In the 18 years from We Were Making History to Living To Tell Their Tale: Testimonio as Subaltern Voice In India and Latin America, the seminar organised by the Centre for Spanish and Latin American Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, Indian, in 2007, a growing recognition of the need for a more suitable generic approach had occurred, especially in the study of Dalit life narratives. This is also reflected in the pointed nomenclature of Sharmila Rege’s important book Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios, published in 2006, and in Gopal Guru’s questioning of Baby Kamble’s narrative as an “autobiography,” in his 2008 afterword to the English translation of the same text. More recently, Vijay Mishra’s 2017 essay “Writing Indenture History through Testimonios and Oral Narratives” has also highlighted the testimonio as a critical source of historical knowledge of the Indian plantation diaspora, by drawing attention to the few surviving written testimonios that give contemporary accounts of the subaltern lifeworlds of indentured labourers. A considerable number of oral and testimonial narratives of collective struggle, especially by women of marginalised groups – such as prisoners, Dalits, and other political activists – have been documented and published in the Indian subcontinent since the 1970s. These are evidence of the growing significance of the testimonial genre in the Indian subcontinent, and they cover a wide range, yet almost all of them have been published as autobiographical narratives or personal memoirs, not as testimonios that would warrant readings in which the locus of the narrative is the collective and not the individual. While official recognition is lacking, publications of testimonies proliferate, as do their translations, especially into English. Although the realities of most Dalits and the politics and conceptual categories of the English language are in a fraught relationship, as I discussed in the last section, I include information about English translations, if available, of all the testimonies discussed in this section, as the availability of a book in English translations is indicative of its importance for both the world of academia concerned with historical transformation and the publishing world driven by public demand. Akhtar Baluch’s “Sister, Are You Still Here?” – the diary of a Sindhi female prisoner arrested for having protested against the detention of Sindhi nationalist and peasant leaders in Pakistan in 1970, during the interim regime of General Yahya Khan – was published in Race and Class in 1977 but is relatively unknown in this subcontinent. We Were Making History: Women and the Telengana Uprising, a collection of testimonies of women who participated in the Telangana People’s Struggle

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of the 1940s in the state of Hyderabad, recorded and edited by the Stree Shakti Sangathana, was the first widely read collection of women’s testimonial literature in India and the English translation was published in 1989. Hannaman and Jailer Bhetor Jail, prison testimonios of the Naxalite period written by Jaya Mitra and Meenakshi Sen, came out in Bangla in 1989 and 1993 respectively, with a second volume of Jailer Bhetor Jail by Meenakshi Sen following within a few months. Hannaman: One Who is in the Process of Being Killed (Prison Memoirs of Indian Women), the English translation of Jaya Mitra’s testimonio, was published in 2010. In the context of Tamil testimonies, now-renowned writer Bama penned the life narrative Karukku, which was published in Tamil 1992; it was published in English first as nonfiction in 2000, and then republished in 2012 and is marketed by the current publishers as an autobiography, in fact as the “First autobiography of a Dalit woman writer.”4 Bama’s testimonio Sangati (1994), published in English in 2005, is introduced as a novel by popular websites and magazines,5 while the publishers of the 2005 text vacillate between genres. Towards the beginning, the description, on the inside front flap, asserts that “Sangati  flouts received notions about what a novel should be and has no plot in the normal sense, nor any main characters.” It goes on to observe that “many voices narrate personal experiences” and adds in the next paragraph that “Sangati is a book about a community’s identity, not about the single self.” By the time the description reaches the bottom of the inside front flap, Sangati has become a “novel” and continues to be referred to as a novel on the back inside flap too. With the English translations of the oral narratives of Bangladeshi female survivors of the mass rapes by Pakistani soldiers, Rising from the Ashes: Women’s Narratives of 1971 (2013) and other such texts currently in various stages of publication, the importance of testimonial writing is being increasingly acknowledged across this subcontinent. The testimonio has thus been challenging the bastions of lettered knowledge from alternative epistemological grounds for almost five decades in India too, but it has yet to gain recognition here as a distinct genre. Of course, the genre has been subject to other important discussions; one of the significant ones was at the seminar mentioned earlier, and that was also continued in the pages of the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature (2009). The aforementioned seminar featured a clear consensus on the need for a generic approach that would do justice to both the collective self and the contemporary activist and oppositional stance that informs Dalit narratives. A  critical focus of discussion, though, regarded the naming of this nascent genre in India. Various suggestions were placed on record, including gawaahi bayan, gawaahi qissa, and saakshi sahitya, echoing the chequered history of the naming of the novelistic genre in India. Another dimension to this debate included the view that the original name, testimonio, be preserved, because if we could ultimately retain the Anglo-American term novel in India, then the reluctance to take on the Latin American term testimonio might reflect a bias against acknowledging the literary interaction with Latin American influence.

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The reality on the ground of course is that just as the novel developed in India – as much from the oral genres of the panchalis and the narratives of the kathakars and from charit sahitya as it did from the influence of the Western novel – so too have the narratives of the Telengana women and the Dalits emerged more from local modes of orality and those of Baby Kamble or Urmila Pawar and the prison accounts of Jaya Mitra and of Meenakshi Sen in the context of contemporary Indian conventions of writing than as a direct response to the testimonial literature of Latin America. Moreover, the trajectory of what we now call the novel has also seen, and continues to be witness to, a proliferation of names such as the kadambari, naval katha, kahani, dastaan, upanyas, and others. The point is thus not about the Western, Latin American, or Indian source of nomenclature but about the consensus on the nature of the conventions of the genre in a specific culture and about the horizons of expectation that a particular generic naming may set up. A genre frames the reader’s interpretation of a text, and the specific conventions of the genre draw readers into identifying the significant features of the genre, as distinct from others, that operate in the text.

Transformation of the genre and Bama’s Sangati Sonya Surabhi Gupta argues in her work on Miguel Barnet, in Chapter 11, that the testimonio does not erupt at the margin and suddenly occupy the centre, though the title of Beverly’s essay – “The Margin at the Center” – arguably suggests this. The institutional validation of the testimonio in the 1970s comes from the decolonised vantage point provided by the cultural politics of Latin American revolutionary projects for national liberation, and it is also a part of the project of the Cuban Revolution, which provoked a new direction in literary and cultural studies and led to a profound revision of the canon. Gupta’s chapter argues that generic validations and new modes of reading should be understood in relation to the sociopolitical contexts in which these transformations are catalysed. A direct transposition of the generic conventions of the testimonio from Latin America would thus be a reductive enterprise. As Francesca Denegri asserts in Chapter 1, “The history of Indian and Latin American subalternities is encoded in the specific literary forms that testimonial narratives . . . adopt in each case.” She observes that although Latin American testimonios are still largely products of collaborations in a contact zone between narrators and mediators, Dalit writers in India have “cracked open the walls of the lettered city without the need of mediation from upper castes.” One may not fully agree with the reasons cited for this difference, but Denegri’s suggestion that this difference between a mediated narrative situated within a history of mediation and the direct “confrontational” Dalit narratives calls for further comparative study, is well worth emphasising. Given the fluid and changing forms of the testimonio as it evolves in different political contexts, K. Satyanarayana’s caution (in 2009) that attempts to institutionalise the testimonio as a literary form may undermine its radical character is a

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point well worth considering. He emphasises the dual character of the testimonio in relation to radical democratic politics, cautioning that one cannot presuppose the politics of its engagement. Positing Dalit representations of caste identity and global modernity in Narendra Jadhav’s Outcaste: A Memoir as a case in point, he argues that Jadhav’s critique of caste in the nation is compromised by his desire for a cosmopolitan identity; consequently, he overlooks Dalit engagement with modernity in the nation-state and celebrates a personally acquired global identity. This, Satyanarayana argues, results in the setting up an ideal of global citizenship, “in which caste somehow just melts away.” On the other hand, Satyanarayana also calls attention to the radical possibilities of the testimonio, through the role of the speaking subject and its negotiations in the present, that destabilise the world and open up possibilities of democratic negotiation. He establishes this through his analysis of Limbale’s Akkarmashi (2003), for its striking exposition of the close link between sexuality and caste hierarchy, for its exposure of the respectable Marathi literary establishment, and for its privileging of the bourgeois family and marriage. Bama’s Sangati demonstrates the testimonio’s potential for further opening up possibilities of democratic negotiation even in the community – because a testimonio as fiercely critical of patriarchal oppression, not just by the upper caste but also by Dalit men, has secured the appreciation and support of leading Dalit scholars such as Raj Gauthaman and Gopal Guru. A critical point in this discussion raised by Venkataraman (2009) provokes thought about an international tendency to view oppressed races, castes, and communities as still inhabiting a premodern time marked by the traditions and cultures that they struggle to safeguard. Focusing on Rigoberta’s testimonies, she emphasised that in these  there “is no desire to nostalgically recreate a distant or lost Mayan past but to modernise the indigenous communities and locate them in the present” (82). The question of temporality that she raised is critical; it is a reminder of how colonised communities were relegated to temporalities of the past as a way of eliding their claims to the “liberty, equality, and fraternity” enjoyed by the colonisers in the modernities of Europe. It is also an important move to begin dismantling one of the barriers of otherness that mainstream societies erect between themselves and the populations that they marginalise. Modernity has to be acknowledged as a possible aspiration for those whose voices we hear in the testimonio, if not already a sphere inhabited by them. In fact, one of the loci of intergenerational conflict between the women in Sangati is between older women subsumed under Dalit patriarchy, even if critical of upper-caste patriarchy, and younger women who challenge, as Bama does, from both natural human rights perspectives and analytical feminist ones. Raj Kumar’s analysis (in Chapter  6) of Muli’s life history recorded in James Freeman’s Untouchable: An Indian Life History (narrated in Oriya and translated into English) is useful in tracking the ruptures between the sense of individual self and the sense of collective self to understand the lifeworlds of Dalits in this community in more-nuanced ways than just reading the narrative for its representations of collective struggle would enable us to do. Muli’s trajectory exemplifies a

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defiant response to extreme hunger, unemployment, and abysmally low literacy rates, especially among Dalits in Orissa. Choosing to become a pimp, Muli covertly disregards his community norms, while overtly, he continues to go through the motions that represent “respectable” behaviour. That the narrative centres on Muli and elaborates how, despite various reinventions of self, he fails to reconcile an individual self and a social identity, seems to cast this narrative back into the field of biography, as Raj Kumar’s use of the term life history also indicates. Yet that Muli’s life history is shown to portray the ruptures in the community in the conflicts between the ideals of his caste, his own expectations, and his actual behaviour and that the narrative further foregrounds the rural stranglehold of economic and physical oppression such that Muli and most of the people of his caste are doomed to failure together ensure that the thrust of this narrative is ultimately on the collective level. Hunger and extreme economic and physical violence, which in certain cases lead to the creation of defiant pockets of manipulation in the Dalit community, ironically become the basis on which the community stands united in the face of devastating oppression. This study demonstrates how, even as the norms of the community are challenged from within, the severe nature of the exploitation ensures the perpetuation of the collective, albeit internally fraught. In the context of these rich debates on the dynamics of representation of individual self and collective self in specific sociopolitical contexts, Bama’s Sangati stands out as a powerful instance of the extension of the genre. It stands out as different from well-known women’s testimonios such as Rigoberta’s and Domitila’s in their interweaving of voices of various Dalit women, across generations and diverse perspectives, in their introducing multiple narrators in dialogue with each other. Thus, alongside Bama, her mother, grandmother, and other women in the community also find place as direct narrators engaged in heated arguments about the lot of women in their society, yet ultimately, they all reinforce the sense of collective identity that informs the testimonio. The presence of multiple narrators is not new to the testimonio, as is evident in Partnoy’s 1986 account of life in a concentration camp in The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina; however, what marks Sangati as unique is the structuring of a dissenting community of Dalit women in the larger community of Dalits posited as Dalit patriarchy in the text. Sangati hinges on a fine balance in structuring such that both the Dalit community in the face of the upper-caste world and the Dalit women’s community, in the face of the internal Dalit patriarchy and the external upper-caste patriarchy, together comprise the locus of the narrative. The complex standpoint of Dalit women as women against patriarchy, both internal and external, yet as women asserting their Dalit identity, within the community and in full loyalty to the Dalit identity, is thereby reinforced in the narrative in no uncertain terms. The narrative contains strong suggestions of dissenting feminist voices in the shorter Telangana women’s narratives, even as the overall loyalty to the Telangana people’s movement is emphasised, but the multiple voices there find place more in discrete chapters – rather than interwoven in dialogue and debate, as in Sangati. The representation of internal dissent in the collective is not foreign to the Latin American testimonios,

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either, and several instances of it feature in I, Rigoberta Menchú, Let Me Speak, and Sandino’s Daughters. Yet in none of these does one find such a sustained articulation of a feminist community and voice  – or of any other internally dissenting collective – and of the integrated locus of a collective within a collective, dissenting internally, yet united in the face of the world. Not unexpectedly, careful generic analysis also yields insights into the political conditions of the production of the text, as has been well established by Bakhtin in his exposition of heteroglossia, whereby the context seeps its way into and establishes its primacy over the text. In the case of Sangati, such an internally dissenting feminist account could not only be written by a woman emphasising her loyalty to Dalit identity but also be lauded by Dalit scholars such as Raj Gauthaman (Bama xv), and highly respected Dalit intellectuals such as Gopal Guru have been writing about Dalit patriarchy themselves (Guru 80–86), which marks the coming of age of the Dalit movement in India. In comparison, the fact that such an internally dissenting feminist locus did not develop in the Latin American narratives under discussion here indicates the fragile political situation under the dictatorships or oppressive regimes in which those works were compiled, where the assertion of the solidarity of the Sandinistas or of the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala or Bolivia was such a dire political imperative that internal dissent could still not be articulated by those loyal to the common cause. The acceptance of both the investment in the Dalit collective and the feminist “counterpublic sphere” in it signals a certain political confidence of the Dalit movement that allows for the emergence and the public representation of other solidarities in it, however strife-laden the internal dynamics may be. Parallel to the ways that the genre of the novel was significantly transformed even as it took root in India, the testimonio has already shown signs of developing its own character in our specific historical and political conditions, and this is what needs careful theorisation now. Where the testimonio is marked by a completely integrated and unquestioningly unified collective voice, it does risk the danger of taking on the dimensions of a mythology, albeit a necessary one in the face of hegemonic mythologies that endanger the well-being and existence of marginalised communities. Yet when the testimonio can afford, when political conditions permit, to arrive at a point of maturity such that internally dissenting perspectives nuance the standpoint of the collective, then it has truly arrived as a testament to history.6

Limits of the collective voice The logic of this genre of collective struggle is such that it imbues the subject of the collective aesthetics of the testimonio with a potential that exceeds the individual self: “the subject of a revolutionary politics is not the individual militant . . . any more than it is the chimera of a class subject” (Badiou 43). Thus, in the struggles of the Mayan people, Rigoberta Menchú is no more the individual militant; she

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enters into the composition of this subject that is the bearer of the “truth” of the K'iche' struggles, even as Ambedkar was the bearer of the “truth” of the Dalit subject, or as Bama and her community of women are now, of the “truth” of the Dalit feminist subject position. However, as Badiou also points out, even as the individual or collective enters into the composition of this subject, “once again it exceeds [them]” (43). This excess imbues the subject with its/their representative power, infuses the testimonio with its unique potential for nurturing a collective consciousness,7 and allows for the search for new agendas and newer political modes of resistance beyond that which is already “known” and “permissible.” What are the limits of the collective voice in the testimonio? Such an investigation into this question need not necessarily violate any political commitment; on the contrary, although it may seem to imply a challenging of the collective spirit and of political solidarity in the community, it may actually yield insights into experiences that have not yet found place in a collective voice and might never do so. Such insights might hold valence at the level of individual experience without deserving to be written off as “bourgeois” or individualistic in nature. Bama’s narratives, and Sivakami’s fiction too, are testimony to the claim that women’s experiences, which eventually found validation in the solidarity of women represented in these works, once inhabited the realm of the individual. In fact, “as the individual self seeks affirmation in a collective mode” (Rege 14), the testimonio throws into sharp focus the systemic political nature of what might seem to be individual instances of oppression and suffering. Thus, the articulations of individual experience that have not yet found expression in the collective mode mark one of the limits of the testimonio. The potential to engage with new questions that find no representation in the institutional domain can, however, be fraught with political complexities. As K. Satyanarayana has shown in the case of Narendra Jadhav’s privileging of a global identity over the anticaste struggle, “one can not presuppose the politics of this engagement” (146). On another note, Rege rightly emphasises that “reading dalit ‘life narratives’ minus the political ideology and practices of the dalit movement does stand the risk of making a spectacle of dalit suffering and pain for non-dalit readers” (15). With Bama’s testimonios, and even more so with others, the critical question is one of the absence of those personal, intimate negotiations with histories of strife that may not shape visible historical transformations, which have not yet been in public discourse or master narratives, even of the community, but which nevertheless shape and sediment culture, transforming individual selves and the cultural texture of societies in still-invisible ways. These do not find place in the collective voice or in the ideology and practices of the movement, because they might be specific to each individual and yet result in the strengthening of self that makes individuals and collectives capable of mobilising history. And peoples disinherited and marginalised across centuries or incarcerated under repressive regimes must also face anguished negotiations of self with community

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and history, in the realms of interiority, that fail. The resurgence of the diary as an important genre under dictatorial regimes bears testimony to the impact of political injustices on the emotional and psychological life of individuals and the struggles in the realm of interiority. Anne Frank’s diary, written in the Nazi era, is the most famous instance of this, and María del Carmen Sillato’s Diálogos de amor contra el silencio; memorias de prisión, sueños de libertad (2006, Dialogues of Love Against Silence: Memories of Prison, Dreams of Liberty) is a powerful recent example. This is an intimate diary about the pain of a woman, a fighter, and a mother, kidnapped and tortured first in the military torture chambers and later kept in prison for almost four years without trial in Argentina during the Dirty War of 1976–83. “It’s . . . an example of solidarity and a tribute to those who are no longer with us: the dead and the disappeared,” says Sillato.8 The workings of the internal, liberating transformations that enable survival, and even more so the intimate experience of painful failures, inhabit silent netherworlds and mark the limits of the collective voice in the testimonio. Since the Dalit movement has come of age, the challenge, if it is to continue to extend its concern to those silenced in still-unrecognised ways, has become to read between the lines of the testimonio in order to locate the unarticulated transformations of self; in fact, the challenge is to read beyond the lines of the testimonio, and into the silences within the community to look, if possible, for those who fell by the wayside. Only by addressing the silences underlying the collective voice and the blind spots as well as internal hierarchies of the collective consciousness in the community can the struggles fortify themselves and can the testimonio survive, both as a genre and as a political weapon.

Notes 1 This is a substantially revised version of “The Testimonio in Latin America and India: Critical Contestations of the Collective Voice.” Testimonial Literature and Dalit Narratives, Special Issue of the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 46, 2009, pp. 7–24. 2 In an earlier essay on the generic nature of the testimonio, I elaborated on how it marks its place in the interstices of history and literature: From the point of view of literary study, it inhabits the zone of indeterminacy between historiography, autobiography and the novel. It narrates history but is distinct from historiography in terms of its foregrounding of hitherto silenced voices, and its nurturing of collective identity and consciousness; it is not autobiography in that it comprises eyewitness accounts of collective struggle; and while possessing literary quality in terms of its ability to interweave aesthetic and narrative dimensions, it is not exactly fiction in that it represents lived experience, and does make claims to “truth.” Finally, the genre of the testimonio is not to be confused with testimonies delivered by witnesses in courtroom trials either. (Panjabi, “Transcultural Politics and Aesthetics” 122) Further, the testimonio may be written directly by the activist in struggle. Or it may be narrated orally by the activist and be compiled by the interviewer, who also functions as the editor of the text and who has so far, for most well-known testimonios, been a person from another culture. In such cases, the testimonio, even in its production, takes shape as a transcultural genre calling for a nuanced cross-cultural approach.

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3 The editors of We Were Making History acknowledge this influence thus: When we first chose to do this study, one of our own aims was to recover our own history – we saw the women in the Telangana Struggle as founders of a history of women’s action in Andhra, indeed in India itself. So we thought we would be tracing a lineage. . . . But after we had done nearly forty interviews, we decided that it would be best to publish them as life stories. We now thought of it as a book that was theirs, as much as it was ours. We were also encouraged because we had read and enjoyed Let Me Speak and Sandino’s Daughters. (280) Given the strong parallels in the political and historical experiences of women in these cases, here was ready ground for the reception of this influence; the Telangana women’s narratives, like the Central American testimonios cited by the former’s editors, are situated in the historical context of crises of nationalism in contemporary postcolonial societies and in the increasing articulation of the role of women in these struggles. 4 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/karukku-9780199450411?lang=en&cc=dk. 5 www.outlookindia.com/website/story/introduction-to-karukku/211413 and https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bama_(writer). 6 I am grateful to Alicia Partnoy, Shikha Mukherjee, and Swapan Chakravorty for the discussion on mythology and testament that took place at the seminar “Prisons, Politics & Poetry in Argentina and India,” organised by the Centre for Studies in Latin American Literatures and Cultures (CSLALC), Deptment of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, on February 1, 2010. 7 Cf Panjabi, “Transcultural Politics and Aesthetics” for a more detailed discussion. 8 http://martazabaleta.blogspot.com/2007/10/dialogos-de-amor-contra-el-silencio. html.

Works cited Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory. Oxford UP, 1992. Akhtar, Shaheen et al. Rising from the Ashes: Women’s Narratives of 1971. Translated by Niaz Zaman. Dhaka UP, Ain o Salish Kendra, 2013. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. Verso, 2001. Baluch, Akhtar. “ ‘Sister, Are You Still Here?’: The Diary of a Sindhi Woman Prisoner.” Edited and Translated Mary Tyler. Race & Class, vol. 18, no. 3, 1977, pp. 219–45. Bama. Karukku. Translated from the Tamil Karukku (1992) by Lakshmi Holmstrom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000 (Also published by Oxford UP, 2012). ———. Sangati: Events. Translated from the Tamil Sangati (1994) by Lakshmi Holmstrom. Oxford UP, 2005. Barrios de Chungara, Domitila, and Moema Viezzer. Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines. Translated by Victoria Ortiz from the Spanish Si me permiten hablar . . . Testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (Historia inmediata), 1977. Monthly Review Press, 1978. Beverly, John, and Marc Zimmerman. Literature and Politics in Central America. U of Texas P, 1990. Coleman, Allarie. Teaching Through Testimonio: Language Arts Curriculum Made Relevant to Mexican/Mexican American Adolescents. M.A. Thesis, U of New Mexico P, 2016. Das, Veena. “Cultural Rights and the Definition of Community.” The Rights of the Subordinated Peoples, edited by Oliver Mendelsohn and Upendra Baxi, Oxford UP, 1996, pp. 117–58.

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Delgado Bernal, Dolores, Rebeca Burciaga, and Judith Flores Carmona, editors. Chicana/ Latina Testimonios as Pedagogical, Methodological, and Activist Approaches to Social Justice. Routledge, 2018. Dorfman, Ariel. Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Translated by George Shivers with the Author. Duke UP, 1991. Geetha, V. Doing Gender in the Classroom: Issues at Stake. Draft copy of the paper presented at the IAWS Conference, Feb. 2008. Guru, Gopal. “Dalit Women Talk Differently.” Gender and Caste, edited by Anupama Rao. Kali for Women, 2003, pp. 80–85. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney. Princeton UP, 1980, pp. 28–48. Kamble, Baby. The Prisons We Broke. Translated from the Marathi Jina Amucha (1986) by Maya Pandit. Orient Longman, 2008. Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Edited by ­Elisabeth Burgos-Debray and Translated from the Spanish Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1982) by Ann Wright. Verso, 1983. Mishra, Vijay. “Writing Indenture History Through Testimonios and Oral Narratives.” Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora, edited by Radha Sarma Hegde and Ajaya Kumar Sahoo, Routledge, 2017, www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315672571. ch3. Accessed 25 Mar. 2020. Mitra, Jaya. Hannaman: One Who is in the Process of Being Killed (Prison Memoirs of Indian Women). Translated from the Bangla by Rinita Mazumdar (Hannaman: Towards Freedom, 1989). Anyadhara, 2010. Panjabi, Kavita. “The Generic Location of Women’s Testimonial Literature and Its Social Function in India and Latin America.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. XXX, 1991–1992, pp. 58–65. ———. “Transcultural Politics and Aesthetics: Testimonial Literature.” Literary Studies in India: Genealogy. D.S.A. Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, 2004, pp. 122–43. Partnoy, Alicia. The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina. Cleis Press, 1986. Pawar, Urmila. The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs. Translated from Marathi Aaydan (2003) by Maya Pandit. Stree Publishers, 2008. Randall, Margaret. Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonios of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle. Edited by Lyna Yanz. New Star Books, 1981. Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios. Zubaan, 2006. Rosiles, Fabiola. The Telling as Political & Intentional: Resistance Through Testimonio for Latinas in Higher Education. M.A. Thesis, DePaul University, 2018. Satyanarayana, K. “Dalit Autobiography as a Testimonial Narrative: Reading Narendra Jadhav’s Outcaste.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 46, 2009, pp. 139–54. Sen, Meenakshi. Jailer Bheter Jail: Pagolbari Parba. Spandan, 1993. Sillato, María del Carmen. Diálogos de amor contra el silencio: Memorias de prisión, sueños de libertad (Rosario-Buenos Aires, 1977–1981). Alción Editora, 2006. Sommer, Doris. “Not Just a Personal Story: Women’s Testimonios and the Plural Self.” Life/ Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, edited by Bella Brodsky and Celeste Schenck. Cornell UP, 1988, pp. 107–30. Stree Shakti Sanghatana. We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana People’s Struggle. Kali for Women, 1989. Venkataraman, Vijaya. “Rigoberta Menchú’s Testimonios as the Voice of the Marginalised.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 46, 2009, pp. 73–86.

4 IN DEFENCE OF THE “SUBALTERN” Tracing the concept through/across South Asia and Latin America Deepti

It seems that the conceptual and political category of the “subaltern” has been partly able to capture the pain and resistance of the invisible masses, usually left out of most methods of historiography. The process of history writing in South Asia (as colonial, nationalist, or Marxist) has worked with the a priori unities of nation, class, community, and so on, pushing outside “the histories of the people.” The latter seeks to crack from within the surface illusory coherence of any kind of unity so much so that history now could be read/written from “a weaver’s diary, a collection of poems by an unknown poet (and to these we might add all those literatures of India that Macaulay condemned, creation myths and women’s songs, family genealogies, local traditions of history)” (Pandey 28). Such an enabling of reading/writing of the subaltern came along with the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group, who sought to write that history, a history against the grain, against the then dominant nationalist framework, a history against the master’s discourse and of the subaltern. Arising from a history of failed possibilities and betrayed promises of postindependence India, the Subaltern Studies Group emerged outside of any institution, following the Naxalbari revolt and emergency rule in India. It was an assortment of marginalized academics – graduate students yet to complete their dissertations, two or three very young scholars only recently admitted to the teaching profession, and an older man stuck at its lowest rung apparently for good – it had the advantage of owning no loyalty to any department, faculty, school, or party. With no curriculum, no dogma, no official line to guide it, no professor, no prophet, or politburo to watch its every step, it was an outsider only too eager to listen to and participate in the controversies agitating the space beyond and around the temples of learning and the political headquarters. (Guha, “Subaltern Studies Reader” xiv)

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The group’s split from institutional mechanisms gave it the freedom to thematise South Asian society around splits of various kinds, not mutually exclusive of each other, hitherto avoided by most historiography. Among these many splits, a few that emerged prominently are as follows. The first split is the split of a unified history into a history of the elite and histories of the subaltern, in South Asia. The former, which is the mainstream historiography in India, reduces all narratives to the emergence of a sovereign/secular/socialist nation-state. For instance, the history writing about the communal strife in India looks at these events primarily as aberrations in the otherwise-“secular” path of the nation (Pandey). The subaltern history, on the other hand, is the unrecorded history, and in most cases, it has to be gathered from fragments or reading official archives, police reports, newspaper articles, legal documents, and so on against the grain, highlighting the impossibility of the nation-state to speak for its people. Closely following from that is the second structural spilt in the unified (again) domain of politics into politics of the elites and politics of the subaltern. The politics of the elite created a certain notion of an organised political struggle (sometimes led by the Indian National Congress or the mainstream communist parties) that left out the domains of the autonomous subaltern politics and that worked with its own knowledges, stratagems, and idioms. The third is the split between the European history/master’s history/universal history and a history of South Asia/the colonised/the subaltern (yet again), which looks at the impossibility of adapting Western codes to study the Indian colonial state. What the project did, in a more Lacanian fashion, was write/read the various impossibilities. To do so, it hystericised the coherent, stable, and unitary character of the master’s history, taking it to the other side of the subaltern/hysteric, who in pointing out the inconsistencies in the master’s narrative of mastery broke into a thousand shrieks unheard before. Such a “hystericisation of history” would then always produce knowledges that are in the process of arriving somewhere rather than having arrived – a process that also made the subaltern studies project an always open and future-directed process. Making this claim true, we can thus see the emergence of a similar group on the other side of the Global South in the 1990s calling itself Latin American Subaltern Studies. Sharing a similar yet a singular colonial history, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group too sought to reconceptualise the history of subalternity in the subaltern location of Latin America, whose founding statement opens with an acknowledgement of inspiration that it drew from the South Asian project (12). Just like the South Asian Studies Group, the founding members of this group were distraught with the way the nationalist and socialist discourses had either not represented or misrepresented the politics of the subaltern and sought to link “politics, culture, and literature” (2) in order to rethink the historical constitution of the continent and for the larger goal of a South–South dialogue/exchange. Even though much work had already been produced in Marxist literature (“the history of below mode,” adopted by Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson) before the inception of these projects, which contested the dominant mode of history writing, the intervention of subaltern studies was seen as bringing forth a radical departure from the

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way historiography was traditionally constructed. The conceptual category of the subaltern has since then gone beyond the two groups and has particularly garnered much attention in those parts of the world that had experienced colonialism in various forms. Even as both groups eventually dissolved due to internal differences, the most recent three decades have seen various debates on the efficacy of the subaltern as an analytical category to think about history and politics. A major portion of the critique has come from Marxist circles (Vivek Chibber, particularly) who argue that with the universalisation of capital, one can’t do away with the universal categories of labour, capital, and the working class. His primary attack regards the group’s rejection of universalism and Eurocentrism and their vehement focus on the difference between capitalism in the East and that in the West as a miscalculation of how capital works. He says that although there could be different ways that capitalism operates in the East and in the West, the universal drive of capital to perpetuate itself through surplus value would perfectly co-opt particular social structures of the East like caste, kinship, and so on rather than be obstructed by it. Although the subaltern studies project couldn’t take into consideration the global chain of capital, what it does is still remarkable. The singularity of violence and suffering gathered in the category of the subaltern exceeds how resistance and solidarity have hitherto been talked about, because what emerges here is a moment of subaltern consciousness before the moment that it is instituted as anticolonial, anticapital struggles, and more. In that sense, it can only supplement the Marxian understanding of history rather than work in antagonism to it. At the same time, both projects have tried to self-reflexively conceptualise these debates in the aftermath of the collapse of the projects and brought to fore a call for new frameworks and methods. Although no new projects evolving from subaltern studies have come up in the domain of South Asian studies, a new one by the name of Project Modernity/Coloniality came up in Latin American studies in 1998, which builds on and critiques the limited theoretical framework of Latin American subaltern studies. The present book emerges from such a legacy of articulating newer, hithertounthought ways of writing the history of the subaltern. It does so through a conversation between Dalit self-narratives from India and testimonio narratives from Latin America, which unleash their own epistemologies onto dominant ways of writing histories. While the South Asian subaltern studies took the complexity of caste relations in South Asia seriously towards the later part of their existence, this seriousness still wasn’t sufficient. How does one capture the violence of caste that thoroughly and insidiously permeates South Asian society? One of the obvious ways to begin is by attuning oneself to the self-narratives of Dalits. It is a singular emergence of a disruption in the foundation of traditional epistemology, where the object of analysis reflects back on history and issues a call forth. Similarly, the testimonial writing (testimonio) in Latin America referring to a documentation of the personal (and autonomously political) lives of the subalterns by themselves (though mostly recorded by someone else) is another way that the subaltern formulates or

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speaks for itself even before the two subaltern studies projects come into being. Hence, even as one looks in retrospect at these self-narratives, they seem to be writing themselves even before the category of the subaltern comes into focus. A  history writing is happening, then, in the process of writing oneself and the other. Studying Dalit self-narratives and testimonio writing is a further extension of the work that subaltern studies had only begun. The purpose of this chapter is to draw a preliminary sketch of the history, methods, and purposes of South Asian subaltern studies, Latin American studies, and Project Coloniality/Modernity and their convergences with each other, which will allow us to place the current book in their aftermath.

South Asian subaltern studies Initially conceived as a three-volume, full-length journal called Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, the Subaltern Studies Collective/Group,1 headed by Ranajit Guha, launched itself, in 1982, with the publication of its first journal by Oxford University Press in New Delhi. Twelve volumes were published, apart from a huge body of knowledge developed by the group members, outside the series, which can be called the Subaltern Studies Project, each member reading subalternity in their own way and coming to be called subalternists or subalterns. The group’s conceptual framework was laid by two of Guha’s books: Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgence in India (1983) and Dominance without Hegemony (1997). Aspiring to posit critical interventions between the ongoing dominant debates on modern Indian history, the initial collective, consisting of Guha and other historians,2 was germinating since the 1970s in Britain. One end of the debate (colonialist/neocolonialist) was represented by Anil Seal of the Cambridge School, whose 1968 book The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century theorised nationalism in India as the making of the elites who worked with colonial institutions, methods, and legalities and with the colonisers for ascendency in power and privilege, as explicated by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his position paper “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography.” Chakrabarty goes on to say that According to this argument, the involvement of Indians in colonial institutions set off a scramble among the indigenous elites who combined opportunistically around factions formed along “vertical” lines of patronage (in contradistinction to the so-called horizontal affiliations of class, that is) – to jockey for power and privilege within the limited opportunities for self-rule provided by British. Such, the Cambridge historians claimed, was the real dynamic of that which outside observers naïve historians may have mistaken for an idealistic struggle for freedom. Nationalism and colonialism both came out in this history as straw and foil characters. (12)

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The subalternists contended that the Cambridge School saw nationalism of this sort as nothing more than a learning process for the local elite, as and when they responded to the codes and thought systems of the Britishers, with no personal ideological leanings whatsoever, but only power politics. On the other hand was the narrative (Marxist-nationalist or neonationalist) of historians like Bipin Chandra, who “drawing on both Marx’s writings and Latin American theories of dependency and underdevelopment” (Chakrabarty 12) countered the reductive theorisation of the aforementioned method and saw nationalism in an altogether different light, as the antithesis of colonialism, something that unified and mobilised the Indian people against the British rule under the guidance of elite institutions or nationalist leaders like Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. He talked about a binary between the colonisers and the colonised that created conflicts of interest and relegated all other conflicts of class and caste to secondary positions in the writing of Indian history (Chakrabarty 13). Both these viewpoints seemed to the subalternists, especially Guha, to be overly simplistic and each wrought with its own set of problems. While the first view, in a guise of writing the history of India, was actually writing a history of British imperialistic ventures, the other view rested its claims majorly on the peasant community, by ignoring the coercion inflicted by the native elite and the Britishers. The inadequacy of these two forms of elitist “unhistorical” historiography to read the politics of the people in their autonomous domain has been well elucidated by Guha in the introductory document or “manifesto” to the subaltern studies in the first volume of Subaltern Studies, known as “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” or the 16-point critique of elitist historiography. He explains that the insurgent mobilisations of the subaltern peasant groups were independent of the “colonial adaptations of British parliamentary institutions” (Guha, “On Some Aspects” 4), emphasising their own way of structuring and organising, based on either kinship, territorialisation, or class associations, depending on the level of the consciousness achieved by the people, and were spontaneous as opposed to the controlled practices of the elites. Hence, there existed two domains, subaltern politics and elite politics, with considerable overlapping, creating diverse narratives of the “Indian National struggle against colonialism.” However, Guha contended that the political domain of the subaltern, primarily in the form of the numerous peasant insurgencies with no coherent alliance with the working class (which still wasn’t a “class-in-itself ”), was far too fragmented to usher in something like a national liberation movement (5). He concludes the document as follows: It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class to lead it into a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeois-democratic revolution of either the classic nineteenth-century type under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie or a more modern type under the hegemony of workers

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and peasants, that is, a “new democracy” – it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India. (6, original emphasis) The attempts to excavate the subaltern past can be traced to the neo-Marxism of the 1970s, of producing accounts of “histories from below,” particularly visible in the works of Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm, so much so that subaltern studies have been seen as a “local avatar” (Chibber 5) of the developments in Western Marxist historiography. What the group (the initial volumes at least) theorised singularly, though, was the different historical progress of capitalism in South Asia compared to Europe. They stressed the fact that the peasant community should be seen not merely as a by-product of the historical progress of capitalism but rather as inhabiting an autonomous domain of its own and resisting power structures specific to the colonial context of the subcontinent, in the process asking what modernity/capitalism/politics entails for India. To arrive there, they derived their methodology from the Gramscian analysis of the subaltern classes. Although in use since medieval times (for peasants, an inferior in militaries), the term subaltern was adopted by Antonio Gramsci in his “Notes on Italian History,” which was later made part of his famous Prison Notebooks. He used subaltern for somebody who is subjected to the hegemony of the ruling classes and saw it as a relational theoretical category possessing a consciousness of being exploited and oppressed. This subaltern consciousness, which Guha referred to as the autonomous domain of peasant politics, has the potential to produce counterhegemonic structures, which were not paid much attention by the elitist statist/nationalist historiography.3 Because most of the historical archives were dominated chiefly by elitist narratives, where could the group look for its sources? One of the places was the already-mentioned Marxist historiography, which provided much of the empirical data. The other source was a reading of the dominant historiography itself, in such a way as to find how the insurgent consciousness has left its mark on the dominator. Guha undertook the task of recuperating this distinctive consciousness by theorising that about a “dialectical opposition” (in relation to power) between the apparatus of domination (the state or the landlords or the moneylenders) and resistance (by the peasant), and “this opposition creates the possibility for a movement within that relation, and thus makes it possible for there to be a history of relation of dominance and subordination” (Chatterjee 11). Chatterjee elaborates: In searching for the characteristic form of the autonomous of peasant consciousness, Guha was led to a study of the aspect of resistance. This did not mean that resistance was more important, or more true, than domination. On the contrary, by placing the forms of peasant consciousness within a dialectical relation of power, peasant consciousness would be assigned its proper theoretical value: its significance was to be established only in relation to its other, namely the consciousness of the dominator. . . . The study of peasant insurgency was, in other words, a methodological procedure by which one

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obtained an access into peasant consciousness, expressed through its resistance at the point of insurgency and recognized as an antagonistic force in the historical records prepared by the dominant classes. (11) The six aspects of peasant insurgency that Guha tried to dig up were as follows (Chatterjee 12–13): 1

2 3

4

5 6

Negation is a “negative consciousness,” which is to say that the identity of the peasant was created by the conditions imposed upon them by the dominator, who would determine their resistance strategies. Ambiguity is part of the insurgent rebellion that was often read by the dominator in terms of criminal activity. Modality comprises the characteristic forms adopted by the peasant community who was either dismantling the objects of authority through burning, wrecking, and looting or by establishing a counterhegemonic authority, “in the inverted image of the authority that it replaced.” Solidarity is a sense of collectivism that placed itself in opposition to the dominator, usually through ethnicity or kinship, where one could sometimes read the glimpses of a certain kind of class consciousness too. Transmission includes news or messages that flow through popular modes like rumour, and they are not easily discernible by the enemy. Territoriality is defined in a negative sense by its awareness of exclusion and in a positive sense through the logic of solidarity mentioned earlier.

Guha inscribes such invariant aspects in the domain of collectivist community consciousness, which cannot be understood in the conventional paradigm of bourgeois rationality and which should be given its own “paradigmatic form” (Chatterjee 11). The “peasant consciousness,” however, was critiqued by Gayatri Spivak in later volumes, in an attempt to find a suitable critical discursive tool to seek out the voices of the subaltern beyond “master words” like the peasant, the colonised, the woman, and the worker in a society intersected by colonialism, caste, gender, and economic exploitation. Spivak argues that in writing the revisionist histories from below, the collective has adopted a dominant mode of representation and has fallen into the danger of essentialising and objectifying the peasant consciousness and has reproduced something like the class consciousness (which they had sought to critique), and in the process, such writing has “bestowed a false coherence on to the much complex and differentiated struggles of particular subaltern groups” (Morton 53) and consequently, had rendered invisible the gendered/caste nature of the subaltern. The current book, which looks at the first-person accounts of Dalits from India and testimonio writing from Latin America in a comparative vein, could be seen as a response to this critique where history writing would be read in the accounts, which speak for themselves, not as always represented by history writing projects, though the latter always remain an important facilitator

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of thinking beyond the known. The subaltern, then, is always an emerging category whose relationship with the history writing projects has been more complex than imagined. The current book, in that sense, can be considered a response to the promise of the South–South dialogue that was to happen through a dialogue between the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group and Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. The latter’s history is presented in the next section.

Latin American subaltern studies Modelling themselves on the South Asian Collective, the Latin American Subaltern Studies claimed to continue the “legacy of politically committed scholarship” in the climate of political and intellectual crisis. Ileana Rodriguez, one of the founding members, opens the “Introduction” to the Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader as follows: In the wake of the Sandinistas’s defeat in the 1990 elections in Nicaragua, a small group of friends and colleagues who despaired over world politics, as well as the politics of public and academic institutions at the moment of changing paradigms, met in Washington, DC. (1) The group’s founding statement, which was published in 1993 in the special Boundary 2 edition called “The Postmodern Debate in Latin America,” begins by establishing a need for new epistemological and political projects with the present dismantling of authoritarian regimes in Latin America, the end of communism and the consequent displacement of revolutionary projects, the processes of redemocratization, and the new dynamics created by the effects of the mass media and transnational economic arrangements. (110) It avows an allegiance to South Asian Group’s debunking of master paradigms in search of an active subaltern voice. It traces its genealogy to an older Latin American tradition (albeit a few epistemological breaks here and there), where the domain of intellectual activity and politics are critically intertwined. The founding statement in tracing these genealogical continuities explicates the engagement of the critical tradition in Latin America with the question of subalternity in terms of three phases. In the first phase (1960–68), the essay tradition that had begun in good stead by Domingo Sarmiento4 in the 19th century reaches its mature phase with the publication of “Caliban” in 1971 by Roberto Fernández Retamar,5 where he articulates the Latin American identity as inseparable from internal, authentic, and Indigenous knowledges, deflating the earlier intellectuals’ method of imitating Europe.

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Such an approach worked in tandem with the paradigmatic shifts brought about by the Mexican Revolution and the Cuban Revolution, which enunciated the conditions of the continent as incompatible with models or theories derived from Europe or North America (113). The Cuban Revolution, particularly, by infusing a Cubanised Marxism, extended the representation of “social subject of Latin American history” from the middle/upper class to the “working masses” (113). This epistemic shift in forms of representation and articulation was palpably found in the Boom literature of the 1960s (e.g. Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, etc.), the dependency theory of Andre Gunder Frank, and the emergence of experimental and provocative cinema and theatre: Among the most significant results of this shift in the field of culture were the documentary film school of Santa Fe created in Argentina by Fernando Birri, the films of the Brazilian Cinema Novo and Cuba’s ICAIC, the Bolivian concept of “film with-the-people” developed by Jorge Sanjines and Grupo Ukamu, the Colombian “teatro de creación colectiva,” the Teatro Escambray in Cuba, and related movements in the United States like Teatro Campesino. (113–14) However, the group avers, even as these movements of art, culture, and social theory created rapid strides towards new epistemologies, they still operated within a class-based framework, ignoring questions of indigeneity, race, gender, sexuality, and so on (114). In the second phase (1968–79), the student body acquired a political force symptomatic of the global climate with the rise of New Left, antiwar movements and the civil unrest in France in May 1968. Apart from the widespread effect that it had on conventional political discourses, it unleashed a new wave of cultural production from the New Song Movement (La Nueva Cancíon/La Nueva Trova) to testimonial writing (testimonio) (114–15). While the former chose the popular tool of music (combining Indigenous forms with the imported ones) to offer narratives of resistance against various dictatorial regimes, the latter refers to a documentation of personal (and autonomously political) lives of the subalterns by themselves (though mostly recorded by someone else), and it also forms the major portion of the current book. In this way, In contrast to the ambition of the Boom novelists to “speak for” Latin America, the subaltern subject represented in the testimonial text becomes part of the construction of the text itself. The dissatisfaction with the boom’s male-cantered strategy of “metafiction-ality” leads to a new emphasis on the concrete, the personal, the “small history,” writing (or video work) by women, political prisoners, lumpen, and gays, raising, in the process, questions of who represents whom. (115)

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The Latin American subaltern studies project thus already situated testimonio writing as the writing of/by the subaltern much before the project itself came into being. In the third phase (the 1980s), projects like the South Asian subaltern studies and the cultural studies of the Birmingham School emerged, which formulated questions pertaining to colonial modernity and the domain of the hitherto-neglected “popular/people.” At the same time, it was a period of the circulation of ideas and theories across borders, with deconstruction coming to Latin America and testimonio travelling to US academia. It was also the time when television and the subsequent telenovelas became new cultural sites of discourse circulation (116). Most importantly, it was the period of the Nicaraguan Revolution and the spread of liberation theology6 across the continent. Interestingly, the most lucid theorisation of the subaltern and the ways of pursuing it comes after the project dissolved, in Rodriguez’s article “A New Debate on Subaltern Studies?” She calls “subaltern” a metaphor that stood to extend the group’s imagination to unknown spaces and propelled the group as a whole to challenge the dominant way of understanding oppression and agency: Subalternity was a notion always at a crossroads. For some, it was located along the lines of the logic of certain systems of representation, and as such, a pre-text for flexing our intellectual muscle and using it as a way of thinking the unthinkable. In this respect, subalternity stood as a metaphor for several negations, as a limit or threshold of Western, dominant, hegemonic knowledge, always considered insufficient and lacking. Conceived in this manner the subaltern made it possible to review the history of philosophy itself, to come deeply to examine old hermeneutical systems, to create very sophisticated games of knowledge, to play with logic and syntax and to come up with prestigious texts that put us at an advantage in the market. . . . For others, subalternity was a real and not only a discursive condition of subordination, and as such it stood for a social position embodied in the oppressed, a condition that generated the coloniality of power. (14–15) At the same time, similar to the South Asian project, the hitherto-celebrated concepts of nation-state and nationalism were called into question by the group, because these concepts pushed the subaltern social classes away from participating in the political process. The group identified the inadequate elite leadership as the central problem of postcoloniality (Beverley et al. 117), causing what Guha refers to as the “historic failure of the nation to come into its own.” However, the Latin American Group’s conception of subalternity in relation to the nation doesn’t necessarily operate in the dichotomy of elite/subaltern (colonial/creole elites; creole elites/subaltern groups), but instead, it extends to pluralistically constituted identities or nonidentities of “language, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and the resulting tensions between assimilation (ethnic dilution and homogenisation) and confrontation, passive resistance, insurgency, strikes, terrorism)” (118). The subaltern, then,

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is understood as a “mutating and migrating subject” (121), situated in a moment of postmodernity or peripheral modernity where the concept of class cannot override the categories of ethnicity and gender (Rodriguez, “A New Debate” 5). By linking literature, culture, and politics, subaltern studies were then heralded as what Spivak called “the strategy of our times” (Rodriguez, “A New Debate” 5) in a crisis-laden world, where the subaltern’s agency is subsumed within overarching frameworks. With the demystification of the statism of both the bourgeoisie and socialist kind, they sought to redefine oppression beyond economic and national terminology with new research methods. Deriving a sense of new social sensibility from the South Asian Group (particularly Spivak, Guha, and Chakrabarty), which combined theoretical rigour with academic militancy to constitute a “new humanism,” they adopted research techniques from Derrida and Foucault and political methods from Guha and Gramsci. They argued that any kind of political engagement is disabling until a rigorous cultural analysis occurs. Hence, they envisioned a coming together of postmodern, postcolonial, cultural, and subaltern studies, which apart from providing new explanatory frameworks for sociohistorical analysis could be a site of radical critiques for political interventions (Rodriguez, “A New Debate” 6). The constituents of a radical criticism included the question of a relationship between the intellectual and the subaltern (Spivak) and between domination and hegemony in relation to the national bourgeoisie (Guha) in the context of Latin America. Because most members dealt with these issues in their own way, there is no single conceptual understanding of hegemonic processes in Latin America, contrary to the one provided for the South Asian Project by Guha for the Indian subcontinent in his Dominance without Hegemony. However, both groups converge in their rejection of theoretical categories derived from the Enlightenment project. Consequently, there was much work done on alternative modernities; the re-creation of the left, which doesn’t work within the teleology of modernity, citizenship, and ungovernability; the desire for recognition; subaltern representation in their “radical heterogeneity”; Rigoberta Menchú7 as representing the subaltern beyond Marxist categories; the resignification of political practices as practised by Indigenous peoples; Zapatistas; and the “coloniality of knowledge and power” – to name a few. Even as both the South Asian Subaltern Studies project and the Latin American Subaltern Studies project have been dissolved, various modes of conceptualising subalternity “as a marker of its own history” continue to exist and point to the limits of the subaltern studies school. Most prominent among them is the theorisation by Project Modernity/Coloniality, which is discussed in the next section.

Project Modernity/Coloniality: going beyond subaltern studies Many independent studies had begun around the same time as the inception of Latin American subaltern studies, but as an umbrella project, it was initiated only in 1998, under the name of Project Modernity/Coloniality (El proyecto Modernidad/

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Colonialidad, or Project M/C), when Walter Mignolo,8 Aníbal Quijano,9 Enrique Dussel,10 Arturo Escobar,11  and Fernando Coronil12 came together in an event organised in Caracas by Venezuelan sociologist Edgardo Lander,13 with support from CLASCO.14 From the early 1990s to the present day, a huge corpus has been produced that seeks to go beyond the “Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism”15 of the Latin American Subaltern Group and look for new areas of enunciation to understand Latin America’s historiographical and epistemological configurations. As a result, many critical concepts have emerged that have added new insights into the working of coloniality, modernity, and Eurocentrism and created, in the process, radical “decolonial” ways of countering their hegemonic influences. At the centre of these theories lies the thesis that coloniality is constitutive of, and not separate from, European modernity, which originates in 1492, with the conquest of the Americas (Dussel 66). This creates “colonial differences,” which according to Mignolo classifies the planet in the modern/colonial imaginary, by enacting coloniality of power, energy and a machinery to transform differences into values. If racism is the matrix that permeates every domain of the imaginary of the modern/ colonial world system, “Occidentalism” is the overarching metaphor around which colonial differences have been articulated and rearticulated through the changing hands in the history of capitalism and the changing ideologies motivated by imperial conflicts. (Mignolo 13) Hence, as opposed to the usual paradigm of subaltern studies, Saidian framework, critical theory, poststructuralism, and the rest, which takes the 18th century and the Enlightenment as the sites of the emergence of modernity, the modernity/coloniality group considers the 16th century as the point of departure to understand the subalternisation of Latin American knowledges. In this regard, Aníbal Quijano’s theoretical category of the coloniality of power has been widely used by the group (particularly Mignolo) to articulate the hegemonic and classificatory processes of the modern/colonial world. “The coloniality of power” entails a certain universalising of Eurocentric knowledges and a subalternisation of colonially peripheral knowledge production sites. The group considers that with the expansion of capitalism through the colonial process, Western epistemology in various forms, from instrumental reason to critical theories of capitalism and state (e.g. Marxism, socialism, etc.), gets transported to the “other” parts and subsequently “creates an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies, and institutionalised in the global university system” (Grosfoguel 9). Eurocentrism is defined by the group, especially Dussel, as the site of chronological inception of a universal history and as the bearer of “moment of development” (Entwicklungstuffe) (73), which works in tandem with Mignolo’s concept of colonial difference and Quijano’s concept of the coloniality of power. All these

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analytical categories have been used variously by the group members in locating various subalternised points of enunciation of epistemologies. To wit, Grosfoguel raises the following question: “How would the world system look like if we moved the locus of enunciation from the European man to an Indigenous woman in the Americas, to, say, Rigoberta Menchú in Guatemala or Domitila Barrios de Chungara in Bolivia?” (8). Critical spaces are then sought by this project, which could constitute a new logic coming from the periphery to create a platform for a “radical decolonial critical theory” (Grosfoguel 3). One of the ways to delink from the colonial matrix of power is through border thinking/border gnosis/border epistemology, as introduced by Mignolo, which is the subaltern reason striving to bring to the foreground the force and creativity of knowledges subalternized during a long process of colonization of the planet, which was at the same time the process in which modernity and the modern Reason were constructed. (Mignolo, Local Histories 13) These spaces are then sites of epistemic disobedience that are not submerged by the rhetoric of modernity. However, such a delinking would be possible, the group says, if a macronarrative of modernity/coloniality were built from the perspective of coloniality, geared not towards different truths but a different logic, in opposition to the macronarrative of world history (Mignolo, Local Histories 22). At the same time, decolonial thinking or doing begins as soon as colonialism itself, where the myriad narratives of resistance come from the colonised, and they undercut the legitimisation of the modern/colonial outlook and have escaped much attention. Hence, decolonial projects like the various Indigenous movements throughout Latin America, including the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE) in Ecuador, the National Park and Indigenous Territory Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS) movement in Bolivia, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, and so on, are sites of struggle seeking an epistemic disobedience from the colonial matrix of power that constitutes modernity. The main thrust of these theoretical projects from the two subaltern studies schools to Project M/C has been to dismantle epistemic boundaries of history writing and to take us to peripheries where the subaltern sites are created through disobedience and resistance. These sites, in the mere process of becoming the marker of their own history, rupture the “truthful” epistemic power of the hegemonic master’s history. These projects not only compile and compel the writing of a different and darker side of history but also see their own projects as unfinished and future directed. The current book, which seeks to comparatively look at subaltern voices of Dalit self-narratives from India and testimonio narratives from Latin America, is like these theoretical frameworks, which in producing counter-histories/counterepistemologies of the subaltern, open another set of critical questions that, like the

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endless resistance of the subaltern, should be repeatedly posed from time to time. Such works in the rare moment of hystericising the master’s discourse also point to hitherto-unexplained gaps in various theories of power, politics, reading, writing, and so on – asking, once again, how does one write history?

Notes 1 The initial collective consisted primarily of Ranajit Guha, David Hardiman, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gyanendra Pandey, later joined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Susie Tharu, Gyan Prakash, Sudipta Kaviraj, David Arnold, Gautam Bhadra, Ajay Skaria, Qadri Ismail, Kamran Asdar Ali, Shail Mayaram, Sumit Sarkar (later dissented), Lata Mani, Aamir Mufti, M.S.S. Pandian, and Shahid Amin. 2 David Hardiman, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gyanendra Pandey. 3 But Gramsci does not define the subaltern as “somebody who is not an elite,” which is Guha’s definition. 4 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an Argentinian politician, was one of the first essayists to spark the debate between the Indigenous “barbaric” model and the “civilised” European model. Wary of lifestyles and “noncultures” of the caudillos and gauchos, he advocated for the urban-based European (particularly London and Paris) model, which would create cities that will eventually become the cultural centres of the nation. He argues this in a novel-cum-essay-cum-biography titled Facundo, wherein Juan Facundo Quiroga was the symbol of the barbaric illiterate gaucho who according to Sarmiento was a highly dangerous species for the development of Argentina into a modernised nation-state. This modernisation could happen only through appropriating the wild, unused countryside space into a centre for implanting Western industrialisation and capitalism, he suggests. 5 Fernández Retamar, who was heavily influenced by José Martí, wrote “Caliban” in 1971, inverting the whole Caliban/Ariel dichotomic imagery by identifying Caliban with Latin America and Prospero with the conquistadores. He explains, There is no real Ariel/Caliban polarity: both are slaves in the hands of Prospero, the foreign magician. But Caliban is the rude and unconquerable master of the island, while Ariel, a creature of the air, although also a child of the isle, is the intellectual – as both Ponce and Césaire have seen (16). By identifying the continent with Caliban, he asked its inhabitants to rethink their history. The whole argument of being Caliban involved for him taking pride in being Caliban, just as when the term mambi was imposed on the Cubans during their war of independence by the colonists to offend them, it was in turn gladly accepted by the Cubans with pride and glory. 6 “A  school of theology, especially prevalent in the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America, that finds in the Gospel a call to free people from political, social, and material oppression.” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2000, by Houghton Mifflin Company) 7 Rigoberta Menchú Tum is an Indigenous Guatemalan woman, and she is the subject of the testimonial biography I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983). Her work for the rights of Indigenous peoples won her the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. 8 Walter D. Mignolo is an Argentine philosopher and semiotician who currently teaches at Duke University and has published some influential books like Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (1999); The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization (2003), and The Idea of Latin America (2005). 9 Aníbal Quijano was a Peruvian sociologist who taught at Binghamton University, New York. His major works are “Identity and Utopia in Latin America” (1989), “Coloniality

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and Modernity/Rationality” (1999), and “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America” (2000). 10 Enrique Domingo Dussel is an Argentine-Mexican philosopher and one of the founders of the philosophy of liberation movement. He is currently teaching at Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City, and his important works are Philosophy of Liberation (1993), Hypothesis for the Study of Latin in History (2003), and 1492, The Cover of the Other: Towards the Origin of the “Myth of Modernity” (2008). 11 Arturo Escobar is a Colombian-American anthropologist and has taught at various US universities. His works include Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995) and World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations in Contexts of Power (2006, coedited with Gustavo Lins Ribeiro). 12 Fernando Coronil  (1944–2011) was a Venezuelan anthropologist who contributed widely to Latin American studies. His most important works are “Beyond Occidentalism” (1996) and The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela (1997). 13 Edgardo Lander taught at the Central University of Venezuela, and his most important works are Neoliberalism, Civil Society and Democracy: Essays on Latin America and Venezuela (1995), Democracy in Contemporary Latin American Social Sciences (1997), and The Coloniality of Knowledge: Eurocentrism and Social Sciences. Latin American Perspectives (2000). 14 The Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) is a nongovernmental international institution created in 1967 on the initiative of UNESCO, an institution with which it holds associative status. At present, it brings together 320 research centres and over 600 postgraduate programs in the social sciences and humanities (master and doctorate studies), in 25 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. The council aims to promote and develop research and training in the social sciences and to strengthen exchanges and cooperation among organisations and researchers inside and outside the region. It further encourages the active dissemination of the knowledge produced by social scientists among social movements, popular organisations and civil society entities. Through such activities, CLACSO helps rethink about the issues related to Latin American and Caribbean societies, from a critical and pluralistic approach (CLASCO official website, www.clacso.org.ar/institucional/1a. php?idioma=ing). 15 Mignolo characterises one of the reasons for the split within the Latin American Subaltern Group as between those who read subalternity as a postmodern critique (which represents a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism) and those who read subalternity as a decolonial critique (which represents a critique of Eurocentrism from subalternised and silenced knowledges).

Works cited Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography.” Libcom, 2000, http://libcom.org/files/subaltern.pdf. Accessed 13 June 2020. Chatterjee, Partha. “The Nation and Its Peasants.” Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi. Verso, 2000, pp. 8–23. Chaturvedi, Vinayak, editor. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. Verso, 2000. Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. Navayana, 2013. Dussel, Enrique. “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures).” Boundary 2, the Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, vol. 20, no. 3, Autumn 1993, pp. 65–76. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Caliban and Other Essays. U of Minnesota P, 1989. Gramsci, Antonio. “History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodological Criteria.” Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. ElecBook, 1999, pp. 202–7. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of PoliticalEconomy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Transmodernity:

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Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 2–38. Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi. Verso, 2000, pp. 1–7. ———, editor. A Subaltern Studies Reader: 1986–1995. Oxford UP, 2012. Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. “Founding Statement.” The Postmodern Debate in Latin America, edited by John Beverley et al., Special Issue of Boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 3. Duke UP, 1993, pp. 110–21. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton UP, 2000. ———. “Coloniality of Power and Subalternity.” The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana Rodriguez. Duke UP, 2001, pp. 224–44. Morton, Stephen. Routledge Critical Thinkers: Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak. Routledge, 2005. Pandey, Gyanendra. “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today.” A Subaltern Studies Reader: 1986–1995, edited by Ranajit Guha. Oxford UP, pp. 1–33. Rodriguez, Ileana. “Introduction.” The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana Rodriguez. Duke UP, 2001. ———. “A New Debate on Subaltern Studies.” LASA Forum, vol. XXXIII, no. 2, Summer 2002, pp. 14–15.

PART II

Autobiographies in the pluriverse of Dalit writing

5 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE DEFACEMENT OF THE SELF Siddalingaiah’s Ooru Keri Shad Naved

Some of the famous male autobiographies of modern South Asia have titles such as My Experiments with Truth (M.K. Gandhi), An Autobiography (Jawaharlal Nehru), and My Son’s Father (Dom Moraes). The autobiographical work of Dr Siddalingaiah (b. 1954) is differently titled, as Ooru Keri (1996), where ooru is the Kannada word for village and keri refers to the Dalit quarters located at a distance from the village. Semantically and culturally, the title is an oxymoron because it brings together two segregated locations in the social life of the village community. But it is also an oxymoron at the level of the genre boundary that an autobiography is supposed to establish. In terms of Philippe Lejeune’s influential definition, autobiography is “a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality” (qtd. in Anderson, Autobiography 2). The title of Siddalingaiah’s autobiography (atmakathana), however, sounds like the title of a book of fiction, referring not to an individual private life but to social space. This reference announces the literary quality of this autobiographical work; that is, it demands to be read not as the retrospective narrative story of the self of Lejeune’s definition but as a narrative premised on the reality of an external world. The act of looking back (“retrospective”) is focused less on the story of the self than on finding the self missing where we would expect to find it in the title of a conventional autobiography. In this sense, Ooru Keri not just ignores the protocols of male autobiography but also shows the precariousness of that genre’s claim to be a narrative of a real person recounting their existence. My larger argument in this chapter is that defacement of the self is not just the trope for autobiographical writing, as influentially proposed by Belgian US-American deconstructionist Paul de Man, but it is a trope for the subject of politics, signalled by the term Dalit in Dalit autobiography. Ooru Keri establishes, against the confines of an autobiographical narrative, the primacy of a social world instead of a foregrounded individual life. In terms of the

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logic of its title, the narrative that follows it cannot be easily delineated from social commentary, or a short story, and a personalised account of being caught in the chasm between the ooru and the keri. This generic instability, however, has not been consistently theorised by scholars and readers of Dalit autobiographies in general. A common version of this critical observation can be seen in a review of the second volume of Ooru Keri (2010) by H.S. Raghavendra Rao: [Siddalingaiah] does not attempt at a mega narrative of dalit culture and politics at all. Nor is there any conscious effort to theorise or generalise. The entire book is full of lively anecdotes, memorable pen sketches and inimitable caricatures. But the personal and the general are so organically bound [sic] each other that the book is as much about Siddalingaiah the individual as it is about all major social, political and cultural movements of Karnataka in the last four decades. What organically binds (or distinguishes) the “personal” and the “general” is not clear in this narrative that ignores grand narratives about the Dalit movement and that is written, as Raghavendra Rao points out, in a distinctly comic, fragmentary mode. If the personal and the general are coextensive in Siddalingaiah’s book, how do we tell them apart? Why are these terms relevant in a consideration of the book? In this chapter, I focus on how the so-called personal is expressed through tropes or treated as a figure of the social, at the level of Ooru Keri’s narrative, to illustrate the politics of writing and reading Dalit autobiography. My broader contention is that the politics of Dalit autobiography is less what we habitually associate with it, or even what authors say they are writing. It is what emerges from the specific movement of the autobiographical trope in this body of writing. Dalit autobiography is often understood as the entry of Dalit writers into a preexisting genre and format of expression. This view presumes that the subject of autobiography, the self-reflection in writing of a real individual, is simply available for the Dalit writer to choose and occupy. As K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu note in their critical introduction to a dossier of Dalit writings from South India, not even autobiography can be considered a pre-existing template for Dalit expression. This view also implies that now that we do have examples of Dalit autobiography in the various Indian languages (and increasingly in English), they are simply additions to an existing wealth of life narratives in Indian languages. The idea that Dalit autobiographers are readily adopting a pre-existing genre and adding to the genre of autobiography in their respective languages erases the problems raised by their treatment of the figures that create the autobiographical effect, problems that have been reduced to the formula that in such autobiographies the collective “we” speaks instead of the individualist “I.”1 This emphasis on the voice of autobiography, one of the signatures of the genre, shows that we tend to reduce writings from disempowered groups to orality, as something everyone is capable of hearing and comprehending and therefore ignoring. Since the heyday of classical anthropology, many assumed that the structure of writing is only available to “advanced” cultures

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and groups and that “primitive” cultures express the self transparently because they are not hampered by writing.2 The current enthusiasm for orature and orality, in studying writing by disempowered groups, implicitly relies on this anthropological prejudice. Any consideration of Siddalingaiah’s autobiography in the context of the aesthetics of Dalit autobiography must grapple with the unique nature of his narration as a Dalit subject. As D.R. Nagaraj points out in his afterword to the Kannada edition of Ooru Keri, Siddalingaiah eludes the victim-narrating-their-story trope common to many Dalit narratives of the self. In fact, the self that unfolds in this narrative is quite protean, indescribable as a temporally bound speaking self and transcends in several ways the injunctions of continuity and fixity required of the normative autobiographical self. The problem, then, with the narrative of the victimised self is not that it functions through a narcissistic reference to the same self as a truth claim but that it erases the historical specificity of violence and suffering as somehow transcended in the performance of a stable self that is able to recount its victimisation. While much can be made of the fragmentariness of the self, the overall framework of Ooru Keri is discernibly conventional, where the narrative follows the Tolstoyan model of childhood and youth. But like the classic twist proposed by G.B. Shaw in his autobiography, Siddalingaiah does not recount things that happened to him but rather the way he happened to things. In this sense, the slippery sense of the self and disruptive humour inflects this seemingly linear and developmental autobiographical narrative. Here is not a victim bearing testimony to their physical and social humiliation alone but instead a vibrant personality bringing a life into narrative, a life realised by survival, struggle, and recounting the distance between success and survival. In the major part of the narrative, one does not encounter any declarations on the narrator’s part such as “I, Siddalingaiah,” even when there are many selfreferential declarations such as “I did this/that.” In other words, what seems missing are the moments in which the narrator appears to birth himself. Thus, in “Part 4” of the book, in the section titled “Factory worker,” we encounter for the first time the name Siddalingaiah. The narrator is working as a cleaning hand in a rich factory owner’s household. He has the job of throwing out the garbage after cleaning the huge vessels. The narrator says, I was a little nervous that I may be seen by someone I knew when I was taking out the garbage. So I would smear black soot all over my face before stepping out with the buckets, which made me unrecognisable. (M.P. 38) At one time, in the same narrative sequence, he sees an acquaintance on the road while he is taking out the garbage, and the narrator says, “Before he could ask the question on his lips, ‘Aren’t you Siddalingaiah?’ I twisted my face and limped back into the house” (M.P. 38, emphases added). In terms of the autobiographical genre, this is a significant moment in the text: The author’s name intrudes on the

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narrative and gives it autobiographical credence. This is the first instance within the text where we read the name of the author as the narrator. Paul de Man points out in his influential essay “Autobiography as De-facement” that autobiography is a function that effects defacement or disfigurement of the face of the autobiographer, who tries to create a fictional face by using linguistic tropes and who is supposed to stand in for the author’s self (72). Unlike Lejeune’s external definition of the autobiography, de Man directs us towards the language of autobiography, which creates a complex relationship between speaker/narrator, self, and what he calls “face.” In other words, the verifiability and reliability of autobiographical truth does not arise from the fact of writing one’s life as its author; rather, giving a particular face to one’s voice creates the autobiographical text. In the case of Ooru Keri, in the passage cited earlier, the narrator defaces himself with soot because he is trying not to be recognised by anyone. In this condition of literal defacement, he is recognised by someone. He pre-empts this recognition by pointing to himself through the voice of the narrative, “Aren’t you Siddalingaiah?” The question is notably not even asked (“before he could ask”) and therefore not answered in reality, and the narrator says that he turns away and refuses to acknowledge the other person’s question. This entire exchange happens at the level of narrative and is not a real occurrence that is being reported factually. Such a textual moment significantly reveals the politics of autobiography as it operates in Siddalingaiah’s autobiography. The narrative does not offer an originary, articulate self as the fulcrum of meaning. In fact, the text repeatedly reveals the complexities of any announcement of the self as such. In terms of social hierarchy, the sense of self commonly portrayed in autobiography is a privileged origin of speech and self-assertion. This text, however, does not announce “I am Siddalingaiah, and this is my life story.” Instead, in such a moment of narrative tension, between a question unasked and an answer forever delayed, the narrative voice is forced to acknowledge itself, but only in terms of disavowal, defacement, and silence. In trying to escape humiliation, the narrator hides behind self-defacement. In the process, he shows that in the threat of humiliation and shame, the self can be best captured and made intelligible. Even though he avoids the imaginary interlocutor’s query, the narrator repeats his own name in the autobiographical mode – creating a sense of personhood as part of the defaced autobiographical self. A sharp sense of historical oppression and exclusion marks such a textual moment when the fiction of the self in writing is brought up against the precarious conditions of life forced on people who are marginalised and disempowered. What are the conditions under which the self refuses to acknowledge its name, and from what position does that same self talk about this moment? Although it is a moment of self-discovery, it is composed entirely of the pain of self-defacement enjoined by a systematic devaluation of the self. Thus, although we can visualise the young boy limping back into the house, pretending to be not himself, we cannot really say what a “twisted face” looks like. This is what the trope of defacement looks like, not hidden in the folds of language but spelled out by Siddalingaiah’s narrator.

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Only now can we read de Man’s theory of autobiography itself in rhetorical terms (i.e. as a trope) when considering the features of Dalit autobiography or any writing by the marginalised. In his essay, de Man calls the autobiographical function “a discourse of self-restoration in the face of death” (76). The “face of death,” however, is itself a trope in de Man’s theorisation of autobiography, a sort of romantic horizon for his deconstructive reading. The authenticity of the horizon of death is what seems to lend credence to the discourse of self-restoration in autobiography. Dalit autobiography, in the example of Ooru Keri, chooses instead not to escape this face of death (and humiliation) and finds the self in precisely those instances when its conditions of existence are questioned and brought face to face with its humiliation. What trope is to be used for the emergence of this self? Surely it is not self-restoration by putting together a mask of language. The face is more difficult to conjure in writing, as opposed to painting, photography, or film. Aniket Jaaware chooses in his recent phenomenology of caste to focus on touch as the basis of the grammar of caste relations in India. However, the face is neglected in his phenomenology; it is the one publicly visible body part that is considered too intimate and invasive to touch. And yet in the scene from Ooru Keri, the face is rubbed with soot by the subject himself. The trope of a “twisted face” speaks of an attempt to escape detection by language (i.e. the call to his name), an attempt that fails and through which we get the immediacy of another trope, the trope of a historical disfigurement. The narration of this episode breaks the romantic horizon of death and defacement, as triggers of self-restoration, by showing how even defacing oneself will not remove the stigma attached to the self. The victimisation is thus not an external story being narrated here but a defacement that happens at the level of language and that does not administer the relief of self-restoration, either for the autobiographical self or for readers used to recognising autobiography as a triumph of the self over external obstacles. One aspect of Dalit autobiography that Raghavendra Rao’s review, quoted earlier, valorises is its expression of the pain and suffering of a collective rather than a personal one. This logic of one or the other diminishes the engagement between the two levels of consciousness that narrates the self in Siddalingaiah’s autobiography. Equally, the metaphoric of death in de Man’s theorisation misses out on this aspect of the writing of the collective self that is formed within its experience of a structure of relentless oppression. In both formulations, the personal–social tie tends to disperse the actual location of humiliation, shame, and suffering that narratives like Ooru Keri are interested in focusing on and confronting. The tropes of masking, defacing, and disfiguring are therefore criticisms of this binary, which ultimately removes the Dalit autobiographical self from both the world of its unique linguistic modes and the historical processes through which the Dalit self is formed. At an early moment in Siddalingaiah’s narrative, much before the naming episode analysed earlier, we encounter the primal scene of humiliation for the narrator: One day, as we stood on the squat walls calling out to our parents, we noticed something strange. A  man had fastened a yoke onto the shoulders of two

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others, and was ploughing Ainoru’s fields. It was amusing to watch the two men trundle on like bullocks, while the third followed them swinging a whip and making them plough. A strange agony gripped me the moment I realised that one of the men carrying the yoke was my father. Some women who [sic] came to where we were standing and sighed, “What a plight has befallen poor Dyavanna!” This doubled my agony. (S.R. 2) The scene describes a chance occurring, whose chronology in the narrator’s life is not specified (“one day”). The image of the two men yoked to a plough creates an arresting, even grotesque, image whose meaning is uncertain because of the sudden strangeness of the sight. The scene is witnessed by a “we,” and the narrator describes their general mood as “amused.” It looks like a play is being enacted, more precisely a parody of the usual sight of a bullock yoked to a plough being goaded by a person from behind. There is already a doubling in the scene (the actual sight of men ploughing and the image that they recreate for the audience as bullocks ploughing a field), and completely locating the speaker in either scene is hard. He is of course physically among the “we” and is amused to behold this scene while calling out to his parents. The narrator’s exclamation about his agony coincides with the realisation that one of the men is his father. Amusement turns to agony precisely when the narrator recognises his father’s face. His agony is “doubled” when there is a confirmation from others who point out his father by his name (“Dyavanna”). The earlier mood of amusement thus characterises a free playing engagement with the world where a scene of physical exploitation of men is read as a funny parody of a stock rural scene. Such moments of biting irony are coded as comic in Siddalingaiah’s narrative. And this is not accidental. The disorienting shift from comedy to tragic agony in this passage shows the realisation of someone else’s (here the narrator’s father’s) dehumanised self in one’s consciousness through a move away from the distanced observation of the world characteristic of comedy towards seeing oneself implicated in the horrors of that world (could we call this merely tragedy?). I suggest that the face and the name are rhetorical modes of representing this movement in the passage. The narrator’s agony is not just a philosophically detached cry about social oppression but the painful and shameful realisation of his connection with that oppression both as spectator and as its victim. He realises that it is his father in the presence of those who call the father by his name, alienating the son from his own father but finding the father in a position that reflects directly on his own degradation. The appearance of this anecdote, at a general level, shows the milestones of the self that the narrative seeks to memorialize. The father’s initial humiliation in such a public way highlights not just the painful restoration of the self in the narrative but also the persistence of other modes of seeing the world besides the autobiographical. Thus, the second moment of agony for the narrator is initiated by a comment from “some women” who uttered what they had to say within earshot of the narrator. The women may be genuinely expressing sympathy for someone of their

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own social and economic class (they “sighed”), but the sense of shame arising in the narrator at their comment is hard to disentangle from a “doubled” perspective. The first is obviously the agony of not realising that this amusing scene involved the degradation of one’s own father. The second involves the instance of the mask, the doubled face, which in this moment is caught in the recognition by the women who openly take his father’s name and turn him into an object of pity. The agony is therefore not just doubled in magnitude but felt by a second self who is aware that the entire social scene has become the site of a personal and subjectively felt agony. To be singled out so starkly in the generality of social life cannot be the enabling condition for the conventional autobiographical self, but rather, it points here to the conditions under which the Dalit self must learn to recognise itself and survive the agony of this moment. This entire movement of self-recognition – through the inability to recognise the father, reduced to a labouring animal, and through the forced realisation of it through the voice of others – comes across in such narrative moments of disfiguration of the autobiographical self. We cannot simply reduce this movement to the cold recounting of the milestones of the development of the autobiographical self that is writing about itself from the outside. Both moments that we have seen so far come from the acutely felt memories of youth, which may be considered formative for the mature self from and about which Siddalingaiah has written subsequent volumes of Ooru Keri. An incident about the making and disfiguring of the autobiographical face also emerges in the second volume of Ooru Keri, published in 2006. Structured around vignettes of memory, powerful impressions and explosive laughter from the writer’s later, mature life in the Dalit movement, the incident occurs when Siddalingaiah is invited to address a Dalit conference at Doddaballapur (“A Drop in the Ocean of Humanity”). At this point, Siddalingaiah is a well-known literary and political figure and a fiery public speaker. He chooses to walk to the venue with the crowd of people who have come to attend the conference and in particular listen to him. He chooses to walk not at the front of the procession but among the people. There he notices a woman shouting Dalit political slogans and carrying an infant in her arms. She notices his looking at the child and asks him to carry the child for her. She does not realise that he is one of the dignitaries at the function. The writer happily carries it to the venue and returns the child to the mother. Later, after his passionate speech, as he is ribbed by other speakers, because his powerful oration came from such an emaciated-looking person, Siddalingaiah notices the same woman looking “awkwardly” at him from the audience, having realised who he was. The textual moments of recognition of the face are not just incidental to Siddalingaiah’s narratives. The narrator connects the public comments about his thin frame and his fiery speech to this woman’s recognition of him as one of her own people: “Was it my appearance and my simple clothes that encouraged that sister to ask me to carry her child?” In the movement of the self-recognition of this passage are three moments. The obvious celebrity of the Dalit poet and public intellectual, his public face, is rejected when he decides to walk among the crowd. This first moment is full of self-awareness and the decision to not wear that public face, because the self

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will become dissociated for those by whom it wants to be recognised. The second moment is the recognition of the public face on the dais, when his body becomes the cause of some banter, a recognition not just by the writer of his own “ordinary” appearance but also from his being identified by the woman sitting in the audience. The third moment comprises Siddalingaiah reading the woman’s awkwardness as really his own awakening to the fact that he does look ordinary and that that is why the woman recognised him as someone trustworthy of giving her child to carry. These three moments of the linguistic defacement of the self, I suggest, not only are autobiographical but also say something about how politics may have an autobiographical dimension: not in the sense of our politics’ depending on who we are, as a personal identity, but in the sense of politics as arriving at our sense of self by reworking all that we have learnt to believe about this self. We can read in the development of the idea of the self, and simply its self-restoration, discontinuous moments when the pressure, stigma, and wish for social recognition are different moments in the politics of Dalit consciousness. The first moment here was self-chosen when the public figure decides to walk unnoticed among the masses. That he could manage this “deception” shows that his celebrity is based not on some symbolic relevance (that he is known by face) but rather on a faceless involvement in mass politics. Voice perhaps would have been a better marker of Siddalingaiah’s celebrity, which is exactly what distinguishes him in the second moment among his peers on stage. How could such a powerful voice emerge from his thin bodily frame? In this moment, the self is made conscious of a division within itself: The outer frame does not correspond with the power inside. But before this realisation is absorbed or privatised, he notices the woman looking at him from the audience. This is the third moment of the political movement of consciousness that it is the private self, its face, its voice, and its bodily characteristics that embody the connection with the social. The woman’s face registers an awkward expression, a possible defacement in itself, that connects the Dalit leader with the Dalit woman. This is not a “political” realisation in which a faith in some originary self is restored but rather a moment reflecting on the nature of politics in which the individual self, through its face, bypasses the representational aspect of mass politics of the bourgeois kind. Siddalingaiah is relieved that he is recognised not by the defacement of the face, as is usual in a politics of representation. Instead, it is his face, the conditions of its recognizability, that undercuts such a politics of representation. Within the confines of the text, this recognition of the several moments of de-facement is a valuable commentary not just on the Dalit movement but also on the redrawing of politics that results from its recounting in writing. As I have argued throughout this chapter, we miss out on this political dimension of autobiography when we forcibly read into Dalit autobiography the predetermined relation between the social world and the individual self as the only face of politics. In terms of the question that is not answered when he thinks someone is going to ask him who he is, and the elision of a conventional speaking position articulating his personal pain, Ooru Keri reflects on the undoing of autobiography, its rhetoric, and its politics through Dalit autobiography. The question is then not just one of confidently writing (and reading)  first-person narratives  of suffering and

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instantly forming a community of pain but also one of using shame, defacement as positive attempts at coming to terms with the social and political construction of the self. This is not to downplay the vibrant humour and particularistic detail of the text. Indeed, the humour and comedic elements are closely tied to the description of the way the narrator inhabits the world and comes to perceive emotions of shame, humiliation, and cruelty. Interrupting the linearity of an evolving self, Ooru Keri works with folklore, ghostly sightings, and loosely connected anecdotes within a concern for the reality of experience and creates a sense of history (of the Dalit movement in Karnataka, which is another story that the narrative tells), making it overflow the staid confines of the autobiographical genre as conceived by theorists of writing.

Notes 1 This has been the axiom of reading Dalit autobiographies and Dalit literature in general since the first commentaries appeared in English in the late 1990s. See, for example, Nayar (2006). Dalit critics such as Baburao Bagul do not adhere to the binary of I/we when thinking about the revolutionary (rather than just collective) dimensions of Dalit thought and writing. 2 See, for example, Jacques Derrida’s famous critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Works cited Anderson, Linda R. Autobiography. The New Critical Idiom Series. Routledge, 2001. Bagul, Baburao. “Dalit Literature Is but Human Literature.” Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature, edited by Arjun Dangle. Orient Longman, 1992. De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. Columbia UP, 1984, pp. 67–82. Derrida, Jacques. “The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau.” Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins UP, 1976/1997. Jaaware, Aniket. Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching. Orient Blackswan, 2019. Nagaraj, D.R. The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement in India. Edited by Prithvi Datta and Chandra Shobhi. Permanent Black, 2010. Nayar, Pramod K. “Bama’s Karukku: Dalit Autobiography as Testimonio.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 41, no. 2, 2006, pp. 83–100. Raghavendra Rao, H.S. “Community Narratives.” Friday Review Bangalore, The Hindu, 17 Sept. 2010, www.hindu.com/fr/2010/09/17/stories/2010091750740200.htm. Accessed 15 Dec. 2010. Satyanarayana, K., and Susie Tharu, editors. No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India. Dossier 1: Tamil and Malayalam. Penguin Books, 2011. Siddalingaiah, D. Ooru Keri: Atmakathana. Translated by M. Madhava Prasad [M.P.]. Akshara Prakashana, 1996 (unpublished English translation). ———. Ooru Keri (An Autobiography). Translated by S.R. Ramakrishna [S.R.]. Sahitya Akademi, 2003. ———. “Ooru Keri (Part 2): Excerpts.” Steel Nibs Are Sprouting: New Dalit Writing from South India. Dossier 2: Kannada and Telugu, edited by K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu and translated by M. Madhava Prasad. Harper Collins, 2013.

6 MULI’S LIFE HISTORY AS DALIT TESTIMONIO Raj Kumar1

Life writing as an established literary genre can be found in the West as early as the 4th century bce. The best example is Plato’s Seventh Letter, where he describes an important period of his life. Some sources tell us that some of the early Roman rulers, like Lutatius, Catulus, Scarus, Rutilius, Rufus, Sulla, and Caesar, left behind some parts of their life accounts mostly concerning their military achievements. Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and other Roman philosophers, while expounding on their philosophies, are known to have referred to some aspects of their respective lives.2 However, Saint Augustine’s Confessions is the best-known piece of writing about a life. Because of the extensive use of an agonised self, Saint Augustine’s Confessions is considered to be a trendsetter for the emergence of a new literary genre, called autobiography. The term autobiography was put into circulation for the first time by Robert Southey in the Quarterly Review in 1809 (Sayre 4). Even before 1809, autobiographies were surely available in the market. Southey’s term referred to works written by people about their personal lives. He, however, did not include diaries, journals, and collection of letters in his definition, because they were different genres of writing in terms of both theme and structure. Today, autobiography has many more forms, which also include memoirs and mediated autobiography, among others. While the early autobiographies were mostly written by rich, educated, upper-class men to celebrate their successes in public life, later varieties of autobiographies were written by all types of people, including women, Black people, sex workers, workers, and many others. This prompts Julia Swindells, a literary critic, to comment thus: Autobiography now has the potential to be the text of the oppressed and culturally displaced, forging a right to speak both for and beyond the individual. People in a position of powerlessness – women, black people, working-class

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people  – have more than begun to insert themselves into the culture via autobiography, via the assertion of a “personal” voice, which speaks beyond itself. (7) Swindells’s just-cited views are important because the oppressed people throughout the world have been voiceless for a long time. Only after their sustained organised democratic struggles have they been able to read, write, and speak in public. Now oppressed subjects, who for a long time were voiceless, have become speaking subjects. Many of them have also started writing their autobiographies. Linda Anderson, the author of Autobiography (2001), therefore writes, The idea that autobiography can become “the text of the oppressed,” articulating through one person’s experience, experiences which may be representative of a particular marginalized group, is an important one: autobiography becomes both a way of testifying to oppression and empowering the subject through their cultural inscription and recognition. (104) Anderson’s view on “the text of the oppressed” is quite significant in that as far as autobiographical practices are concerned, the poor, illiterate, and underprivileged, whose voices earlier went unheard, have now started speaking/writing to the world. This is a common practice in almost all countries. So instead of generalising about this phenomenon, this chapter cites some specific examples of oppressed people who have become vocal in asserting their struggling lives. The predicament of Dalits in India is a befitting topic in this context. The question therefore arises whether autobiography as a literary genre can contain Dalit subjectivity. Asking this question is important because as a result of Hindu caste laws, Dalits in India were deprived of education for a long time. It was only after independence that the Indian Constitution made provisions for compulsory education to safeguard the interests of Dalits and other deprived communities. For a long time, illiterate Dalits could not write their life histories. Consequently, life writing was not a traditional literary genre in Indian culture. But from the 19th century onwards, we begin to find texts that narrate personal lives. Critical studies of these personal narratives have been slow to emerge. The few Indian autobiographies that have widely drawn attention of researchers worldwide are Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Autobiography or My Experiments with Truth (1927), Jawaharlal Nehru’s Autobiography (1936), Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), and few others. Gandhi, Nehru, and Chaudhuri individually represent different worldviews, but socioculturally, they belong to a common category; that is, they were upper-caste men and hence privileged to speak to the world. In recent times, a considerable number of critical studies on Indian upper-caste women’s autobiographies have appeared. Heretofore, Dalits, Adivasis, hizras, sex workers, domestic helps, and other less-fortunate

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human beings, who have been raising their voices for quite some time through their respective personal narratives, were rarely heard from and thus systematically neglected in academic circles. Because of a lack of space, this chapter will not be able to give examples from all these demographics mentioned or demonstrate how their life writings have already made a big difference in the Indian literary scene. Perhaps, referring to only Dalit life writing and seeing how a new subjectivity has emerged will be sufficient to draft a new narrative of Indian society, culture, and literature. The emergence of Dalit autobiography gives a new dimension to the study of autobiography. Apart from being marginal, Dalits have been denied education since time immemorial in Indian caste society. Now that they are getting educated, some of them have been using writing as a weapon for their social assertion. Thus, writing autobiography is a special act for the members of this group, who use the genre to achieve a sense of identity and mobilise resistance against oppression. This phenomenon can be well understood when we read some of the Dalit autobiographies, such as Hazari’s Untouchable: An Autobiography of an Indian Outcaste (1951), Laxman Mane’s Upara (Marathi, 1984), Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi (Marathi, 1984), D.P. Das’s The Untouchable Story (1985), Narendra Jadhav’s Amcha Baap Aani Amhi (Marathi, 1993), Vasant Moon’s Vasti, (Marathi, 1995), Balwant Singh’s An Untouchable in the IAS (English, 1997), Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan (Hindi, 1997), Laxman Gaikward’s Uchalya (Marathi, 1998), D.R. Jatav’s A Silent Soldier: An Autobiography (English, 2000), and Shyamlal’s Untold Story of a Bhangi Vice-Chancellor (English, 2001). One important aspect about studying Dalit life writings is that they cannot be appreciated or properly evaluated in terms of the existing conventions of evaluating autobiographies written by educated upper-caste writers. Many of these narratives have not, in fact, been written down. They have been orally communicated and then recorded by others. For instance, the moving life story of an unlettered ex-Untouchable Muli titled Untouchable: An Indian Life History (1979) has been recorded by US-American anthropologist James Freeman. Sumitra Bhave’s Pan on Fire (Marathi, 1988) and Josiane Racine and Jean-Luc Racine’s Viramma: Life of an Untouchable are two similar collaborative works. While analysing Muli’s life history, this chapter will read it as an example of Dalit testimonio because Muli, throughout his narrative, challenges the existing caste truth and brings an alternative truth to prove his points. Before analysing Muli’s life history, the chapter briefly sketches how testimonio as a literary device helps poor and illiterate subjects to articulate their subjectivities.

Testimonio as a literary device Testimonio as a literary device has its origin in Latin America. The reason for its emergence is political: to give voice to the voiceless, particularly against a ruling establishment. But there are also other historical reasons for its emergence. In

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“Testimonio and Subalternities in India and Latin America,” Francesca Denegri traces the origin of testimonio in the Latin American context: The rise of Latin American testimonio can be read as a result of two factors which converged in the late 1960s. First, the existence in the region of a rich and continuous ethnographic tradition within the contact zone, going back to the Chronicles, with a strong interest in the oral accounts of natives; and second, the social liberation movements which swept across the continent after the Cuban revolution mobilising the interest of the middle class intellectual to give voice to the indigenous compesinos who were seen as fellows in the common struggle against authoritarian states. (46, original italics) When testimonio originated in Latin America, it dealt with specific local issues. But later, the genre of testimonio was adopted in other countries using it for political purposes, making it a transnational literary genre. Dalit life writing mobilises resistance against the oppressive caste structures in India. Dalit testimonio may not be exactly the same as the Latin American testimonio, because of the different sociopolitical and historical conditions of both the countries. Nevertheless, testimonio as a literary form has some ingrained characteristics that are commonly used by people across regions and nationalities to reclaim their human rights. Kathryn Blackmer Reyes and Julia E. Curry Rodriguez in their joint article “Testimonio: Origins, Terms, and Resources” contextualise the use of testimonial form as follows: The use of personal narratives in U.S.-based scholarship in the areas of critical race theory, Chicana and Chicano Studies, and other critical studies is informed by the practice of testimonio as a legacy of reflexive narratives of liberation used by people throughout the world. . . . This type of writing entails a first person oral or written account, drawing on experiential, selfconscious, narrative practice to articulate an urgent voicing of something to which one bears witness. Presented at times as memoirs, oral histories, qualitative vignettes, prose, song lyrics, or spoken word, the testimonio has the unique characteristic of being a political conscienticized reflection that is often spoken. To be sure, the testimonio does not remain in its oral state; but rather, it is often taken (as in interviewed, recorded, and transcribed) or written from the outset perhaps in diaries, letters, or journals. What is certain is that testimonio is not meant to be hidden, made intimate, nor kept secret. The objective of the testimonio is to bring to light a wrong, a point of view, or an urgent call for action. Thus, in this manner, the testimonio is different from the qualitative method of in-depth interviewing, oral history narration, prose, or spoken word. The testimonio is intentional and political. (525, original italics)

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Testimonio, whether in oral form or in written form, becomes a tool for the masses to record their protests and to seek solidarity for their struggles. Thus, testimonio is one of the best mediums for the subaltern groups to further their political causes. In “Subaltern Narrative and Political Solidarity in the Testimonial Genre in Latin America and India,” Abhishek Mitra presents the following views: Testimonio gives voice in literature to a previously “voiceless,” anonymous, collective popular-democratic subject, the “people,” but in such a way that the intellectual or professional, the editor-collaborator of the text, usually of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois background, is interpolated as being part of and dependent on the “people,” without as the time losing his or her identity as an intellectual. It suggests as an appropriate ethical and political response more the possibility of solidarity than of charity. A testimonio has the potential of placing on the agenda, within a given country, problems of poverty and oppression, for example in rural areas that are not normally visible in the dominant forms of representation. (59) Mitra’s views here exactly reflect the way Dalits in India, particularly those who live in rural areas, are situated. As mentioned earlier, illiteracy among Dalits is common. Even if they try to get education, facing all odds, they are not all successful in their ventures. They cannot write their autobiographies on their own. But they can narrate their life stories to others, who can help to document them. The narrated autobiography of Muli is one such dictated life story. It has been collected in Odia and then translated into English by anthropologist James M. Freeman, under the title Untouchable: An Indian Life History (1979). Muli comes from the state of Odisha, where the general literacy rate remains low even today. In this case, we can well imagine the literacy standard among the Dalits of Odisha. A narrated autobiography such as Muli’s invites the following questions: Should oral autobiographies be read in the same way as a written autobiography? What is the difference between the two? Is there any relationship between the written autobiography and the oral autobiography? The following pages in this chapter will seek to answer these questions. There is a complex relationship between the oral form and the written form. Every human society before the invention of a written language was oral based. Oral communication is easy and quick but temporary, as it is not documented. But when something is written about, it becomes a document that can come under scrutiny. Therefore, anything that is available in written form becomes a part of history that can be referred to in the future. So what can be the relationship between oral communication and written words? Oral communication is temporary, but spoken words are sometime more powerful than written words. When we speak, our speech language registers a powerful impact on the listeners. Since our speech is temporary, it alerts both the speaker and the audience to be mindful of the entirety of communication. This is very different

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in the case of written communication, because the reader can always go back to verify the document if there is a communication gap. Document verification, of course, needs literary skills. Therefore, literacy becomes an inevitable medium to pass from an oral culture to a written world. Since the genre of autobiography is an act of writing, the question arises whether narrated autobiographies are less important than written autobiographies. Philippe Lejeune, an authority on autobiography, resolves the conflict centring on orality and literacy, stating that narrated autobiographies have the same authenticity and legitimacy as written autobiographies, sometimes even more. Because, Lejeune explains, “On a certain number of points, autobiography by people who do not write throws light on autobiography written by those who do: the imitation reveals the secrets of fabrication and functioning of ‘the natural’ product” (186). He strongly suggests the idea of “autobiographical collaborations,” precisely so that the voice of illiterate people like Muli can be heard more often. Lejeune also argues that the common masses all over the world have been silent over the years, not because they are unread simpletons but because they are the victims of ruling elites. To quote Lejeune, Why this “silence”? Because they did not know either how to read or how to write, and they transmitted their memories orally? It would be naïve to think so. Education became widespread throughout the nineteenth century. But those who knew how to read and write used their education for other ends, in other forms; why, or for whom, would they have written the story of their life? Behind this problem of literacy and acculturation is hidden another: that of the network of communication of the printed work, and of the function of the texts and discourse that are exchanged through its channel. This network is in the hands of the ruling classes and serves to promote their values and their ideology. Their autobiographical narratives, quite obviously, are not written only to “pass on memory” (which is done through word and example in all classes). They are the place where a collective identity is elaborated, reproduced, and transformed, the patterns of life appropriate to the ruling classes. This identity is imposed upon all those who belong to or are assimilated into these classes, and it rejects the others as insignificant. (198, original emphasis) Muli, naturally the “other,” is more than an “insignificant” character for the Odia/ Indian ruling classes so far as his collaborative autobiography with James Freeman is concerned. Born into a poor Dalit family in the state capital of Odisha, Bhubaneswar, Muli had probably all the advantages of grabbing new opportunities provided by a civil society in the wake of India’s independence. But Muli’s Untouchable caste identity was his major disadvantage. In his childhood, he was thrown out of school just because he happened to come from a supposedly polluted community called Bauri. After that, he tried several professions: He became a daily wage labourer, small shopkeeper, sharecropper, and so on. Given the situation that

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all these jobs required a strong body, Muli chose to become a pimp supplying sex workers to upper-caste men, to make easy money. Because Muli had a weak body and a lazy mind, the job of a pimp suited him. But money was not all Muli wanted in his life. He also wanted dignity and self-respect, which as an Untouchable, he did not get so easily. Therefore, tensions build up throughout his narrative. Muli’s attempt to define a self was rejected by the upper-caste people in their day-to-day relationships with him. James Freeman writes, The story of Muli’s life may move others, as it did me, to ponder their own experiences in ways they had previously neglected. An authentic life history confronts us with an immediacy and concreteness that compels our involvement, that causes us to discover within ourselves something about human predicaments everywhere in the face of which our cultural differences become insignificant. Muli presents such a life history. The cultural idiom in which he operates may be foreign to us, but his aims are not: he strives for dignity; he seeks to be respected by the people around him; he questions why fate has brought him to his present circumstances; he wants a good life for himself. As he approaches what he thinks of as old age, Muli sees his dream of achieving a good life slipping by; a bleak end awaits him. He expresses no hopes of salvation or a better existence in a future life. His particular beliefs are guided by his cultural setting, but his predicament is not. (396) Given that Muli’s predicament was also the predicament of the Untouchable community as a whole, investigating how Muli engaged his “personal self ” while fighting against the “communal self ” of the discriminatory society to which he belonged is important, as is studying the cultural milieu in which Muli grew up. But before analysing Muli’s life history in detail, let us briefly discuss the background in which Muli’s “collaborative autobiography” came into being.

An act of collaboration As stated earlier, James Freeman collected the stories of Muli’s life in Odia, translated them into English and published them under a title Untouchable: An Indian Life History. Freeman knew Odia, but he was also helped by an interpreter named Hari. The book Untouchable contains 31 chapters. Except for chapters 1, 2, and 3, which make up the introduction, and 30 and 31, which make up the conclusion and are written by Freeman, the remaining 26 chapters are Muli’s version of his life, as told to Freeman. Freeman writes in the introduction that he never interfered with Muli or influenced him in anyway, except that he had to provoke Muli in some places to talk in detail about some of the interesting events of his life. Muli was quite selective in narrating his life stories. He did not realise that Freeman would help him to connect each episode of his life to a single idea of the development of his marginal self. Perhaps Freeman’s concern about “equality of all [humankind]”

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drew him closer to Muli and the people of his community whom he witnessed as the victims of caste oppression. Becoming a “collaborator” of Muli’s autobiography, Freeman did an immense service to oppressed people at large. In the conclusion, he writes, “by recording the lives and sufferings of Muli and his people, I hope that I have helped to hasten the day when such sufferings cease, not only for Indian untouchables, but for all victims of social inequality” (396). This activist vision of Freeman’s does not in any way suggest that he was biased in favour of Muli and his community. Freeman, on the other hand, was impartial and serious about his academic ethics. While showcasing Muli’s life history, he writes that “A detailed life history like Muli’s provides a way to reach behind the surface answers outsiders often receive, grasping from the insider’s perspective what he really values and how he interprets his experiences” (12). We must acknowledge here that Freeman’s earnest efforts to project “Muli as he was” earned him worldwide recognition as the author of the book Untouchable. Muli was a pseudonym. He belonged to the Bauris,3 an Untouchable caste group in Odisha who did not have a fixed traditional occupation at least until the 1970s, when Freeman was collecting Muli’s life history. The Bauris earned their livelihood by doing odd jobs, such as stone cutting, road building, weaving, and so on. Most of them were landless, and that brought insecurity to their lives. A majority of them were daily wage labourers. Since they belonged to one of the socially and religiously “polluted” groups, social mobility was a distant dream. Freeman reports that although subsidiary castes such as the Mallias, who were barely above the Bauris in caste hierarchy, had amply benefited from the opportunities offered by the new capital city, Bhubaneswar – which was located 3 kilometres away from Muli’s village, Kapileswar, and now is a part of Bhubaneswar city – the Bauris had stagnated over the years. The reasons for their pitiable conditions could be several: Lack of education and lack of resources, including land, could be cited as main factors. Also, limited contacts outside their community compelled the Bauris to work as unskilled labourers, something that they had been doing for many generations. Because of protective discriminatory provisions enshrined in the Indian Constitution, the Dalits of various Indian states have improved educationally and economically to a certain extent, but Odia Dalits have lagged behind by not availing themselves of such opportunities to the fullest extent. One important reason for this may be that Odia society is still feudal, which means that the state does not easily allow any modern democratic values to enter and upset the traditional power structure. The ingrained exploitative aspects of caste and their economic consequences remain the same, even stronger today than they were some 30 years ago, when Freeman was doing his field study. Therefore, the Bauris, like other Untouchable communities in Odisha, continue to do unskilled poorly paid jobs that deny them anything more than basic subsistence earnings. Inheriting such a stigmatised social role, Muli seemed to stagnate both socially and economically. Muli also belonged to a large joint family, which could hardly think of any economic security, and hence, he lived on the brink of starvation throughout the

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year. Muli remembered how as a child he, along with other members of his family, starved almost daily: We were always hungry; most of the time we starved. Father’s income alone was insufficient to feed us. Because mother was usually pregnant or nursing babies, she rarely worked in the fields. We ate whatever we could find: snails from the river, leaves, and rice from the fields. Once a day the adults ate cooked food, mostly pakhala [watered rice], but they gave most of it to us. I remember that when I was five years old we ate hot cooked rice only very rarely, once every two weeks, and it was a great feast for us. We usually ate freshly cooked hot rice too fast. To make it feed more people, we let it cool and added water. We ate this watered rice most of the time. (66) This is a grim picture of a family who struggled to keep going. Muli and his family members later endured more food scarcity, particularly with the onset of a monsoon. This was a time when agricultural labourers did not get work in the fields. This was also a time when most of the government-sponsored road works and other wage works ceased temporarily. The poor people suffered mercilessly and still struggled hard to make ends meet while waiting for a better future. When nothing came through, the only option available to them was to mortgage whatever precious things they had at home. In the case of Muli’s family, the mortgage was either for bell metal or for other cheap silver crockery, which fetched them a little food but which would not last long. They would go without food for many days. The circumstance would force Muli’s father to steal taro from somebody’s field so that at least the children would be fed. Facing all these adversities, most of the Dalit families cannot set a goal to achieve something better. Their time and energy are spent obtaining food. In this context, education as an opportunity for job prospects can be highly recommended. But going by the track record of the upper caste, the prospect seemed grim. Muli did try for an education. Like other parents who wished their children to be educated enough to get a secure job, Muli’s father and grandfather sent him to a local school. Muli also appreciated their ideas, realising that once properly educated, his qualification would automatically ensure him a better-paying job, not available to any member of his community then. Muli enthusiastically worked hard to achieve his goal, but his school environment did not allow him to pursue his study. In Odisha, which is one of the most caste-prone societies, several manifestations of caste prejudices are witnessed in schoolrooms. Muli tells us how he was always maltreated: The villagers never forgot, nor did they let us forget, that we were untouchables. High caste children sat inside the school; the Bauri children, about twenty of us, sat outside on the veranda and listened. The two teachers, a Brahman outsider, and a temple servant, refused to touch us, even with a

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stick. To beat us, they threw bamboo canes. The higher-caste children threw mud at us. Fearing severe beatings, we dared not fight back. (67) The passage sufficiently demonstrates the hostility of the school environment where the Dalit children were discouraged to attend classes. It only underlines the hidden agenda of the upper castes, who are afraid that once Dalits are given a chance to study, they will go on to become powerful. Moreover, who will do their menial work if all of them are educated? Muli was an immediate casualty of this attitude, and as a result, he dropped out of school. Starvation forced him to be a child labourer. He helped his parents by adding a little earning to their meagre income at the cost of doing strenuous physical labour. Earlier, we saw how Muli did not get proper food to eat – let alone a balanced diet. As a consequence, Muli, like many children of his community, often fell sick and constantly nursed a weak body throughout his life. This suffering of Muli brings our attention to a larger existential question that the Dalits in Odisha, and elsewhere, face every day. Predominantly rural and illiterate, they have become one of the most exploited peripheral groups in society. Over the years, they have lived in subhuman conditions and suffered economic exploitation, cultural subjugation, and political powerlessness.4 Two special reports on the study of untouchability and atrocities on Dalits reveal that Odisha is one state where public places are still not accessible to Dalits. There are also violent incidents perpetrated on Dalits, but organised protests from Dalit groups are not reported in equal measures. This shows the general powerlessness of Odia Dalits, who continue to bear the social injustices perpetrated on them by upper castes.5 Living in such an environment where insecurity reigns, Odia Dalits always have to work hard and lead a life of compromise and alienation. One reason for this might involve the socioeconomic life of Dalits in Odisha, which has not undergone the level of change of other areas where Dalits live, such as Maharashtra. History testifies that a few cases of unorganised and sporadic resistances did take place against caste atrocities,6 but they were swiftly suppressed. In fact, leaders of these resistance movements invariably came from the fold of Hinduism. The ruling class has used the pervasive cult of Jagannath and other deities to mould the consciousness of Dalits to a point that has blunted the edge of their protests. The legend of Dasia Bauri7 and many others testify to this. Citing various myths and legends, Muli and his community members were denied entry into temples, including the Jagannath temple in Puri. Instead of protesting against such perverted practices to reclaim their civil rights, Muli and his community continued to remain content with their degradable ritual status. Muli raises this issue in the following excerpt: I remember Granny as a smiling, peaceful, gentle person, and very religious; every evening, she set out her clay oil lamp for deities, and offered them rice. She often fasted for the deities and visited many temples to worship deities,

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even though she was not allowed in. From outside the temple she watched, and gave her greetings. For four or five years during the Shivaratri festival [birthday of the deity Shiva] she went to the Dhabaleswar temple, which stands in the middle of the Mahanadi River, and burned a clay lamp full of oil. She also went to Puri every two years or so to visit Lord Jagannath, but she never went inside the temple. I myself went into the outer compound of the Jagannath temple for the first time only in 1970. I did not go into the inner room; I have never seen anybody of my caste enter the temple compound before this time. (124)

Muli, the rebel Muli seemed to be a rebel by heart when it came to various sociocultural practices in his community. Even as a child, Muli violated the prescriptive norms of his community and created tensions among its members. For instance, Muli at the age of 16, rejecting the traditional Bauri profession, became an unskilled labourer and later a pimp supplying Bauri sex workers to upper-caste men. He continued to stay in this profession for quite a long time, until age 40. To become a pimp or sex worker was not common among the Bauri community. Thus, by choosing this profession, Muli disregarded his community norms, not overtly but covertly. Overtly, he went through the motions that represented “respectable” behaviour. Covertly, he broke the rules, showing no guilt whatsoever in doing so. Interestingly, he portrayed his sex workers in similar ways: While giving the appearance of respectability, he also justified his act by claiming that they enjoyed the professions and wanted money. Freeman responded to this: “Throughout his life history, Muli depicted how he, his family, and his friends creatively manipulated, adapted, or disregarded rituals to fit their needs” (389). After two years of studying the Bauri community in close quarters, Freeman concludes that Muli’s lifestyle represented one of three possible adaptations ordinarily available to Bauri people: the life of unskilled labourers, the life of shamanistic faith healers; and the life of pimps and sex workers. Muli seemed to have exceptional adaptability in coping with perpetual poverty and social discrimination. As stated earlier, Muli’s health was weak because of malnourishment during his childhood. Adding to this was his general laziness that made his job as farm labourer and quarry worker really tough. He found his way to earn easy money by pimping, the profession which fitted his physical (dis)abilities and psychological outlook. The profession of a pimp brought Muli into closer association with wealthy and powerful upper-caste men. He admired them and wanted to emulate an uppercaste lifestyle. Muli befriended many of these men not only to get money; he also wanted them to reciprocate his friendship by showing him due respect in public, which he seldom got. Many upper-caste men sometimes shared meals with Muli and his sex workers and spoke about their friendship in flowery language, but they cautioned Muli in the end that their friendship must remain a secret and never be

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disclosed publicly. Muli resented this double standard and as a matter of revenge frequently changed his clients, thus severing relationships with the men whom he did not find to be true friends. Thus, throughout his life, Muli displayed a behaviour rarely found among Untouchables. Muli constructed his self according to his circumstantial need; otherwise, he would have found survival difficult. At times, he played the role of a pimp, sharecropper, and businessperson, but he failed in every venture. Because of his personal failure, people of his community, including his extended family members, did not take him seriously, and the upper-caste men whom he supplied sex workers for avoided him regardless of his personal quality. Muli’s life history thus provides an insider’s view of the psychological effects of discrimination against people at the bottom of society. Like all Bauris, Muli regularly experienced rejection in public places simply because, being an Untouchable, he had the potential of “polluting” the upper castes. Muli deeply resented such discrimination but mockingly described how upper-caste women avoided his presence lest he would pollute them, how tea stall owners refused to allow him to enter their shops, and how the upper-caste men barely tolerated him as long as he supplied them with sex workers. In this context, Freeman rightly observes that “Muli expected to be insulted, avoided, and cheated in his everyday contact with higher-caste people, and he retaliated by cheating them” (383). Muli tried to escape such discrimination by emulating his oppressors, on whom he had to depend totally for his survival. When they rejected him, he immediately retaliated by trying to bring them under his control, often by supplying them with sex workers or by changing his clients, and when successful, he laughed at their behaviour of surrendering their “self ” to a mere Untouchable like him. Muli knew well how to play with his generous landowning masters, construction employers, or customers of his sex workers; he pretended his loyalty in front of them but privately ridiculed them for their behaviours and ideals. Thus, Muli’s acquiescence to his superiors does not in any way prove that he accepted his lot. But on the whole, Muli was a failure. In spite of his changing of roles and various self-inventions, he could not reconcile his individual self and his social identity. Ultimately, Muli failed in his endeavours to get social recognition, for which he disgraced his community codes, writes Freeman: Muli’s life history portrayed conflicts between the ideals of his caste, his own expectations, and his actual behaviour. Muli’s thwarted expectations led him to idealize his youth. His attempted adaptations were in the long run unsuccessful. He failed to solve both his internal problem of negative self-image and the external problem faced by almost all untouchables of his village: poverty, discrimination, and failure to benefit from the growth of the new city. Pimping brought Muli no improvement over the other available life style choices: hard physical labour and religious healing. No Bauri labourers or healers in the village have improved their economic or social situation in the past decade, while high-caste people have benefited enormously from

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urbanization. . . . Muli’s life history thus is representative of the condition of most Bauris, who try to improve their situation but fail. (387–88) Muli’s failure can be explained by his low caste position. Whenever Muli started a new business venture, his failure was predetermined. Muli at one point started a betel-selling business. He became the first and only Untouchable of his village to hold a permanent spot in the busy market place of Bhubaneswar. Up to a point, he succeeded, but once people came to know that he was an Untouchable, they would not buy betel from his shop. This kind of caste discrimination in business persists all over India, even today. Dalits can hardly be found opening up hotels and similar business ventures, because they are regarded as carriers of pollution. And if they still opt for such a venture, it might cost them their lives as well. Muli’s last debacle came directly from a miserly Brahman landowner, named Jadu. Muli became Jadu’s sharecropper, hoping that it would fetch him a good amount of paddy, thus bringing an end to his economic insecurity. This time he really worked hard. But finally, Jadu cheated him. Muli discovered that Jadu never owned any land; he sharecropped the land for a goldsmith, who had recently sold it to an oil presser. After a year-long labour, when Muli came to harvest his share of the crop, the oil presser chased him off the land and called the police to arrest him as a thief. Muli, for his part, did not go to the police or any court of law, because he knew that a poor Untouchable like him could never get justice, because laws in India always favour the rich upper caste. Instead, Muli demanded his due from Jadu, and when he failed to get it, he quarrelled with Jadu in front of a crowd gathered at the village tea stall, where they exchanged insults and curses. He appealed to the upper-caste men present there that they should help him get justice. Although they supported Muli, they did not force the miser to pay Muli for cultivating the crop. Muli did not get his due. But he, once again, broke his conventional role as a meek and docile Untouchable. Muli was the first Untouchable in his village who dared to publicly challenge and insult a Brahman who ritually commanded the superior position in the social hierarchy.

Conclusion At the end of Untouchable, Freeman brings up an important issue for examination: What is Muli’s future likely to be? Seeing his helpless state throughout the narrative, one cannot hope for a better future for Muli and his community. At least, Freeman, who collaborated with Muli to bring out the book, did not hold such hope. More than 40  years after the publication of Muli’s life history, one would expect that the children and grandchildren of Muli might be doing better in social and economic fronts compared to the wretched conditions of Muli and his people. But the empirical existential conditions of Dalits in Odisha in general and the Bauris in particular tell us that nothing much has changed since the days of

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Muli. In fact, in the following exerpt, Freeman forecast the future of Muli and his community, a future that we live in today: Untouchables throughout India rarely claim to be proud of their place in society; instead, individually or in groups, many attempt to pass as “clean” high castes by changing their names, customs, occupations, and dress to those of the “clean” castes. Others deny their caste by converting to anti-caste religions such as Buddhism, Islam, or Christianity. Still others join political groups that cut across caste lines. In the anonymity of cities, untouchables usually can blot out more of their past than those who reside in villages, but the process, slow and painful, often takes generations. In Muli’s village, where untouchables depend for their livelihood on higher caste employers, denials of untouchability provoke severe high-caste economic retaliation, if not physical violence. Thus, external conditions have doomed Muli and most of the people of his caste to failure no matter what they choose to do, and Muli’s adaptations reflect this situation. Muli and other Bauris have failed, not because they embody expectations of failure or accept their lot, but rather because the Bauris face social and economic disabilities that they are presently powerless to change. (397) Odia Dalits still lack a strong hold on the social and political activities of the state. But now that literacy is available on the literary and cultural fronts, they have been displaying some organised efforts, both individually and collectively, to break the culture of silence so that the voices of protest of the Odia Dalits can be heard. The growing number of Odia Dalit poets, writers and activists prove this point clearly. Although Odia Dalit literature still lacks firm roots, it is slowly but unmistakably taking shape.8 Muli’s life story remains an example for many Odia Dalit writers, to emulate his protest in their writings in order to form a distinct Odia Dalit identity. So even if Muli could not write his autobiography, because of a lack of education, his life history is a significant document for Dalits in Odisha to speak truth to power.

Notes 1 This chapter is a revised version of the essay “Community, Identity and Politics: Muli’s Life History” that appeared in the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, no. 46, 2009, pp. 109–24 in a special volume, “Dalit Narratives and the Testimonial Genre in India.” Some ideas from this article were also developed by me in the book Dalit Personal Narratives. 2 For details, refer to Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, vol. I, particularly part II, where he deals with autobiography in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world. 3 To learn more about their social and economic life, political participation, cultural settings, life cycle, spiritual foundations, and so on, refer to the report Bauris: A Scheduled

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Caste Community of Orissa, prepared by the National Institute of Social Work and Social Sciences (NISWASS), Bhubaneswar, 1995. 4 For a recent reading on the plights of Odia Dalits, see Tripathy. 5 On the nature of untouchability practices and incidents of atrocities against Dalits in Odisha, two project reports are available: “A Study on the Problems of Untouchability with Emphasis on the Incidents of the Atrocities on Harijans in Orissa,” prepared by NISWASS, Bhubaneswar, 1984, and “A Study of the Protection of Civil Rights Act in Orissa,” prepared by Anup Kumar Dash and Raj Kumar for NISWASS, Bhubaneswar, 1994. 6 See, for example, Pradhan. 7 Dasia Bauri, an Untouchable, was supposed to be a great devotee of Lord Jagannath. The myth goes that Jagannath had to come out from the Puri temple at the dead hour of midnight to take offerings of Dasia Bauri for the simple reason that the latter could not enter the temple, because of his low birth status. Muli happens to be a descendant of this mythical figure. 8 For a discussion on Odia Dalit literature, see Raj Kumar (1995).

Works cited Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. Routledge, 2001. Denegri, Francesca. “Testimonio and Subalternities in India and Latin America.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 46, 2008–2009, p. 104. Freeman, James. Untouchable: An Indian Life History. George Allen and Unwin, 1979. Kumar, Raj. “Oriya Dalit Literature: A Historical Perspective.” The Fourth World: Journal of the Marginalised People, no. 2, October 1995. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. U of Minnesota P, 1989. Misch, Georg. A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, vol. I. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949. Mitra, Abhishek. “Subaltern Narrative and Political Solidarity in the Testimonial Genre in Latin America and India.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 46, 2008–2009, p. 59. Pradhan, Prasant Kumar. “Nirvedia Andolana: A Lower-Caste Movement of Cuttack and Puri Districts of Orissa (1966–79).” Proceedings of Orissa History Congress, XIX Annual Session, Bhubaneswar, 1994. Reyes, Kathryn Blackmer, and Julia E. Curry Rodriguez. “Testimonio: Origins, Terms, and Resources.” Equity & Excellence in Education, vol. 45, no. 3, 2012, p. 525. Sayre, Robert F. The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James. Princeton UP, 1964. Swindells, Julia. The Uses of Autobiography. Taylor & Francis, 1995. Tripathy, Revati Ballav. Dalits: A Sub-Human Society. Ashish Publishing, 1994.

7 DALIT WRITING IN BANGLA A thematic reading of selected narratives by Manoranjan Byapari and Manju Bala Sayantan Dasgupta1

When I started working on a projected anthology of Dalit writing from Bangla more than a decade ago, Bangla Dalit writing was almost unheard of in mainstream academic discourse and in the media. Dalit writing had, of course, already carved out an identity of its own and had already entered the syllabus of various university departments of English and comparative literature, but Dalit literature then referred mostly to literature written in languages such as Gujarati, Kannada, and Marathi. That there was a body of Dalit literature in Bangla was by and large unknown or at least unacknowledged. This is not to say that caste did not figure at all in the imagined spaces of Bangla writers. But what was seen to be absent in the Bangla literary space was the manifestation of any Dalit literary movement as had by then manifested itself in some other Indian languages. Caste did make an appearance even in the works of “canonical” Bangla writers such as Saratchandra Chattopadhyay. But there seemed to be a notion that caste and caste-based discrimination were less important in Bengal. There was no Dalit literature in Bangla, and often the two were linked up in a relation of causality. This invisibilisation of caste in critical discourse relating to Bangla literature needed to be challenged and examined. Indeed, it has been trenchantly critiqued and examined over the past decade or so. What was hitherto invisible has today become more visible, what was on the periphery is today moving towards centre stage. Curiously, this seems to have happened to some extent at least through the mediation of the English language. The past ten years have seen an efflorescence of English translations of Bangla Dalit literature and of critical and newspaper writings on Bangla Dalit literature. A curious politics of this development has emerged, whereby literature of oppression and marginalisation in an Indian bhasa becomes more visible but only through the intervention of English. But that is a politics that deserves to be examined elsewhere; it does not fall within the scope of this chapter. What needs to be

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underscored, however, is that the past ten years or so have resulted in an enhanced visibility of Bangla Dalit literature, and this will undeniably affect the Dalit literary movement and literary oeuvre in Bangla. This visibilisation has also resulted in the iconisation of certain writers from the Bangla Dalit literary tradition, notably Manoranjan Byapari, whose multiple works have been picked up for translation into English by well-known translators and publishers.2 Has there been no Dalit “movement” in Bengal? While no such movement has enjoyed any great visibility, this chapter resists summarily dismissing the efforts of the group of people who have been struggling for a long time now to establish a Dalit literary identity in Bangla. Ambedkar has been an inspiring icon in that endeavour, other writers from the various Indian languages have been influential as well, and Chuni Kotal, the tribal girl who died by suicide in Kolkata, has been the other rallying point for the movement; notwithstanding the academic division between “tribal” and “Dalit,” she has come back again and again in Bangla Dalit literature. What is Dalit literature? Conflicting notions abound even today about how this label is to be defined. Sisir Kumar Das has the following to say about the development of Dalit literature: The most significant feature of modern Indian literature in respect of the emergence of the underdogs as a major literary force is what has come to be known as the Dalit movement. . . . It [the Dalit movement] gained momentum around 1920 under the leadership of Dr B M Ambedkar with the burning of the manusmriti, agitation for the right to use ponds and wells reserved for caste Hindus etc. Although Dalit literature, a literature of militant protest against the upper-caste literature upholding Brahminical values, is a postIndependence phenomenon – to be precise it made its impact only in the sixties – its ancestry can be traced in the earlier decades. D Javalkar’s Desaca Dusman (1926), an essay attacking Chipulankar and Tilak, for which the author was prosecuted by the Brahmins, can be taken as the beginning of Dalit literature. (22) Dalit writing is today considered by many to be synonymous not just with writing about Dalits but also with literature focusing on Dalits and written by Dalit writers. This seems to signal a shift from the concept as it was enunciated at the first Dalit literary conference organised by the Maharashtra Dalit Sahitya Sangha in 1958, where Resolution No. 5, passed at the end of the conference, stated that “the literature written by the Dalits and that written by others about the Dalits in Marathi be accepted as a separate entity known as Dalit literature” (Bose 184). While Bangla Dalit writing is not always overtly about caste, a large corpus does deal directly with caste-based oppression in modern Indian contexts, both urban and rural. Thus, on one hand, Kapil Krishna Thakur’s “Ek Sandhyar Galpo” (One Evening) evokes a rural setting where readers encounter an “honour killing” – a

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young couple who have dared to marry across caste lines are tried by a village panchayat, found guilty, and executed, while, on the other, Fakir Chandra Gharami, the Sudra protagonist of Bimal Biswas’s novel Prem Number Four, can only spit in disgust when he finds out that the urban, educated, and well-to-do parents of his doctor say no to the prospect of a Dalit’s donating blood to their daughter. Likewise, Manju Bala’s poem “Aar Neeche Nambo Na” (Won’t Go Any Lower) reiterates how caste prejudices become manifest in mundane, everyday settings – an off-the-cuff wedding proposal that is made on a running automobile is immediately withdrawn upon learning the bride-to-be’s caste: “But one thing/What caste are you?/Namashudra, Anamika softly mutters./Namashudra! I am sorry then,/I was a Brahmin’s daughter/Became a Kayastha’s wife/Won’t go any lower down.” The dynamics of the invisibilisation of Dalit literature in Bangla cannot be understood without taking into account the particular mechanism of production and circulation of Dalit writing in Bangla. Jatin Bala, Manju Bala, Kalyani Thakur, Manoranjan Byapari, Nakul Mallik, Shyamal Kumar Pramanik, and Lily Haldar are just a few of many Dalit writers who write in Bangla today about caste discrimination faced by the Dalit community. But most of this work appears not in the socalled mainstream publications or as volumes published by reputed publishers with substantial distribution prowess. Rather, much of this work appears in little magazines that have limited circulation, in specialised Dalit periodicals (e.g. the nowdefunct Adal Badal, Neer, Chaturtha Duniya, etc.) and publications and sometimes in the form of self-published volumes. In each case, this body of work remains invisible to readers outside primarily niche readerships. Thus, people from outside this core group easily remain conveniently unaware of Dalit literature’s existence. Yet Dalit writers have today started becoming more and more vocal about the presence of this body of writing and emphasising its importance. A watershed in this movement was Manoranjan Byapari’s essay “Is there Dalit Writing in Bangla?” in Economic and Political Weekly (2007). Much of this body of literature depicts those privations that the caste oppressed has had to face, perhaps not necessarily at the individual level but at a broader, community level. The experience of being labelled a “Dalit” perhaps empowers a writer to be palpably aware of larger, community-based Dalit experiences vis-à-vis caste discrimination and oppression and to give shape and form and body to tales heard, remarks overheard, fears and fantasies harboured, and memories and injuries nurtured. Embodying the same implies bearing testimony to not necessarily a factbased, objective reality but to an apparently more subjective if no less truthful and systemic one. Can this body of Dalit literature in Bangla, therefore, not be related perhaps to the genre of testimonial literature, without simply reducing the attempt to do so to a mere hunt for “life” in “work” in the basest, most simplistic and most denotative sense? That seems to be one of the challenges in trying to read a body of Dalit writing in terms of the idiom of testimonial literature. We are talking here about more than quantity; a substantial body of Dalit literature in Bangla manages to survive and germinate day by day. A detailed glance at this corpus indicates that given the right (read: unprejudiced) reception, it may well

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evolve into a “movement.” There is no dearth of powerful writers in this group, and one should not have too much difficulty in identifying the value of many of their works as documents of our social realities once sensitised to Dalit writing’s having its own aesthetics, its own set of motivations, and often its own mode of expression. Moreover, Dalit writing in Bangla is not even only about bearing testimony to a given social reality; it not only concerns itself with depicting the material but also often involves itself with portraying the possibility of change. That the point is to change the social realities that engender this corpus is an agenda that comes out strongly in a substantial corpus of contemporary Dalit writing in Bangla. While a varied range of political inspirations is behind these writings  – Kanshi Ram, Mayawati, Marx, and most often Ambedkar – we encounter the clamour for change in the works of many of the writers whom we are discussing, writers such as Manoranjan Byapari, Manju Bala, Brajen Mallik, and Manohar Mouli Biswas and others such as Mahitosh Biswas, Kapil Thakur, and Nitish Biswas, for whom class is often seen to be a more abiding concern than caste is. This comes out clearly, for instance, in Manoranjan Byapari’s short stories; Byapari is not content with a merely “realistic” depiction that evokes the reader’s sympathy: Ambedkar’s philosophy of “educate, organise, agitate” seems to be deeply ingrained in his works. Even in the poetry of a writer such as Manju Bala, who is far less overt than the sometimes-militant Byapari, the call for change is palpable even in her characteristic understated style. Manoranjan Byapari’s foray into the world of creative writing has been against all odds. Byapari’s family crossed over into present-day West Bengal from what is today Bangladesh and was directed by the government to settle in the faraway and unproductive Dwandakaranya, as many families had to. His father initially refused, and this resulted in their being deprived of government support. Forced into poverty, the family was in the end left with no option but to uproot once again and leave for Dwandakaranya. Born into such distressful circumstances and growing up in extreme poverty, Byapari says that he has been palpably conscious of the way his caste identity has shaped the way many people whom he has met have responded to him. Byapari worked as a rickshawalla in Kolkata and taught himself to read and write Bangla. He first emerged as a writer, it seems, when Mahasweta Devi spotted him and published his autobiographical piece “Rickshaw Chalai” (written under the pen name Madan Dutta) in her periodical Bartika. Even after that, it was a long and difficult struggle for him to establish himself as a writer, though the situation has changed very much for him over the past ten years or so. “Ribaj” (Custom) is the seventh story of his short-story collection Jijibishar Galpo (Stories of Life Desire). Unlike most of the other stories in this collection, “Ribaj” is set in the village. The location of the story is, in fact, organic to its stoff or subject matter. Several Bengali Dalit writers seem to textualise in their works a sharp divide between the city and the village in terms of how caste discrimination manifests itself. This seems to be at least partially true of Byapari’s writings as well. Many of Byapari’s city stories are powerful in the way they focus on social and

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economic inequalities, but they do not generally take up caste discrimination as their stoff. His stories often revolve around the life of the Kolkata rickshawalla – a life whose dynamics he is well acquainted with – and one is tempted to try to link life and work here. Yet these seem to focus more on the workings of class rather than on caste discrimination. “Maar” (A Thrashing), for example, is written in the first person from the point of view of the secretary of a rickshaw “line.” The narrator is politically involved and is in charge of collecting the monthly party subscription from members of his rickshaw “line.” Yet this story does not in any substantial manner foreground the question of caste or explore how caste identity manifests itself in the way individual characters are treated by society; it is more focused on the theme of political disillusionment and on uncovering how working-class aspirations for a life marked by a modicum of dignity are destroyed because of the demons of drug dependence and substance abuse. “Manusher Mukh” (The Face of Humanity) is another story that revolves around the life of a rickshawalla. Bimal Mistry is the protagonist of this story. This story also does not seem to have much to say about the workings of caste in modern Bengal. Rather, its focus is on poverty, the precarious existence of the protagonist’s family, and the humiliation that he undergoes because of his poverty. As the narrative reaches its crescendo, the gentleman who has been riding Bimal Mistry’s rickshaw says, “What do you people think, huh? You demand a higher fare because it’s raining; you demand a higher fare because it’s dark; you demand a higher fare because it’s the Pujo season. You only want more and more. We are in service. Our salary at the end of the month is fixed. How do you expect us to pay more? Why should we?” (52; translation mine) Clearly, the author seems here again to be focusing on the class issue. While in many cases, we find caste and class identity to run along parallel trajectories, and indeed that may seem to be the case here as well,3 caste remains confined to the subterranean level, and the writer never allows it to surface into a realm that seems to provide a fecund home to the class question. “Ekti Debisthaner Pattan Kahini” (How a Shrine Was Set Up), on the other hand, is a story that foregrounds the coexistence of caste and class even as the writer locates it in a city setting. For the setting of the story, Byapari chooses a rickshaw stand located somewhere close to the Jadavpur railway station. The rickshawallas have a tough time because the passengers habitually urinate beside a tree that stands beside their rickshaw stand. The rickshawallas, many of whom have to wait there for fares, have to tolerate the terrible stink. Finally, the rickshaw union secretary has an idea. He brings an idol of Sitala, the goddess, which had been lying around abandoned, and sets it up near the banyan tree. The passengers immediately stop relieving themselves there. But there is more to the story: It is now time for the entry of Harinarayan Chakraborty. Chakraborty belongs to the neighbourhood

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and spends most of his time gambling. Incidentally, he is a Brahmin. He spies an opportunity and gets into the act. Building on the secretary’s move, he gathers a few more idols and magnifies the devotional aura of the area. The place now becomes an impressive shrine, and people start flocking to it, pouring in their devotion and money. Harinarayan Chakraborty makes substantial profits from the scheme. He soon becomes a wealthy man, while Abhimanyoo, the secretary, who belongs to a scheduled caste, continues to wallow in poverty. The only difference is that the stink of urine is replaced by the din of the incantations. Abhimanyoo is left quite unsure about whether this change was for the better. “Ribaj” is set in a rural, almost idyllic space. Ribaj is set in Banrajya (literally the Forest Kingdom). “Teendike pahar diye ghera; anyadike nadi. Sabhya jagat theke pray bichhinno ei anchal” (Mountains surrounding it on three sides, and a river on the other  – a region almost totally cut off from civilisation) is how Byapari describes it (Byapari 29). Economically, too, the place is a curious anachronism in that it has a unique dynamic stemming from its isolation. The barter system holds sway here. Only the rich of the village can step out of the village to interact with the world outside. This rich group consists entirely of Brahmins, and we see Byapari effecting a congruency of class and caste perhaps more clearly than anywhere else before. The lives of the people here are governed by a set of myths that forbid them from transgressing the boundaries of the village to step out and trade or even communicate with the world. These myths are replete with dire warnings about what would transpire if they were to defy these injunctions. The story begins by invoking precisely such an act of transgression. It begins with the return of Maniram to the village: Maniram has returned to the village after all of five years. He had hopped on to a truck used to transport loads of segun wood and had disappeared without saying a word to anybody. No one had heard of him since then; now, he is back and has brought with him a beautiful wife. One would expect his father, Dholkuram, to be delighted at the return of his son with his new bride. But a terrible fear had driven all his joy away. His heart was racing. Maniram has flouted the traditions and customs of Banrajya. He has not taken his wife to pay obeisance at the Linganathan temple. He has not sent his bride for purification at the hands of the Brahmin god. Instead, he has brought her straight home. That is what lies behind Dholkuram’s fears and anxiety. (29; translation mine) The first paragraph highlights the repercussions of the solitude effected by physical isolation and the myth-making imagination. It implies the existence of an alternative space, one where the oppressive laws of this forest kingdom may not apply, a world that Maniram has gained access to and one that has changed him in a way that enables him to challenge “laws” of this space. This introductory paragraph also explains the title of the story. Ribaj, close to the word rewaj, means “custom”; in

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this context, it refers to the custom in which every woman married into the village would be left at the steps of the Linganathan temple for the first three nights so that she can be “purified” by Deonandan, the Brahmin priest, and his acolytes, apparently all under the express instructions of Linganathan (this divine instruction having been revealed exclusively to the Brahmins, of course), before the husband can bring her home and consummate their marriage. The spectre of divine intervention is used by the Brahmins of Banrajya to legitimise their gang rape of the “lower”-caste women. There is a story here that the evil goddess Matangi, Linganathan’s rival, lies in wait for beautiful virgins, whose vaginas she can infect with the venom of disbelief and disobedience – this is just the first step to her taking over all of human civilisation. The only way Matangi’s notorious intentions can be combated is by having the women give up their virginity to the Brahmins before they enjoy sexual union with their husbands. That would allow the “brahmatej,” or the Brahmin’s semi-divine powers, to purify them and stymie the possibility of Matangi using them to further her hunt for power. Everyone in the village seems to unquestioningly accept this story. Thus, when Maniram returns after seeing the world and refuses to send his wife to follow these rites, the villagers look at him as one who has been taken over by evil spirits. Thus, even his father, who had had his own wife, Shukli, “purified” at the Linganathan temple 25 years or so back, urges him to surrender and to send his wife to the Brahmins at the Linganathan temple. In reality, reading Byapari’s portrayal of the oppressed villagers so simplistically would be patently unfair. Despite their superficial docility and their palpable resistance to Maniram’s ideas, the villagers are not docile subjects, as our first reading might suggest. And Maniram is not the first one to challenge the oppressive norms that rule Banrajya, either. As the story progresses, we learn of Budhuram, who too had entered into confrontation with the Brahmins long, long ago. He disappeared inexplicably. The word had then gone around that the gods disappeared him because he dared to challenge the Brahmins and their authority – the Brahmins were representatives of the gods themselves, after all. The Mishras spread this word, and it effectively explained away his disappearance. Yet the narrative reveals a layer that lies beneath this palimpsest of apparent docility, acceptance, and credulity. Dholkuram, Maniram’s father, was quite aware of what lay behind the story of divine intervention: Budhuram had been abducted and killed by Mishra’s goons. Surely, this knowledge should make clear to him that the discourse of the Brahmins needed to be examined. Why, then, does he still side with the other villagers and demand that his son follow the generations-old inhumane custom? I argue here that he does this not from a blind acceptance of uppercaste Brahminical discourse but perhaps out of a fear of the material power that goes hand in hand with that discourse, along with, of course, a partial acceptance fuelled by the demands of survival.4 Maniram, armed with reason gleaned from his exposure to the outside world, asks, “To deota sab katha khali oderi bole keno? Ja bole tate amader loksan hoy keno?” (Why does this god only tell them everything? Why is it that everything he tells them goes against us?). Dholkuram replies, “Dekh byata, amra nichu jaat. Babhon thakurra amader kono din chhoy na. Chhowa lege

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gele gaye mati lepe chan kore. Tara ki shadh kore shudhhi jagna kore? Deotar adeshe korte badhya hoy” (Listen, son, we are a low caste. We are Untouchables for the Brahmin gods. If they ever touch us, they go and rub earth all over their body and have a bath to cleanse themselves. Do you think they find it palatable to conduct the purification rites? They have to do it because God has commanded them to do so). This example does not necessarily imply that Dholkuram has internalised the Brahminical discourse unquestioningly (Byapari 35). Rather, Dholkuram regurgitates this discourse because he is resigned to the status quo and sees no way of challenging the well-entrenched custom, without perhaps realising that with every repetition of this discourse, it gets stronger and gains the potential to oppress them for ages to come. Thus, Maniram is, in a way, no outsider; his exposure to the city, where caste apparently matters less for Byapari, merely allows him to voice the questions that Dholkuram and so many others in the village can only nurture silently in their breasts. The only difference between him and the others is that he can say, “Desh duniya dekhe eshechhi” (I have seen the world outside), and can thereby imagine an alternative (36). He is still very much a part of this milieu. He is one of these people. That is why his rebellion is more than an individual act of resistance, why his resistance needs to be seen as a sign of things to come. He is not alone: Budhuram has found a following, and so will, we are led to hope, Maniram. This reading is further supported by Deonandan Mishra’s thoughts: “Bhoy, boro bhoy korchhe Deonandaner, abar ki ar-ek Budhuram paida holo naki!” (A great fear gnaws away inside Deonandan: Was he witnessing the birth of another Budhuram here?) (Byapari 38) Nor is Dholkuram alone in his world of ambiguous beliefs, in his inability to break out of the oppressive system and challenge the Brahminical discourse even while being aware, at some level, of the hypocrisy and the cruelty that defines it. At this point, we come to the following significant lines in the story: The village chief nurses his anger. He is the oldest member of this village, and the most respected, too. When his own family had not escaped the Brahmin gods, why should Maniram? He says, “And what if Matangi takes over your wife and starts her tricks, bringing in misfortune and misery? Who will be responsible for that?” “I will.” “If there is a drought, will your crops be the only ones to wither and die? If the Kotri overflows its banks, will yours be the only house to get submerged? If lightning strikes, will you be the only one to die? Don’t act so irresponsibly.” (Byapari 35; translation mine) Here the village chief ’s motives behind trying to convince Maniram to give in to Deonandan Mishra’s demands are more complex than they might first seem. His status quo stance emerges again not necessarily from an unquestioning acceptance of Brahminical discourse; it is also tinged with his own feelings of insecurity and

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guilt over having had to subject his wife to this same humiliation. And these feelings of insecurity, humiliation, and guilt tend to veer towards a form of deflected vengeance: vengeance directed not at the source of the humiliation – that is, the Brahmins whom he is in no position to challenge – but at his own people. Why should somebody else get away without facing what he, his wife, and his family had to face? What is further remarkable about this section is the argument the chief uses to try to browbeat Maniram. He tries to invoke emotions of guilt and fear in Maniram by reiterating that the latter would be responsible for the ruin of the entire village; in other words, the spectre of communal destruction and the prospect of individual sacrifice for the greater good are invoked as incentives to make him toe the line. Here he appears to be reiterating a discourse that is essentially divisive. Surely this can prove to be an effective argument to quell rebellion in the ranks; the moment that dissent makes an appearance, the source of the dissent needs to be identified and targeted by inciting other potential dissenters against it. The same strategy appears in Manju Bala’s short story “Dain.” Swapna is from Kolkata. She is visiting a village. When she is identified as a potential threat to the caste-based power structure in the village, the Brahmins target Ghanar Ma (Ghana’s Mother), whom she has been trying to educate. They depict Ghanar Ma as the innocent bystander who is being provoked by the outsider Swapna and who would suffer the deprivations of hell due to no fault of her own. In this way, they turn her against Swapna; she ends up not only cursing Swapna, who was trying to help her rise against the unjust social order, but also paying the Brahmins an obscene sum of money for purificatory rites (shudhdhu korar jagni). And Swapna is identified as a dain (witch) by the Brahmins and as an akshashi (rakshashi, or [female] demon) by Ghanar Ma and is tied up and prepared for sacrifice. There is one sharp difference between Manoranjan Byapari’s “Ribaj” and Manju Bala’s “Dain.” And this difference is crucial to understanding the politics of their testimonies of Dalit living conditions and caste-based social hierarchies. As in Byapari’s story, here too the city seems to have a redemptive function. Swapna, the city girl, tries to explain to Ghanar Ma that people like her are being economically exploited by the Brahmins, who have made up all kinds of stories about the afterlife and are posing as mediators between humankind and God, precisely to legitimise their power. If exposure to the world gave Maniram the voice to protest and to raise the questions that had lain dormant in the minds of so many of his villagers, then the city is seen to be empowering and propelling the discourse of Swapna: “Jabar agey ekta katha shune jaan, Mashima, oi gurudebra theek na. Ora apnader mithye bole, mithyei swapna dekhay. Oder dan korle kono punyai hoy na. Apni oi chal bari firiye niye jaan. Barang apnader adhpeta kheye thakte hobe na” (One thing you must know before you leave: These gurudevs are not right. They lie to you; they lead you to dream false dreams. You accumulate no virtue by practising charity on them. You should take that rice back home. At least you won’t have to go to bed on a half-empty stomach) (28–29). Yet Manju Bala’s characters in this story are etched much more clearly and unambiguously than are Byapari’s in “Ribaj.”

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When Ghanar Ma says “E janme to dukhkho kasta sab to ager jammer paper fal go meye. Tai e janme bamunder daan-dhyan korli fire janme aar dukhkho thakbeni. Ektukhkheni sukher mukh dekhti pebokhkhani takhann. Chhotojaat hoi aar janmate hobeni” (All the misery we face in this birth is the fruit of sins committed in our previous birth, girl. So, if we practice charity towards Brahmins in this life, we won’t have to suffer in our next birth. We will know a little bit of happiness then. We won’t have to take birth again as a low-caste person), she says it with the conviction of one who has been well indoctrinated (Bala 28). She shows none of the doubt, none of the ambiguity (and therefore none of the elements of incipient resistance and dissent), that we find in the characters of Dholkuram, Shukli, and the village chief. There is no this-worldly redemption that the reader can expect then from the agency of characters like Ghanar Ma; this is where Manju Bala’s text differs significantly from Byapari’s. Byapari’s story ends with the family’s leaving the village under cover of darkness. It would be completely wrong to read this as an act of escapism, because of two important factors. One, the act of transgressing the village boundary is itself a taboo as defined by Brahminical discourse, and therefore, by moving out of the village, the family is issuing a challenge to the Brahmin rulers of the forest kingdom. And two, just before they leave the village, Maniram disguises himself as a woman, reaches the Linganathan temple, and kills Deonandan Mishra. Yet this does not mean that the possibility of change in Manju Bala’s story is predicated upon outside, from-above intervention. We note that “Dain,” while it features the city-bred Swapna initially as the instrument of change, ends not with her rescue by Prasenjit or any of her city friends. The ritual is stopped, and Swapna rescued, by two young men from villages – Kamal and Pabitra. The challenge to Brahminical hegemony, then, for Manju Bala, may rise from within and from below, but it needs a catalyst – and education is what plays the role of the catalyst here. What sets Pabitra and Kamal apart from the other villagers who participate in the ritual and derive pleasure from the spectacle is the fact that they go to college. Had it not been for that, they would perhaps have been merely one of the crowd. This education gives them a certain degree of immunity from the punishment that would have been doled out to anybody else for exhibiting the kind of dissent that they do. Because of this education, the dominant Brahmin group finds impossible dividing and ruling them and directing public ire at them: “Pabitra o Kamal dujon college-e pore. Gramer manush oder dujonke besh samiha kore. Bhoy-o pay. Oder kono kaj-e tai badha debar sahosh pay na keu-i.” (Pabitra and Kamal go to college. The villagers look at them with a certain awe. They fear them as well. Thus, nobody has the guts of trying to stop them.) (32). What is again striking is the uncanny similarity in the ways that Brahminical hegemony is shown to perpetuate itself in both texts. The following is how Malati responds when Ghanar Ma tells her of Swapna’s suggestions: “Bari ne jabe mane? Grame tahole akal porbe ni! Tomar eklar to kheti hobeni, saggoler kheti hobe.” (What do you mean – take it back home? Won’t the whole village be struck by famine then? You are not the only one who will suffer; the entire village will be decimated.) (29). The comment

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merely seems to reflect and reiterate the village chief ’s comments in “Ribaj.” Perhaps these texts approximate each other so much in the depiction of such arguments and strategies because both authors in their own ways try to document their own experiences, direct or indirect, and because such strategies are integral, even defining characteristics of the exercise of caste-based power dynamics to which their works bear testimony.

Notes 1 This chapter is a revised version of “Dalit Writing in Bangla: Repression and Resistance in Manoranjan Byapari and Manju Bala’s Narratives.” Kavita Panjabi, editor, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 46, 2008–2009, pp. 125–38. 2 Among recent translations of Byapari’s works are his autobiographical endeavour, Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit, The Runaway Boy, and There’s Gunpowder in the Air, set against the backdrop of the Naxal movement of the 1970s. 3 The relationship between caste and class often turns out to be more complicated than it may first appear; this relationship may incorporate both identity and difference, and this ambiguity and flexibility often make the mapping of identity such a complicated exercise. In the words of Tapan Basu, The logic of the caste system is that of an inherited institution of division of labour within the community, sanctified by religion as well as by tradition, which frequently works in tandem with the class schisms of modern, capitalist society, though sometimes the rigidities of caste stratas are qualified and modified by the flexibilities within the class structure. (Translating Caste xvi). 4 Neither can Dholkuram totally rid himself of the beliefs that he has been tutored into harbouring: “Abadhya Maniramer kono amangal hobe na to?” (Surely no misfortune would befall the disobedient Maniram?) (Byapari 36).

Works cited Bala, Manju. “Dain.” Chorabali. Chaturtha Duniya, 2005, pp. 27–33. Basu, Tapan, editor. Translating Caste. Katha, 2002. Byapari, M. “Ribaj (Rewaj).” Jijibishar Galpo. Atul Batul Prakashani, 2006, pp. 29–40. ———. “Maar.” Jijibishar Galpo, 2006, pp. 11–14. ———. “Manusher Mukh.” Jijibishar Galpo, 2006, pp. 41–53. ———. “Ekti Debisthaner Pattan Kahini.” Jijibishar Galpo, 2006, pp. 101–6. ———. “Is there Dalit Writing in Bangla?” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 41, 13–19 Oct. 2007. ———. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit. Translated by Sipra Mukherjee. Sage Samya, 2018. ———. There’s Gunpowder in the Air. Translated by Arunava Sinha. Eka, 2018. ———. The Runaway Boy. Translated by V Ramaswamy. Eka, 2020. Das, Sisir Kumar. A History of Indian Literature 1911–1956. Sahitya Akademi, 1995.

8 OPENING THE SELF OR THE OTHER? On the emergence of Bahujan self-narratives on new media Shubham Solanki

I am the soldier and I am the battlefield too. (K.G. Satyamurthy [Sivasagar], “Nenu”)

One day, when I  went to school, my teacher asked me not to enter the classroom. She made me stand outside for almost two and half hours until the recess. She came out and started shouting at me, saying that the whole class was unhygienic because of me, and that I should immediately go home, change my sweater and come back to school! She also said things like “Does your mother not care about you?” and “You people are so dirty! Go change it or leave this school and go to some other ZP (Zilla Parishad) school.” (87) Pradnya here is recounting her ordeal in growing up as a Dalit girl, in a recent book titled What Babasaheb Ambedkar Means to Me. Pradnya, later in her tale, describes how hearing about Ambedkar from her father gave her courage to eventually face the casteist teacher. She offers a testimonial narrative from childhood in a book which has come out in response to the appropriation of Ambedkar from several corners. She is not the only one; several others offer testimonial accounts of bearing the burden of caste and growing up with Ambedkar. They do so because testimonials of discrimination are documents of resistance and struggle. They are attempts to narrate the inhabitation of the subaltern, to that which exceeds and escapes the registers of the hegemonic, because only the subaltern is witness to the limit of the society. This chapter looks at the form and the power of the contemporary modes of articulation of the self asserted by Dalits, gathered from various platforms on new media and in the polemical works Hatred in the Belly (2015) and What Babasaheb

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Ambedkar Means to Me (2019), published in print form. The chapter articulates its thesis in two ways. First, it is an inquiry into the nature of highly diverse modes of testimonial writings emerging online with respect to the specificity of the new media and the current political climate. The aim is not to put the divergent narratives of inhabiting the Dalit subjecthood that surface online into a single category with specific characteristics but rather to discuss them with respect to their intended “functions.” This flows into the second aspect of the chapter: One of the obvious functions of the self-narratives of caste discrimination is to provide epistemic evidence of the existence of caste and subsequent discrimination, but there is an excess to this function that is affect-ive in nature. This chapter is a reflection on the nature of this “excess” from new media. This “excess” accounts for the foregrounding of the narratives of the self in anticaste writings. I am aware that I am writing this chapter at a time when new media is only beginning to be framed as an object of analysis in literary criticism and social sciences. A  hesitation in conducting a discursive investigation of the objects of new media is valid. However, I  emphasise that the Internet has emerged as the new ground of politics, especially emancipatory politics. The term new media is an umbrella category that includes digital forms of communication and social media. The new media excludes the earlier forms of electronic communication like television, radio, and so on. More and more, the politics of the subaltern and the hegemonic forces is taking to digital media or social media in some form or the other. On the one hand, new media is a decentred and therefore liberatory medium for the subaltern and marginalised, but in the same breath, its total presence also transforms it into an effective tool for the mobilisation of emotions by the hegemonic forces. Even for the subaltern politics, though the Internet is a space like no other for organising and articulation, the reality that it is controlled by a few multinational giants does come in routinely when suddenly an account is deactivated or banned. The ubiquity of the Internet can be estimated by the fact that Internet shutdowns are the first and most effective strategy for any clampdown by the state on voices of dissent. We therefore need to enquire into the nature of articulation that is taking place on the new media and its relationship with politics on the ground. More importantly, we urgently need to understand the structure of the relationship between emotions and the new media, particularly social media or how does social and new media “affect” us. This chapter is a tentative and an experimental approach in this direction.

The contemporary anticaste struggle and new media The contemporary anticaste struggle is no exception to the pervasiveness of new media. I claim that a large chunk of the most powerful enunciation by the anticaste and Ambedkarite camps occurs on new media. The term Internet Dalits has acquired parlance across different quarters, owing to the force they exert. In 2016, Havells company released an antireservation advertisement that was thereafter rolled back on account of the opposition by several Dalit groups and individuals on

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blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and news websites (Gopalkrishnan, Times of India).1 The influence of the Dalits wielding the power of new media has also been acknowledged by several theorists. K. Satyanarayana points out the emergence of “what some have categorized as ‘Internet Dalits,’ which collectively refers to a number of important Dalit scholars, intellectuals and activists who are really vigilant and active” and also acknowledges the force they wield: “this has created a serious kind of problem for the mainstream” (Satyanarayana 115). A  considerable amount of anticaste argumentation, articulation, and mobilisation occurs on new media and social media. In fact, it is one of the primary sites where the contemporary radical Dalit subject is in(formed). The uproar and consequent movement against the publication in 2014 of the edition of Annihilation of Caste annotated by Arundhati Roy under Navayana publication was another occasion where a concerted effort to make a direct impact could be seen. What is important for this chapter is the mode of argumentation against the release of Navayana’s publication. Considerable debate and discussion opposed the Navayana book on social media. This enormous discussion culminated in the release of two anthologies: What Babasaheb Ambedkar Means to Me and Hatred in the Belly. What Babasaheb Ambedkar Means to Me was in fact released online with free access on a platform named Smashwords. The book was later published as a paperback under the banner of “The Shared Mirror.” The articles in the book come from a diverse set of individuals. What is crucial is the nature of narrative – the first-person recollection of various memories of encountering Ambedkar, growing up with him, and cherishing his presence in their interiority as a source of inspiration and strength. First, I have chosen these texts because they attest to a continuity between new media and the book form and the prolonged relevance of an institutionalised form of printed books. Second, these books help us emphasise the prevalence and power of testimonial modes in anticaste argumentation. One simple reason for the power of the new media is that it in some sense does actualise the dream of the avant-garde, where the capacity to write and publish is radically decentred and in principle taken to every possible person. The new media, specifically social media, allows for the dissolution of the traditional minimal criteria of quality imposed on writing to a certain extent. The dissolution, however, is not a complete one. For one, to gain readership online, the user has to be informed of the popular idioms and make creative use of them. The danger of the tyranny of spectacle in the forms of expression on new media is consequently always imminent. Therefore, even though certain rules and restrictions are done away with by the new media for publishing, many other criteria still persist, and new ones also appear with the monopoly over the Internet. For instance, with the freedom to self-publish to a selected audience among friends, the strict adherence to grammar is no longer required. This has enabled many people to share their experiences of being ostracised or humiliated because of caste, who otherwise would never find an audience for their written expression. However, the fact that English is still the primary language of articulation also shows that certain standards of quality are

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always operative. Nevertheless, the presence of Dalit testimonial writing opened by new media is certainly reverberating and being felt across various quarters. What distinguishes new media from other preceding forms of communication is its speed and virtuality. The “instantaneity” of the new media facilitates the rapid reception and reaction, or what one may call “serialisation,” of narratives. The “instantaneous speed” of new media and the massive networks on which it operates, allows a particular “affect” to be resonated several times, to be serialised. Here is an example: “Wanted to write something for a long time, but couldn’t find an opportune moment but today, finally the experience shared by Rajneesh Santosh has given me a chance to write. Quite possible that you have similar experiences to share” (Yadav). The author goes on to describe how her Brahmin dhobi would always refuse to eat anything made by her but accepts whatever she brings for him from the market. Eventually one day, when he was proudly mentioning his caste, the author was able to confront and confirm from him the reason for his peculiar behaviour. This post demonstrates the relay chain phenomena that can be actualised on social media within a day or sometimes within hours. It begins by invoking a preceding experience shared by someone else and calls for further similar experiences to emerge. With each new individual expression of their humiliation, the burden of stigma begins to shed itself. One could see a similar relay phenomenon emerging in the MeToo movement as well. What this also implies is the “ephemeral” nature of these fragments. Any fragment or writing that appears on social media (not blogs) lasts for no longer than a day. It is soon submerged beneath a flood of several posts, only to never appear again. The ephemerality of these fragments implies that it is not so much the content which matters but it is the affect of the fragment which will linger on, which can be exacerbated by other, similar posts. These characteristics of social media mediate the discourse that emerges here. The fragments are short and discontinuous and employ the technique of repetition. What impact does the ephemerality of the political narratives have on us? This question will be discussed later on in the chapter.

Affect of testimony The impossibility of inhabiting the Dalit subjecthood is one of the most dominant motifs in the fragments of self-narration that appear online. In the form of Facebook posts, tweets, blog posts, and articles, people articulate their daily experience of being forced to reveal their caste, being ostracised and outcasted. Most of these are rendered in the shades of unending agony and misery. Other references often point to scenes that isolate the unique world that the Dalits inhabit. Their struggle also shapes a particular cultural world in opposition to the mainstream Brahminical cultural sphere that is articulated as a cherished space perpetually under threat by the actions of the savarnas: what happens when u realise that things would have been different if castes were same, u feel broke. u feel doomed. u feel meaningless. and it all feels

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even more painful because u considered that friendship is the most important relation in life because it is the only relation that we choose ourselves, others are sort of given to u by family that u are born into. at half of ur life u get to know that u were living in an illusion. u dont matter, caste matters. it hurts like hell. (Bouddh, “You Don’t Matter: Caste Matters”) It was almost 20 years ago that I had my first much bitter experience of caste, caste discrimination when I just took admission in an engineering college and decided that I would fight this out my whole life. Won’t do anything else. I was 17 then. (Kheri) Both of the fragments attest to the mark of the caste that one carries throughout their life. No worldly power can make them escape it. The virtual space of new media emerged as a revolutionary virtual ground for otherwise-isolated individuals to express themselves as outcastes. One of the primary intentions behind these testimonial fragments is to testify to the presence of caste and its role as the driving motor of Indian society. But the use of visceral language and the registers of agony and misery also demand answers from readers and hold them culpable structurally in their oppression. These fragments on the new media are informed by the preceding Dalit autobiographies in the 1970s and 1980s, which with their depiction of humiliation and abject misery were revolutionary in marking a crack in the epistemic regime in India. These autobiographies were pioneers in the formation of a distinct Dalit literature, and they regularly challenged in their prose the safe distance between the reader and text. Udaya Kumar identified autobiographies as occupying a “paradigmatic” status in the Dalit literary production: The prominence of personal narratives in the canon of Dalit writing has given rise to the view that Dalit writing needs to be read not in accordance with the aesthetic categories of the literary institution but in reference to the authenticity of experience. (163) The testimonial fragments of the caste humiliation claim this authenticity. This claim to authenticity becomes a standard of their quality. The standards of articulation, grammar, and good language are done away with, thankfully – because of both the claim to authenticity and new media. Therefore, an articulation of one’s experience, a singular experience of being marked by caste, does not accidently find a foregrounding in the argumentation in the book What Babasaheb Ambedkar Means to Me. Only when one is able to formulate the pain and humiliation – in other words, the impossibility – of inhabiting the Dalit subjecthood can one begin to even fathom finding a footing of resistance.

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Most of the painful experiences cited in the book come from childhood or being in school. These fragments lay bare the violence that is unleashed in the “safe spaces” on the child who is yet to discover, yet to know, the reality of caste: I did not understand any of the discrimination or humiliation I went through each day growing up. I grew up believing there was something inherently wrong with me. The teachers and students treated me like I was stupid and I believed that I was extremely stupid. I started blaming myself for the way I was treated. (Chandragiri 116) I think I have lost count of the number of times I have felt immensely guilty of getting what I have got because of my caste. I remember sitting in my university classes, people looking directly at my face and saying “some lower caste” individuals do not deserve to be here, because technically they are economically better than even many upper caste Brahmins. (Kang 108) For the majority of the contemporary young educated Dalits, caste discrimination in its brutality takes the appearance of “anti-reservation” rhetoric. The endless taunts and endless justifications eat away the victim’s sense of self and hurls them into the endless abyss of a lack posited in their physical body (the lack of merit or intelligence or purity). Another person writes how only when they encountered the anticaste discourse online were they able to find an answer to the puzzle of having always been singled out in class: “Through these discoveries, I could make sense of my life experiences. I realized how everything in my life has been influenced by caste. People refused to touch me in school. That’s as basic as untouchability gets” (Chandragiri 117). These narratives of appearing in one’s vulnerable self on the public domain on social media are also crucial in forging solidarities. The testimonials facilitated by the “serialisation” on social media has lately led to the development of an active Ambedkarite community. One finds similar first-person narratives and memories in the book Hatred in the Belly as well. In this volume, Nilesh Kumar’s chapter begins by sharing how his father introduced him to Ambedkar’s works The Buddha and his Dhamma and Annihilation of Caste. His father insisted that “Nilesh read these works vigorously” (N. Kumar 128). Gaurav Somwanshi also in his compelling article recounts his experience of living in Aurangabad and not finding a single bookshop or publication run by savarnas who were ready to publish or sell Ambedkar. He, movingly, describes how the circulation of Ambedkar’s texts is being carried out by smallscale Dalit publishers and that the readership of these books consists of mostly lower-class and lower-caste people. In all the excerpts presented so far in this chapter, we encounter the invocation of a memory to produce a gesture or a counter-gesture in the particular case of the publication of the Navayana book. The gesture is that of opening one’s interiority

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and sharing that which is most private and cherished. In the particular case against the Navayana book, it is an encounter with the figure of one’s emancipation or to that which one owes one’s life: Ambedkar. These narratives are attempting to produce an affect with this opening of their inner selves and mobilise it against their readers so as to compel them to radically alter their internal constitution. The resulting effect can be compared to what Barthes characterised as “punctum” when he described the visceral effect that a photograph is capable of producing (25, 42–43). What all these fragments produce is affect. I use this term with respect to Spinoza’s formulation. He defines affect as “the affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, ideas of these affections” (Sec III Def. 3) For Spinoza, the “affect” is related to the power of the subject. The subject’s power can increase or decrease depending on an encounter with a good or bad affect. This connection between affect and power articulated by Spinoza leads us to understand how these enunciations, insofar as they produce a certain affect, intend to create a political space of freedom for themselves. The testimonial fragments articulated by Dalit authors exceed the function of pointing to the existence of caste and caste discrimination. They are simultaneously enunciations of resistance that mobilise affects to demand responsibility from the reader. These fragments intend to produce an affect with force, to move the reader to alter their stance in the structure of caste that everyone inhabits. The Dalit autobiographies that appeared earlier were responses to the radical academics and political circles that failed to address the issue of caste. The contemporary articulations also register a similar complaint. With this subterranean demand, these fragments of the self appear on the stage. The “affectively” charged language of the testimonial narratives today is different from the autobiography that Ambedkar wrote. Ambedkar’s autobiography Waiting for Visa is an assemblage of several chapters narrating an experience of caste discrimination. However, the intention behind this is to prove a propositional conclusion at the end that Parsis also discriminate on the basis of caste and more. The contemporary fragments that we encounter in this chapter are driven towards articulating the unspeakable, akin to the Untouchable, and in doing so, they produce a counter-gesture of proudly affirming what is forced on to them. These counter-gestures forge solidarities across people who inhabit similar experiences and disarm the upper castes, compelling the latter to rethink. These gestures also produce a new vernacular arena with its own protocols of truth. The truth resides in the narration of an authentic experience, of bearing witness to the horror of caste. This is the radical force of the affect that is produced by the testimonies of pain and humiliation. They dismantle or melt the structures of reason and truth that accompany it, and they pierce through bodies, thwarting any sense of meaning based on the existing structures. What stands out is a tendency of articulation in modern “Dalit” subjects that is reflected in the contemporary enunciations as they appear: affectively charged, brief, self-referential. And insofar as these enunciations strive to attain power (power understood in a basic sense: that which sustains us, power to speak, to

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move around, to reproduce oneself), these enunciations are political. In this sense of “political,” we can understand the invocation of first-person recollection in polemical works. These enunciations work in the ethical register, where the articulation of having been at the receiving end of violence and oppression issues power to oneself. This power is the power of justice or an ethical realm, which inches closer with each enunciation. The enunciation, with its impossible articulation of the unspeakable and unfathomable humiliation and oppression, forces the other to silence and accept the need for a new ordering of the world.

Inhabiting the cusp2 Apart from the posts highlighting being at the receiving end of caste discrimination, one also finds expressions of power and resistance. Some of the most powerful writings emerge as a first-person Dalit voice, who can see the world around them mediated through caste. What they see around them are various cultural symbols that are markers of the jati that one belongs to in the form of tilaks, mangalsutras, janeu, śikhā, and so on. In these narratives emerges a recording voice that is incrementally unveiling the underbelly of gestures, markers, and sartorial choices and testifying to the total presence of caste all around us. The voice is a witness to that which is invisible to the upper-caste eyes, because it shapes our mode of perceiving the social world. As Arvind Bouddh writes, “Scene-2: Pandey, a Clerk calls up mishra, a higher up, to say that dwiwedi, a new officer, who is recommended to be posted in the big city of the state, should be kept there only. It is an official request” (Bouddh, “Scene-2: Pandey, a Clerk”). He follows the thread with most of the people think that casteism exists when a dalit/adivasi comes into the picture. what they fail to understand is that when tiwariji calls up dubeyji for mishraji’s work, it is also casteism. when one denies the presence of caste is also casteism. These fragments highlight the specificity of the writing which emerges on social media. With an instant feedback and response mechanism, coupled with the ephemerality described earlier, a daily mechanism of expression and reporting is put in place. The writer here is actively producing an archive of innumerable observations testifying to the presence of caste. However, the encyclopaedic nature of this endeavour with the discontinuous and discrete posts produce a novel affect. The affect is geared towards producing a subject aware of how caste reproduces itself every day. But the affect is that of a process. It is radically different from reading text containing various enunciations in one go. What is happening here is a daily ritual of making mind “imprints” (Wakankar 25). Milind Wakankar, in his radical book, relates the language of hearsay to producing “mind imprints,” comparing the process to the daily Stoic ritual of memorising a single formula and meditating on it (26). These daily fragments also produce a similar phenomenon of imprinting

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affects on the mind. The articulations of the new media are seemingly bringing us close to the language of hearsay or a vernacular argumentative mode. What are the implications of this for the subaltern? It is no longer an individual jotting down their experiences in their private space but rather here is a connected individual writing on the interactive screen with the world always present, ready to burst in through with likes, comments, and shares. The hermeneutic framework developed by Paul Ricoeur in his essay “What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding” (1981) will be useful here. Ricoeur posits a defining feature of speech as addressed to somebody wherein there is interruption, deferral, questioning. The speech weaves the circumstantiality around it unto itself. On the other hand, text is a fixing of the discourse. The text is marked by a double eclipse, an absence. The subject is split into two while writing: one that writes and one that listens. The world is present for the subject through and in the self that listens, quietly judges, omits, erases, edits. Therefore, the solitude of the writer is composed of two. The case of social media seems closer to speech but only deceptively so. The connected subject writes on the screen, where there is an absence, but this absence is supplemented by a virtual presence. A concrete effect of the form of the social media or new media is that the posts have to be affective and short. One cannot afford to write lengthy prose. Therefore, the writing is produced with discontinuities: The writing either unfolds in several connected posts or often unfolds in the comments section, where there is a dialogue with the other presence. The effects of the form of the new media on the writing is beyond the scope of this chapter. But what it certainly means for us is that the context has become all the more important for us to understand each individual fragment. The new media has become a crucial part of our existence, and our politics today is unimaginable without it. I think one of the cause–effect relationships of this fact is that our emotional states are deeply intertwined with the new media. I say this not just with respect to the self-assertion of Dalits in the new media but more so with respect to the appropriation of the new media by the right-wing politics in India. It inspires terror to see how within a few hours one can run a wave of anger and resentment against a particular minority community through new media. What is it that mobilises emotions so effectively and easily on new media? I think we can find a few clues in the “resonating” effect and the “instantaneous speed” of the new media. What new media facilitates is an establishment of a narrow clique, wherein one’s distance from the others in this clique is abolished. One begins to function as a node in this large cluster. With that comes also a hyper separation from the members of other cliques. A binary of us and them is actualised often on the new media. While it is inevitable to an extent in the case of the politics of the marginalised, it also discourages an awareness of the structural causes of oppression or exploitation. Social media has irreversibly altered our experience of space, nearness, distance, time, identity, politics, and so on. While the new media on the one hand brings people closer than ever before, heralding a historical shift in the weaving of densely knit networks, this on the other hand means that the distance between individuals belonging to different clusters is higher than ever before,

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resulting in cliques resembling islands – or to put it simply, as one often hears today, “echo chambers.” The experience of “distance” and “nearness” is united in the opposition between the two. A  decrement in one is always accompanied by an increment in the other. The virtuality of the new media alters our sense of time in addition to our sense of space. We tend to live in a rapidly changing “now” or “present.” The amount of content that is generated and with the ever-increasing traffic, the past recedes further and further, appearing faintly with few specks of intelligibility. The present is at once fleeting and vast. This generates a sense of anxiety or urgency of being active, being productive. In this obsession with the fleeting present, do we lose a sense of an ongoing movement or process? With the sense of space and time altered, a valid question emerges regarding the extent to which the users control social media or are controlled by it. The question is pertinent especially with the fact that the new media is controlled by hegemonic capitalist forces. What is the relationship between the connected and disconnected subaltern? These are complex and pertinent questions. But both Dalits and new media inhabit the cusp, and their trajectories are under massive flux. The answer to these questions will, therefore, unfold only in time. However, the trajectories of both will certainly be influential in the decisions of our future.

Notes 1 The backlash over social media and the consequent withdrawal was widely reported. The article cited here documents the outcry by Dalit intellectuals on social media as the primary cause for this withdrawal, but several other articles briefly reported the withdrawal of the ad and didn’t go into detail on the backlash. 2 I borrow this phrase from Wakankar, whose book on subalternity and religion thinks about how the Dalits inhabit the cusp of modernity with an exhilarating movement into the future out of subalternity, but with a simultaneous recognition of how the social constraints of the past yet remain in place.

Works cited Ambedkar Age Collective, editor. Hatred in the Belly. Shared Mirror, 2015. ———, editor. What Babasaheb Ambedkar Means to Me. Shared Mirror, 2019. Ambedkar, B.R. Writings and Speeches, Edited by Vasant Moon, vol. 12. Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1993, pp. 661–91. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang, 1981. Bouddh, Arvind. “You Don’t Matter: Caste Matters.” Facebook, 18 Apr. 2017, www.face book.com/learn2unlearn2017/posts/10211963993071734. Accessed 1 Feb. 2020. ———. “Scene-2: Pandey, a Clerk.” Facebook, 18 Sept. 2017a, www.facebook.com/learn2unlearn2017/posts/10213510826021591. Accessed 1 Feb. 2020. ———. “How Most of the People Think About Dalit/Adivasis.” Facebook, 18 Sept. 2017b, www.facebook.com/learn2unlearn2017/posts/10213510801340974. Accessed 1 Feb. 2020. Chandragiri, Chandana. “Reaching Babasaheb Through the Ambedkarite Community.” What Babasaheb Ambedkar Means to Me. Ambedkar Age Collective. Shared Mirror, 2015, pp. 116–19.

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Gopalkrishnan, Amulya. “Fanning the Fire: Why the Havells Anti-Reservation Ad Got Everyone Winded.” The Times of India, 15 Mar. 2016, https://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/blogs/to-name-and-address/fanning-the-fire-why-the-havells-anti-reservation-adgot-everyone-winded/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2020. Jadhav, Pradnya. “Babasaheb, Knowing you as Babasaheb.” What Babasaheb Ambedkar Means to Me. Ambedkar Age Collective. Shared Mirror, 2015, pp. 85–91. Kheri, Anoop. “Some of Us Will Have to Fight All Our Lives.” Round Table India, 20 July  2017, https://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=articl e&id=9133:some-of-us-will-have-to-fight-all-our-lives-anoop-kumar&catid=119:featu re&Itemid=132. Accessed 1 Feb. 2020. Kumar, Nilesh. “Stigmatising Dalits, from the Wadas to Web.” Hatred in the Belly. Ambedkar Age Collective. Shared Mirror, 2015, pp. 128–32. Kumar, Udaya. “Consciousness, Agency and Humiliation: Reflections on Dalit Lifewriting and Subalternity.” The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B.R. Ambedkar, edited by Cosimo Zene. Routledge, 2013, pp. 158–70. Ricoeur, Paul. “What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding.” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, edited and translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge UP, 1981. Satyamurthy, K.G. “I.” The Shared Mirror Archive, translated from Telugu by Naren Bedide, 14 May 2012, https://roundtableindia.co.in/lit-blogs/?m=201205. Accessed 23 Jan. 2021. Satyanarayana, K. “Arundhati Roy Failed to Grasp the Significance of AoC.” Hatred in the Belly. Ambedkar Age Collective. Shared Mirror, 2015, pp. 115–24. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. Penguin Classics, 1996. Wakankar, Milind. Subalternity and Religion: The Prehistory of Dalit Empowerment in India. Routledge, 2010. Yadav, Shweta. “Kuch dino se kuch baat sajha karna chahti thi.” Facebook, 29 Apr. 2017, www.facebook.com/sweta.yadav.980/posts/700480956827308. Accessed 1 Feb. 2020.

9 STUDYING CASTE UP Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit Purnachandra Naik

[t]urn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster. (Dr B.R. Ambedkar, “vol. 1” 47)

Dalit life writing as a potent genre of self-expression has evolved to assume a preponderant space within Dalit literary productions. The genesis of this genre can arguably be traced back to the writings of none other than Babasaheb Ambedkar: the recurrent figure in Dalit life writings across genders, regions, and linguistic variations on the subcontinent. In a short text allusively entitled Waiting for a Visa, Ambedkar promises his intended readers, the “foreigners,” that he will “give an idea of the way the untouchables are treated by the caste Hindus” (“vol. 12” 663). Ambedkar does so by drawing on his experience: He dwells on six specific “events that have happened to me in my own life” (“vol. 12” 663). Yet Ambedkar not only weaves his experience with the experiences of other Dalits as he narrates them, but also implicates the underlying caste structure and perpetrators of caste “violence” in his narratives. For instance, when a Dalit woman (who was ill after delivering her baby) died because a doctor refused to treat her, Ambedkar reflects, “He felt no qualms of conscience in setting aside the code of conduct which is binding on his profession. The Hindu would prefer to be inhuman rather than touch an Untouchable” (“vol. 12” 687). In this pithily provocative articulation, Ambedkar not only attends to the “wounds” of Dalit life but also sheds critical light on the rigidity of caste and Hindu socio-religious dogma that persists at the huge expense of humanity. In the post-Ambedkar period, Dalit life writings have recounted the raw wounds of caste system on Dalit lifeworlds through the idioms of penury, hunger,

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exploitation, discrimination and humiliation, and have also registered the simultaneous struggles by Dalits to reclaim their robbed humanity. As opposed to the echo of the bourgeois “individual” in autobiography, Rege reads Dalit life narratives as “testimonios that summoned the truth from the past; truth about the poverty and helplessness of the pre-Ambedkarite era as also the resistance and progress of the Ambedkarite era” (16–17). However, my intention here is neither to affix the significance of the life writings to certain leitmotifs nor to suggest that they have conformed to any narrative template. Rather, my attempt here is to appreciate a “new” note in the existing polyphony of voices that Dalit life writings are. In this chapter, I argue that Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir marks a significant milestone in the narration of Dalit lifeworlds; the bildungsroman not only dwells on the dreams and aspirations of a “new” generation of Dalits (and the persistently creeping shadow of caste on them), but also “studies” caste in “plural” against the backdrop of constitutional polity of the post–independent nation-state.1 In the prevalent discourse, “caste” is almost invariably tethered to the contexts of Dalits (or “lower castes”), as the former is often (mis)taken to be synonymous with the latter. Yet as Ambedkar argues, “caste in the singular number is an unreality. Castes exist only in the plural number. There is no such thing as a caste: There are always castes” (“vol. 1” 20, italics in original). Furthermore, the academia in particular has been complicit in treating caste as an ideological system of purity and pollution, which Mencher described as a view from “ ‘top to down’ ” (Rege 18). This tendency to bracket caste with Dalits/“lower castes” – or, for that matter, to take the top-down view – amounts to what Pandian calls transcoding caste: “Caste always belongs to someone else; it is somewhere else” (1735). It also exempts the “upper castes” and their accrued privileges owing to caste from scrutiny: In other words, the caste issue is morphed into a problem of the social and economic marginalization of one section of society, and the caste problem is seen as a problem only for the lower castes who “suffer from it.” The social and political dominance of brahmins and other upper castes, their role in perpetuating and extending caste discrimination, the benefits they derive from the formation and the role of caste in modern culture and modern institutions – all remain univestigated. (Satyanarayana and Tharu 10)

From food habits to life chances, caste does matter. Yet the way it matters to individuals and communities could vary immensely, according to their relative location in the hierarchical caste ladder.2 Also, as the quotation at the beginning of this chapter from the seminal work Annihilation of Caste by Ambedkar warns, caste is a monster that has crept into the entire body-politic of the country; its significance has mutated and multiplied in such ways that it has come to underlie realms that are beyond the ritual or social. In this context, the reading of caste in “plural” requires scanning it in terms of its systemic and structural entirety in contemporary times.

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Coming Out as Dalit sketches a contemporary shade of the Dalit lifeworld in which the narrator not only reveals a hitherto-concealed “lie” of being a Brahmin and examines the lived “lie,” but also unravels the many facets of caste(ism) that systemically operate in “modern” institutions today. By focusing on the systemic underpinnings of caste and its structural consequences, Yashica carries out what in feminist standpoint theory is known as “study up.”3 Elaborating on the standpoint theory, Harding argues that the distinctive goal of the theory is to “study up”: although the articulation of the women’s or other marginalised group’s perspective about the group’s lives is an important step in the process, “it ambitiously intends to map the practices of power, the ways the dominant institutions and their conceptual frameworks create and maintain oppressive social relations” (31). In the memoir, as the first-person narrator scrutinises her formerly “performed” life in the light of the consciously assumed Dalithood, she maps caste in “plural” in the process  – in its social manifestations and material translations, its spatiotemporal variations, and its conceptual differentiation.

Caste and/in “modern” institutions The endeavour to acquire education despite rampant discrimination in school has been a recurring theme in Dalit life writings. In Coming Out as Dalit, Yashica (re) emphasises her ancestors’ struggle to acquire education: Until three generations ago, Dalits were denied access to learning. My greatgrandfather defied this social order and learned to write by scrawling in the mud with a stick. His son, my grandfather, like many others of his generation, fought every step of the way to enter the civil services. (1) Furthermore, regarding her great-grandfather, Yashica continues, “He also challenged the rigid prohibition on Dalit education by attending classes even when the teachers refused to teach him. His protest against the caste system allowed my grandfather to graduate with a degree in English literature” (9). As Yashica traces back her ancestors’ struggle to acquire education and the subsequent entry of her grandfathers’ (on both sides) into the Indian Civil Services, the focus of narration here is a familial “past,” which is sketched in the background of the continuous Dalit struggle for liberation and the provision of reservation in the constitutional polity of the country. In this recounting of the “past,” education is treated as a vital (re)source of mobility and a catalyst for refashioning the “outcaste” self, which, in combination, aid in undermining the dictates of caste system. While the legacy of this struggle positively informs the educational opportunities of future generations in Coming Out as Dalit, the narrator in particular undergoes a peculiar training and refashioning in the school that was situated in the flux of a city. Thus, Yashica describes how Ajmer (Rajasthan) in the 1990s, with its factories and well-connected rail networks and, more importantly, as an “attractive

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education hub,” “presented the perfect platform to transcend our caste” (19). And despite financial constraints, she joins Sophia, “one of the top convent schools in Ajmer,” as a step towards her efforts to transcend caste (22). Yet “transcending” caste called for more than “a good education”; she needed “to have a ‘good standard’ ” as well (25). Born into a middle-class Dalit family of civil servants, she was “trained” since childhood to hide her Dalit identity and perform “upper casteness” through her fashion, lifestyle choices (e.g. movie nights, birthday party), and command of English. Therefore, joining the convent school meant honing this performance further. Regarding the rationale behind her family’s decision to send her to live in the middle-class, “upper-caste” hostel, Yashica explains, Living with upper-caste girls was meant to train me to be like them. By picking up little details like how they spoke, braided their hair or tucked in their sheets – some of the markers of upper-caste culture – I would successfully blend in with them for the rest of my life. (26) In her case, “learning” in schooldays involved a constant process of keeping up the “upper-caste” appearances, whereby she policed without lapse who she was and what she was performing. In this regard, Yashica recounts, “But a boarding school meant that I would need to pretend I was upper caste in nearly every breathing, waking and sleeping moment – an onerous effort for most adults and nearly impossible for a seven-year-old” (26). These insightful accounts suggest how caste as a regime of social regulations, not just conscripts its subjects at birth but continues to mould them through minute aspects of everyday life; it is laced with (spoken) accent and woven into sartorial habits. They also indicate that the so-called “standard” cultural habits and manners of the “upper caste” are nothing but constructed pretences towards caste “superiority.” Therefore, for Yashica, imitating the “upper caste” as part of her “standard education” meant pretending after a set of pretence. It was not so much transcending caste as “training” herself in the hegemonic pretentions of “upper” caste. And by implication, she shines light on the sociocultural fallacies of caste system. Yet Coming Out as Dalit is a bildungsroman in the unique sense that it evolves from the institutional space of school and then delves into the terrains of higher education. As her delicate negotiation vis-à-vis the stigmatised “outcaste” identity continues from the school into the college, Yashica admits, “My Dalitness still weighed heavy on me; I  dragged its carcass behind me through my childhood and into adulthood” (xii). Therefore, when she decided to study at St. Stephen’s, “a delicious but impossible option” (58), the attendant financial burden weighed heavily on the “performance.” On the deep dilemma in stating a hitherto-concealed identity, Yashica ruminates, As we filled out the admission form, Mum suggested, for the very first time, that I  tick the box that said I  was an SC/ST  candidate.  .  .  . If I  checked that box, I would taint my achievements with the “quota student” tag. My

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lifetime of lessons to successfully appear upper caste would be rendered useless with that single stroke. (60) While she desperately needed the financial aid meant for Dalits for pursuing education, the simmering disquiet of the narrator over her identity was not entirely limited to matters financial. Entering an “exclusive club” (61) well known for being an elite space, St. Stephen’s compounded Yashica’s anxiety over “passing”: “I noticed that other students who had come with their parents to fill in the form were smartly dressed, impeccably accented and walking around like they belonged there. With my downward gaze and stooped shoulders, I  didn’t” (60–61). This gnawing sense of unbelonging experienced by the narrator might seem as an inevitable consequence of the “training,” which required acquiescing and internalising the supposed “standard” habits and manners of the “upper caste.” However, it is far from an individually experienced instance of unbelonging. In a study on the experience of Dalit students at an “elite university” in India, Ovichegan concludes, this premier university is yet another arena in which the practice of caste division continues to exist. The university environment in this case reinforces and maintains a divide between Dalit and non-Dalit. Dalit students do, indeed, experience overt and covert discrimination based on caste at this premier university. (374) Although Ovichegan keeps the name of this particular “premier university” in question secret, the observations made could be extrapolated to similar contexts. Therefore, the systemic (re)enactment of caste hierarchy in the university environment, in which the privileged castes reproduce their hegemonic pretence, conspicuously conveys to the narrator that she is an unwelcome other. From the foregoing experiential vantage point, Yashica further investigates the presence of caste in institutions of higher/professional education, and its consequences on Dalit scholars. In this context, Yashica’s decision to “come out” was prompted by the “institutional murder” of the Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula in 2016 at the University of Hyderabad (UoH). Also, she has dedicated the memoir to her mother and “Rohith Vemula, who lit a flame that made my silence impossible.” The powerful words written by Rohith in his last letter proved to be catalysing for Yashica in the sense that they melted away her hitherto-harboured assumptions that caste (i.e. “outcaste” identity) could be camouflaged by “performing” “upper caste” (implying “caste-less” or “caste” with positive significance) through which she could then live in a make-believe bubble “beyond” or “post-caste.” On this, Yashica reflects: Rohith, a PhD scholar at Hyderabad University, had allegedly [died by] suicide as a result of relentless caste-based persecution at the university. When

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news of his suicide broke in the mainstream media in January 2016, my own Dalit identity was deeply buried beneath layers of convent education, urban upbringing and a hardened resolve to avoid engaging with anything related to caste. (xiv) Death is an event that occasions mourning for the departed. Yet some deaths are de facto “murders” that call for contemplation, justice, and moral awakening before a moment of mourning could be possible. As an act of contemplation and “personal/ political” awakening, Yashica not only dwells on the chain of events preceding the institutional murder of Rohith and the aftermath, but also proceeds to consider the dreams and struggles of Rohith in detail. She also narrates about the institutional murder of other Dalit students, such as Pulyala Raju, Senthil Kumar, Madari Venkatesh, and Balmukund Bharti, and the rape and murder of Delta Meghwal and Jisha, in institutions of (higher) learning such as University of Hyderabad (UoH) and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).4 While caste in its brutal nakedness is often yoked with the Indian village caught in “antiquity,” all these names bear testimony to the “violence” of caste on Dalit bodies and psyches in “modern” institutions today. On the “contemporaneity of caste,” Satyanarayana and Tharu argue that caste has been relocated into the domain of modernity: “It works in renewed and updated forms in modern contexts and institutions. This history of caste is part of the history of modern India” (11). Yashica maps how caste has been relocated into the “modern” domain, e.g., the university. On the suspension and social boycott of five Dalit scholars that preceded the institutional murder of Rohith, she narrates, Banned from entering the hostel and with nowhere else to go, the suspended students (Rohith and four others) decided to create Velivadas (a Telugu word that refers to Dalit ghettos) on campus to drive home the casteist discrimination they were facing (130) The perpetuation of caste system in “traditional” Indian villages where Dalits are spatially segregated in the peripheral ghettos, and how they are barred from accessing common spaces/resources in the village “proper” (e.g. water from the tube well, walking, or riding a bicycle or motorbike on the road) are much-observed phenomena. The university administration (re)enacts an “updated” version of caste system through an academic and social boycott of the Dalit research scholars in UoH which Sukumar describes as an “agrahara” – the Brahmin quarter in a village (17). In fact, Yashica reports on a “Brahmin well” in UoH, “which was dug in the 1980s for Professor V. Kannan,” who “only allowed other upper-caste students and professors to access it and lower-caste students and faculty couldn’t come anywhere near it till he retired in 2014” (78). Yet the renewed and updated version of caste in the context of “modern” institutions operates in other insidious ways. Yashica points out that caste discrimination

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has become “more subtle” and “institutional” in the context of the universities (79). She argues that “Universities and colleges should be centres for learning new ideas and questioning the status quo. Instead, they become places of discrimination, exclusion and institutional harassment” (78–79). In this context, the narrator enumerates such subtle, institutional, yet insidious forms of casteism as the denial of thesis supervisors and laboratories for conducting research to Dalit students or stalling their scholarship money (75–76). These instances of insidious casteism in the university space inflict deep “injuries.” For instance, the insightful journalistic account by Mondal (2016) on Rohith (beyond and before he joined UoH) reveals, among other aspects, his constant financial hardships. The measure of “injury” that was inflicted on him when the university administration stalled his scholarship for seven months eludes quantification. It’s a form of institutional caste “violence” that operates on a subterranean, systemic level. It is not simply disavowed by the perpetrators but rather dismissed altogether.5 In this regard, Yashica cites studies and research that count “ ‘administrative indifference and hostile regulations’ ” and the alienation of marginalised students as causes of suicide in UoH (76). Yet far from entertaining the research, the university administration asked for “ ‘scientific proof ’ ” (76). This is an instance of what Thorat (2016) calls the denial mode: “There is constant denial and attempts are made to attribute the suicides to incident-specific situations with disregard for the links with the larger social milieu of exclusion.” Also, social studies on “strategic ignorance” have shown evidence to support the claim that “Having power not only means you can look the other way. You can also omit, bury or otherwise conceal inconvenient truths” (Enfield). In other words, the denial mode of the authorities in institutions is an exercise of caste power. Furthermore, the systemic and institutional casteism not only allow the “upper-caste” perpetrators to disavow their direct role in caste violence but also subjects the existence of “wounds” on Dalits to provability through “certificates” and “scientifically” legible procedures. As Bhattacharjee (Dhillon) cogently writes, “the structural violence leaves invisible marks on a Dalit student’s body and psyche that no autopsy can reveal.”

Caste and/as capital As was noted earlier in this chapter, the significances of caste in “plural” not only vary immensely depending on the hierarchically gradational caste ladder, but also have corresponding structural implications beyond the domains of ritual or social. In this regard, Ambedkar’s evaluation that “Indian society is a gradation of Castes forming an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt” (“vol. 2” 506) finds its echo well beyond the spectrum of sentiments (e.g. reverence/contempt). On the one hand, the contempt harboured against Dalits breeds “violence” of many kinds (as the previous section demonstrates about its “institutional” form); on the other hand, the systemic reverence arrogated to the “upper castes” translates into myriad forms of structural advantages. Wilkerson (2020) argues that the hierarchy of caste is about “power, which groups have it

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and which do not. It is about resources, which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not” (17–18). In this context, the following section analyses the grammar of structural privileges and dis-privileges that the memoir unpicks as one of its central themes. After graduating from St. Stephen’s, Yashica secures a well-paying job in an advertising agency to write on Indian fashion, and subsequently moves on to join a master’s programme in journalism at Columbia University (New York, USA). In both the cases, she admits to having benefited from what she describes as “culture cache” (92). As regards the job at the FCB Ulka agency, the narrator recounts how bearing a St. Stephen’s stamp/brand “afforded me a different type of reservation”: Unlike constitutional reservation, which offered a one-time, entry-level advantage in universities, colleges and government jobs, this would last my whole life. Hordes of Stephanians who are multinational CEOs, chairpersons and management executives in the private sector would recognize me as one of their own and pick me over non-Stephanian candidates applying for the same job. (92) Therefore, when she secured the job, it was attributed to the unstated “Stephanian quota” (93). In the prevalent public discourse, concepts such as reservation and quota are almost automatically identified with the contexts of Dalits. While reservation in this context is a well-defined policy measure within the constitutional framework of the country, Yashica throws light on other forms of “reservations” that function in favour of the privileged “upper castes” in systemic ways. For instance, in educational institutions, seats are reserved in alumni quota (for students who have a parent/sibling as alumnus) and management quota (for financially rich students who could pay the high fees) (93). Although these systems of reservation are structurally tilted to benefit certain privileged castes only, they never attract public scrutiny or become subjects of public debate. Yashica observes that “The alumni and management quota are essentially upper-caste reservations but neither of them get even a fraction of the malice or hate that is directed at constitutional reservation” (93–94). Likewise, the structural privileges of the “upper castes,” owing to their caste locations, ensure benefits to them in myriad ways. Yashica notes that the privilege of the “upper castes” “is so deeply embedded into our society that it’s almost invisible” (91): Upper-caste privilege, which is not always about how much money someone has or how much the property they own is, . . . an “invisible package of unearned assets.” This “invisible package,” which is attached to their not so invisible upper caste, opens doors for jobs, bank loans, business opportunities and education that are often closed for Dalits. (90)

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The system of caste, thus, not only simultaneously privileges the “upper castes” and dis-privileges the Dalits but also structurally reproduces the dichotomy. In this context, the narrator argues that “cultural capital” plays a basic role in it: “Upper castes have had access to cultural capital for centuries, from which they continue to benefit and from which Dalits are excluded” (90–91). According to Bourdieu, “capital” has three fundamental forms, which are: economic capital, cultural capital and social capital. He defines cultural capital as: “which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications” (243).6 The “upper castes,” particularly Brahmins, have had a monopoly on education for centuries. Deshpande observes that “the upper-caste middle classes” had the “historical luck” during the Nehruvian era, in which there was a massive expansion of state-funded higher education. As the state provided both educational training and employment to these “castes and classes who were in the right place at the right time” (2441), education was not only a form of de facto reservation for the “upper castes” but also a process that solidified their structural privileges. On the other hand, the structural dis-privileges of Dalits have continued well into the contemporary times. Thorat argues that exclusion as a process, which is “closely linked with the institution of caste” (2432) in the context of India, is far from a phenomenon in the “past”; it continues into the “present” amid varied forms. In his quantitative study, he concludes, that If the lower castes possess few land and business assets and education it is because they do not have access to property rights and education. And if the higher castes are seen to have more of both, it is because assess to assets and education was artificially ‘reserved’ for them at the cost of the lower castes. (2433) Yashica underscores the importance of much-needed financial and logistic supports that she received from friends and colleagues for her journey to Columbia University. The college/professional network (also known as network capital) facilitated her onward march in her career. And these are the crucial links of life chances that continue to be missing for the vast majority of structurally dis-privileged Dalits. She adds that Without access to such well-connected networks, many lower-caste people never get the same chances as upper castes, especially in private sector jobs, even when they might have similar backgrounds and abilities. That’s why even when someone is not actively discriminated against for their lower caste, generations of being denied these networks holds Dalits back from truly succeeding in their careers. (103) Caste in its entirety never remains uncoupled from its “ism,” because it is “plural,” systemic, and structural. Wherever caste exists, casteism is inherent therein.

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Wilkerson observes that “Caste is structure” (emphasis in original), it “is a living, breathing entity,” while “Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you” (70). In an inherently rigged structure of caste hierarchy, inequalities are not just inbuilt but they are reproduced continuously through structural casteism. As the constitutional mechanisms meant to deal with historical injustices and dis-privileges are increasingly weakened under a neoliberal economy wedded with caste capital, Dalits continue to bear the bitter brunt of structural casteism today. Coming Out as Dalit does not limit its narrative arc to the bitter consequences of caste inflicted on Dalits. Rather, it digs deeper by studying caste as a system in its entirety: It scans caste in the crevices of mundane habits and manners; it traces the shadow of caste from school into college/university; it maps caste in the conceptual differentiations (i.e., reservation); it measures caste in the familial “past” and the fluid present of an aspirational generation; it dissects caste in the dichotomy of hereditary rewards and structural violence. It reorients the gaze. In the memoir, the “self ” is never the sole focus of attention. Yashica weaves a composite mirror that reflects the hopes, dreams, aspirations, and struggles of a generation of Dalits striving to defy and transcend the “accident of birth.” As the poignant, “personal,” and political sprout from their specificities and flower in the folds of Coming Out as Dalit, they exude a contemporary note of the Dalit lifeworld.

Notes 1 Coming Out as Dalit is originally written in English, unlike the majority of Dalit life narratives, which are written/narrated in “Indian languages.” The very medium implies a certain degree of educational attainment and mobility of the author. 2 For instance, Ambedkar observes that “Indian society is a gradation of Castes forming an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt” (“vol. 2” 506). 3 Standpoint theory re-emerged in the 1970s and 1980s “as a feminist epistemology, philosophy of science, sociology of knowledge and methodology.” See Harding (25). 4 See, for instance, Thorat Committee Report (2007) on caste discrimination at AIIMS. 5 This doesn’t mean that overt or “visible” forms of institutional casteism lead to culpability of the “upper-caste” perpetrators, as the “certificate saga” in the aftermath of the institutional murder of Rohith demonstrates to the contrary. 6 Bourdieu (243) defines economic capital as that “which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights” and social capital as being “made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title of nobility.”

Works cited Ambedkar, B.R. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches. Compiled and edited by Vasant Moon, vol. 1. Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014a. ———. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches. Compiled and edited by Vasant Moon, vol. 12. Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014b.

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———. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches. Compiled and edited by Vasant Moon, vol. 2. Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014c. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J.G. Richardson. Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 241–58. Caste Discrimination in AIIMS. “Thorat Committee Report.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 22, 2007, p. 2032. Deshpande, Satish. “Exclusive Inequalities: Merit, Caste and Discrimination in Indian Higher Education Today.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 24, 2006, pp. 2438–44. Dhillon, Amrit. “ ‘A Violence No Autopsy Can Reveal’: The Deadly Cost of India’s Campus Prejudice.” The Guardian, 2 July  2017, www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/ jul/02/a-violence-no-autopsy-can-reveal-the-deadly-cost-of-indias-campus-prejudice. Accessed 4 July 2020. Dutt, Yashica. Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir. Aleph Book Company, 2019. Enfield, N.J. “Believe What You Like.” Times Literary Supplement, 17 July 2020, www.the-tls. co.uk/articles/fit-facts-around-prejudices-review/. Accessed 12 Oct. 2020. Harding, Sandra. “A Socially Relevant Philosophy of Science? Resources from Standpoint Theory’s Controversiality.” Hypatia, vol. 19, no. 1, 2004, pp. 25–47. Mondal, Sudipto. “Rohith Vemula: An Unfinished Portrait.” Hindustan Times, 30 Jan. 2016, www.hindustantimes.com/static/rohith-vemula-an-unfinished-portrait/. Accessed 8 July 2020. Ovichegan, Samson. “Social Exclusion, Social Inclusion and ‘Passing’: The Experiences of Dalit Students at One Elite Indian University.” International Journal of Inclusive Education, vol. 18, no. 4, 2014, pp. 359–78. Pandian, M.S.S. “One Step Outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and Public Sphere.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 37, no. 18, 2002, pp. 1735–41. Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Reading Dalit Women’s Testimonios. Zubaan, 2013. Satyanarayana, K., and Susie Tharu. “Introduction.” No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India. Penguin, 2011. Sukumar, N. “Living a Concept: Semiotics of Everyday Exclusion.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 46, 2008, pp. 14–17. Thorat, Sukhadeo. “Paying the Social Debt.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 24, 2006, pp. 2432–35. ———. “Discrimination on the Campus.” The Hindu, 26 Jan. 2016, www.thehindu. com/opinion/lead/Discrimination-on-the-campus/article14019816.ece. Accessed 8 July 2020. Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Lies That Divide Us. Allen Lane, 2020.

PART III

Revisiting the testimonio with cross-cultural readings

10 AT THE THRESHOLD OF LITERATURE Testimonios after Menchú Vijaya Venkataraman

No sooner I write . . . it is not true. And yet I write hanging on to Truth. (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 10)

The Latin American testimonio  – a genre that came into being in the 1960s, symbolising the voice of the subaltern – became the centre of a fiercely polemic academic debate since the publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman from Guatemala (1983), by Guatemalan activist and Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú.1 Nearly 40 years later, the testimonio is believed by some to have become irrelevant, its authenticity questioned and its politics blunted in the neoliberal world that we live in, where market forces shape the production and consumption of literary texts. While scholars debate the thorny questions of truth and referentiality, the testimonio has travelled across shores and has been adapted into, appropriated by, and echoed in other contexts, such as refugee and migrant literature, Dalit writing, and memory studies, among others. In this chapter, I critically examine some of the key questions relating to the production and reception of the testimonio, by attempting a close reading of Rigoberta Menchú’s second book, Crossing Borders (1998), in order to revisit the controversy around the genre and the contingent issues raised therein. In the latter part of the chapter, I look at how the testimonio continues to engage contemporary Latin American fiction writers as they negotiate its appropriation in a globalised world, through an analysis of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novel Senselessness (2004). The Rigoberta Menchú controversy, as it came to be known, paved the way for a critical rethinking of the limits and demarcations of the genre. While some (Gugelberger, The Real Thing) argued that the testimonial moment had passed

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and declared its demise, others (Beverly, The Real Thing; Arias; Dorfman) offered more nuanced readings of Menchú’s text and the testimonio, drawing from theoretical debates from the fields of memory studies and life writing. Eakin, among others, proposed reading autobiographies as “a discourse of fact and fiction and even more fundamentally, a discourse of identity” (124), and Felman and Laub argued for accepting the individual testifier’s account as literature in Holocaust studies. Following these, scholars such as Sharmila Rege posited that Dalit life narratives could be read as testimonios, because they “forge a right to speak both for and beyond the individual and contest explicitly or implicitly the ‘official forgetting’ of histories of caste oppression, struggles and resistance” (Rege, Kindle Locations 353–54). Similarly, Aníbal González argues that the “urge to seek out and express the truth” is found with renewed vigour in contemporary Latin American writers of fiction who espouse “a radical scepticism about postmodern artifices in literature” and who above all seek “authenticity, both personal as well as artistic” (4). My argument that the testimonio is still relevant is based on the conviction that the real issues were perhaps not so much about “authenticity” or “veracity” or even “literariness”; rather, the testimonio came under attack because it raised uncomfortable questions about injustices and inequalities that are deep rooted in our societies. Questioning the form became a convenient strategy to dislodge it from the space that it had managed to wrest for itself. The testimonio had succeeded in making the testimonial author a subject of history and articulating a collective memory as opposed to merely an individual one. The publication of Crossing Borders in 1998 elicited some interesting responses, as the same critics who had celebrated the testimonio’s “arrival” were now wary or even embarrassed of calling it one and instead preferred to read it as a memoir or an autobiography, perhaps to highlight the supposed change in Menchú’s status – from that of a subaltern to that of an exalted individual.

Problems of definitions Attempts to define the testimonio as a genre, given its inherent hybridity, were fraught with difficulties not only because the genre underwent rapid transformations over the years but also because it took myriad forms depending on the contexts of its production.2 John Beverly, one of the first to offer a provisional definition, saw it as an expression of the social transformations taking place that, in turn, led to a transformation of existing forms of narrative literature. Rather than defining the testimonio itself, he identified its distinguishing characteristics. In an oft-quoted definition of sorts, he states that Testimonio may include, but is not subsumed under, any of the following textual categories, some of which are conventionally considered literature, others not: autobiography, autobiographical novel, oral history, memoir,

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confession, diary, interview, eyewitness report, life history, novela-testimonio, nonfiction novel, or “factographic literature.” (“The Margin at the Centre” 12–13) In a later essay, “From All Things Modern: Second Thoughts on Testimonio,” Beverly positions the testimonio against literature, arguing that it was not just a question of reading against the grain but of reading against literature in so far that the aesthetic and ideological significance of the testimonio depends on its ability to function in a historically constituted space that separates elite and popular culture in Latin America and to generate postcolonial, non-Eurocentric narratives of individual and collective historical destiny. Where literature in Latin America has been (mainly) a vehicle for engendering an adult, white, male, patriarchal, “lettered” subject, testimonio allows the emergence – albeit mediated – of subaltern, female, gay, indigenous, black and proletarian “oral” identities. (19) In his later works, Beverly redefines it as “both an art and a strategy of subaltern memory” (“The Real Thing” 277) but continues to position it outside the literary canon. The counter-memory invoked by the testimonio is not for the purpose of memorialising the past but for “the future construction of a more heterogeneous, democratic and egalitarian nation” (15). The emergence of the testimonio coincided with revisionist trends in Latin American historiography, primarily the efforts of the Subaltern Studies Group, to question “traditional configurations of democracy and the nation state” and redefine academically authorised knowledge (7). Notions of order, centre, and hierarchy were overturned as marginalised subjects from the periphery became agents of transformative projects. Denegri emphasises the idea that the subaltern could speak, from “within [their] own cultural difference” and maintain the transgressive edge, avoiding “domestication” (230) while renegotiating the links of solidarity between the intellectual and the subaltern and drawing attention to the tension between orality and writing in the process. Truth and authenticity, according to Denegri, have to do more with the question of how to read the testimonio – that is, how to situate the testimonio vis-à-vis the literary canon. Barbara Harlow too echoes the testimonial subject’s impulse to expose the “connection between knowledge and power, the awareness of the exploitation of knowledge by the interests of power to create a distorted historical record” (116) while locating the testimonio in the broader category of resistance literature that confronts official discourse and offers a rewriting of that discourse to include their own perspective. Many writers, such as Miguel Barnet, in the early days of the testimonio, distinguished it from literary forms and sought to align it with ethnographic and anthropological methods and even oral history. Critics agreed that it was an expression of collective memory and identity, produced in situations of urgency, with the desire to exorcise and set right

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official histories (Yúdice, 44). However, even before a satisfactory resolution could be found to this seemingly knotty issue, the controversy over whether Menchú had presented a truthful account in her testimonio raised questions about authenticity. Critics such as Gugelberger immediately began referring to it as “a nomadic and homeless genre,” lying outside disciplinary boundaries, “on the verge of being autobiography without being autobiography, authored without having an author” (The Real Thing 11). Menchú’s first and better-known book received immediate recognition upon receiving the Cuban Casa de las Américas Prize in the category of testimonio in 1983. Its inclusion as a compulsory undergraduate reading in Stanford University and then Menchú being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 provoked, according to Beverly, “neoconservative assaults in multicultural education and political correctness” (Against Literature 90). The controversy was engineered by those who pronounced her testimonio “a political fabrication, a tissue of lies, and one of the greatest intellectual and academic hoaxes of the twentieth century” (Horowitz np). What it really did was obfuscate the ethnic genocide in Guatemala and the role of US imperialism in the entire region to which her testimonio had successfully drawn attention. The fact that hundreds of villages were destroyed and the fact that more than a hundred thousand civilians were massacred, exiled, displaced, or simply made to disappear were not figments of her imagination. However, the debate did two things: first, it problematised the idea of “authentic” Indigenous subjects and the expectations that lettered intellectuals had of them. To expect absolute truth is possible only when the “authentic” Indigenous subject is viewed as a “noble savage,” whose alleged primitiveness maintains them as akin to some imagined “natural” truth. By this logic, any Indigenous person who uses discourse strategically either loses authenticity or is manipulated by forces outside of their control. Therefore, that person must de facto be seen as a pawn of either Western colonisers or the revolutionary opponents of Westerners, whose strategies they mimic. Denegri has an interesting observation on the “truth” element in a testimonio: To convey the truth glimpsed through vital experience, s/he must first refract it in order to then reconstruct it and submit it to a new form, which is that imposed by the art of narrating or disposition. What is thus produced will never be the entire truth. Parts of that truth experienced in real life is lost, but in the act of refracting and reconstructing it, a new truth, more intense, clearer and more revealing is discovered. (235) Likewise, DeRocher suggests that while David Stoll claims to have “caught” Menchú in a lie, his accusation glosses over the deliberate “rhetorical shaping of her narrative account” and thus “ignores the performativity of Menchú’s life narrative as an intentionally crafted text and reduces it to positivist evidence” (4–5).

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Second, and more importantly, the debate provided the opportunity for critics and practitioners of the testimonio to reimagine it in terms of its relationship with other, similar genres. While Beverly, in all his essays, continued to position the testimonio outside the literary canon, others, such as Arturo Arias, purposefully began to argue for treating the testimonio as a literary text, to free it from the unnecessary burden of truth and authenticity (in Taking Their Word). He argued that the literatures of the peripheries are necessarily nonelitist in character, as the idea of an abysmal sociocultural distance separating the literary author from the subaltern subject does not usually apply. Many of the writers of testimonios were activists themselves, like Gioconda Belli, Claribel Alegría, and Ernesto Cardenal, or suffered incarceration, torture, and violence as in the case of Uruguayan writers Mario Benedetti and Carlos Liscano or Argentinians Alicia Partnoy and Jacobo Timerman. For example, One Day of Life (1980), by Manlio Argueta, and The Inhabited Woman (1988), by Gioconda Belli, are novels based on the writers’ participation in the guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua respectively. Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean writer, in his article “The Testimonial Genre in Chile Today: Political Code and Literary Code” (1991), attempts to link the literary and political dimensions of testimonio by juxtaposing the two codes and calling them “Siamese twins” (195). Dorfman asserts these two codes imply vastly different and perhaps incompatible approaches to writing about trauma. The irreconcilable gap between the two, according to him, highlights the problems of finding satisfactory ways to approach the testimonio. Nance concurs, arguing that “the political code rejected deliberate shaping of the retelling of experience in order to engage the reader, the literary code gives short shrift to the political dimension” (Nance, 12). The testimonio, for Latin American writers, had clearly become an accepted mode of narration to represent the nightmares of their experiences while problematising the contours of such representations. As Arias claims, testimonios “always led to equivocal perceptions of the self, even within the same cultures, while writing within preconceived notions of cultural meaning” (Words 134). The fact that the testimonio continues to be adapted in new contexts is proof of the fact not simply that the testimonio is a desire but that its reinvention and adaptation to other contexts was a necessary outcome.

Testimonio versus memoirs The appearance of Menchú’s second book, Crossing Borders, amid this controversy further intensified the debate on the reading of testimonios of marginalised and subaltern groups. Critics such as Gugelberger, among others, argued that the book could be regarded only as her memoirs, because the testimonio “is a one-time affair, a coup in the world of letters” (“Remembering” 63), which was already achieved in 1983 by I, Rigoberta Menchú. On the other hand, persuasive arguments in favour of sifting through the traces of the real in a Lacanian sense (Beverly The

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Real Thing) and for reading these texts as counter-memories and counter-histories continued to produce discomfiture in many academic circles. Before entering into a detailed analysis of the book and how it can be approached, two comments on the English translation of the book are in order. First, the title of the book in English, namely Crossing Borders, suggests the transcending of some borders by Menchú, thus losing her claim to subalternity. The title in Spanish, on the other hand, Rigoberta: la nieta de los mayas, refers to Menchú as the granddaughter of the Mayas, as the carrier of the memory of her ancestors. Being the grandchild of the Mayan community, she is the link with their past and history and represents the younger generation and its ability to look ahead into the future (87). Second, the English translation glosses over the presence of the various collaborators, by omitting the various prefaces and introductions. The book in Spanish highlights the idea that although Menchú is the author, it cannot be taken as an individual production. It is the result of a collaborative effort in which there is no single compiler or transcriber or mediator but multiple ones. This not only draws our attention to the politics of translation but also echoes the anxiety produced in academic circles regarding Menchú’s status as an “authentic” testimonial or subaltern subject. Fourteen years set apart the two books, and this also mediates our understanding and evaluation of these texts. During this period, Menchú continued to relentlessly campaign for the rights of the Indigenous people of her country, and this struggle and her journey through the corridors of power gave her a confidence that she had earlier lacked. But Menchú also takes the opportunity to address two issues of significance. First, she rethinks the relationship between the mediator/compiler/transcriber and the subject. She confesses that, for the first book, she allowed herself to be persuaded by Arturo Taracena to dictate her story to somebody well known in academic circles so that the book could gain wider circulation. There I met Juan Mendoza, a dear friend to this day. Dr. Taracena introduced me to Elisabeth Burgos. He said that if he and I wrote the book, an exile and an indigenous woman, it would seem like a sort of family pamphlet. He said we needed someone with a reputation and an entrée into the academic and publishing world. (113) Menchú also explicitly acknowledges Arturo Taracena’s contribution in shaping her first testimonio, which had remained unrecognised: He had a significant hand in the book, though he is a modest man and was not interested in self-aggrandisement. After the text was compiled, I spent about two months trying to understand it. Seeing it on paper is very different from talking into a tape recorder. . . . When I wrote that book, I simply did not know the commercial rules, I was just happy to be alive to tell my story. (113–16)

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Perhaps because of the differences that arose between her and Elisabeth Burgos,3 she makes explicit the presence and contribution of several friends. Dante Liano, Guatemalan writer and poet, helped her to “reconcile the manner of living, thinking, understanding and expressing a large part of my life in K'iche' so that it could be perceived, lived, understood and respected in Spanish, and in all the other languages of the world” (26). The other collaborator, Gianni Mina, an Italian writer, helped Menchú give shape to her book and organise it into chapters. Eugenia Huerta, a close friend from Mexico; don Mario Matute, the blind Guatemalan writer who heard her testimonio as she narrated it; and her friends from the foundation are some others who played a role in shaping the book. Eduardo Galeano, in his preface, describes her as one who speaks from within the Mayan communities and not about them (8). There are two introductions. One is by Esteban Beltrán, director of the Spanish section of Amnesty International, who talks about the 36-year-long civil war and the trail of destruction, disappearances, and massacres that left scars on Guatemalan society. The other is by Humberto Ak’abal, a K'iche' poet who celebrates the book for fulfilling the need for writing that would be truly representative of the Indigenous voice, ways of life, and thought. He lauds it for not only offering a testimonio based on her experiences and a journey through the recent past of Guatemala but also for being a point of departure for reflection and analysis for future action. Without departing from the flavour of oral tradition – that is, the experience of listening rather than reading – the book, according to Humberto Ak’abal, recreates the magical experience of sitting around the fire at the end of the day, the hearth burning and the family gathered to sit listening to the grandparents (22). This formal structural aspect of the book highlights that the testimonio is born of collaboration and rooted in the collective struggles of people. Menchú also recognises that her first testimonio naïvely overlooks her political activities in the Committee of Peasant Union (CUC), which changed her worldview. The book addresses a wide range of issues. She laments the continuing violence and injustices against Indigenous peoples, in spite of the 1996 Peace Accord, describing at length the events leading to the massacre at Xaman in 1995. She no longer expresses the desire to withhold the secrets of her community or to preserve the “pristine character” of the Mayan way of life, but rather, she advocates for the social and linguistic integration of Mayan culture into the mainstream. The nostalgia to recreate a distant or lost Mayan past is absent, instead she believes that Indigenous communities must modernise and locate themselves in present times. That is why she discusses the place for science and technology in the Mayan worldview and sees religion as an arm of conquest and colonisation in the past and as a tool for justifying the exploitation of the poor. She is strongly critical of the so-called development programmes wherein scientists or technicians are sent to “study, educate, and teach” Indigenous peoples. She critiques the mistaken belief that social inequities and lack of respect and dignity towards Indigenous peoples are related to the lack of scientific or technological development in Indigenous communities. Menchú pays homage to her mother, lamenting the fact that she did not speak about her in the earlier book, and Menchú relates her mother’s life to the double marginalisation of women.

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In the last part of her book, she returns to the issues of the violence inflicted on her community and to her exile. She briefly refers to the hate campaign unleashed against her and the racist slurs she is subjected to, responding to those who would have liked her to continue being “the smiling, colourful Indian” (Mina). Some people still see me as that illiterate indigenous woman, that subversive born in squalor. I’m still the domestic servant, as some mestizos in Guatemala City refer to me. There is so much resentment against an indigenous woman being a national leader. . . . What has been hard to accept is the way some of the media use their power to try to undermine my role. Not only do I have to fear being killed, I  also have to worry about political harassment from those who cannot tolerate the presence of an indigenous woman in politics. It’s hard for them to share a platform with me. (191–92) Remarkably, not once in her 200-odd-page book does Menchú lose hope that a new generation would be born that would shun this mentality and that the Indigenous people would proudly take their place in history. My reading of Crossing Borders thus confirms the book as a testimonio, because it is a document that constitutes a constant movement through her individual memory as a witness to some momentous events, towards a collective memory of a time and because it arises out of the political desire to give space to Indigenous voices, oppressed and silenced for centuries. If the two aspects that distinguish the testimonio from other firstperson narratives, such as autobiographies, life stories, memoirs, and so on, are the mediators and the responses to situations of marginalisation or exploitation, then there is no reason to deny this place to Menchú’s Crossing Borders. Self-writing undertaken with the intent to produce intellectual and cultural capital centred on the self must be distinguished from those that are collective and collaborative endeavours. The latter exemplify a particular discursive space where negotiating an alliance between the radicalised intelligentsia and the subaltern becomes possible (Beverly, “Through All Things Modern”). Menchú’s text does precisely that: It brings into play a “counter-memory,” creating a space for the linguistically and politically marginalised voices through language and literature. It consciously subverts official histories and presents alternative versions. It also involves a resistance to protecting the idea of an absolute, original, unedited, untouched version of events and happenings, which would be a utopian dream. It is a struggle against forgetting in that it keeps no secrets. It also connects with other attempts – fictional or otherwise – “to expose and resolve contradictions and effect social, political and economic transformation” (Craft 15).

Testimonio today The neoliberal order imposed on developing countries around the world has exacerbated disparities, and the 21st century is a witness to wars, large-scale migrations,

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the displacement of people, refugee crises, and political turmoil, along with identitarian assertions of various kinds. Writing in the context of migrant and refugee narratives, Whitlock argues that contemporary literature is replete with examples that take on the legal/political functions of human rights documents as well as the literary/aesthetic properties of both memoir and fiction. . . . The hospitality of fiction creates openings for the adaptation and appropriation of refugee life narrative at the ends of testimony. . . . Here, at the seam where testimony and metafiction are joined, postcolonial life writing “bears” witness to those “slaves and monsters” who are the most brutally colonized. (197) Here the chapter reflects on how fiction has created possibilities for engaging with the testimonio through an analysis of one such literary response to the ethnic genocide and its aftermath in Guatemala.4 Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness, published in 2004, thematises the production and reception of the testimonio and its relationship with literature. Born in Honduras, Castellanos Moya has lived in almost all parts of Central America and writes on the consequences of prolonged violence in Central America, in an attempt to make sense of contemporary realities. Senselessness deploys the testimonio and the autobiography as rhetorical devices to narrate the experiences of victims of the nightmare of state sponsored terror. It positions itself to recover the memory of the victims while critically examining their testimonios, the possibilities of justice, and the concept of the archive. Just like the testimonio, it too defies generic classification. Real events are presented in the text under the garb of fiction, and thereby, it straddles the historical document, testimonio, and autobiographical narration. Granting it the status of a novel would be difficult but for the disclaimer by the author that it is a work of fiction and for the fact that it was published by a leading publishing house (Anagrama) in its “Collection of Hispanic Narrative.” The narrating “I” in Senselessness is a Salvadorian writer and journalist who undertakes the task of editing the final report on the genocide5 against the Indigenous people of an unnamed neighbouring Central American country. Employed by the Catholic Church and sitting in the archbishop’s office, the narrator has to sift through more than 1100 pages of testimonios that document the innumerable massacres perpetrated by the army. Soon after his arrival, he fears that he is not complete in the mind to have undertaken such a perilous task. As he progresses with the reading of the testimonios, his fear intensifies, and he is convinced that he is totally incomplete of the mind, like the victims whose narratives he reads. His fear finally becomes paranoiac, and he abandons the country without his completing the task at hand. Although the name of the country is never revealed in the novel, ample clues are provided for the reader to piece together that the country in question is Guatemala. The novel is replete with references to political leaders, such as Ríos Montt (the president of Guatemalan in the early 1980s, who was subsequently

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indicted for human rights violations and crimes against humanity) and Indigenous communities and languages of Guatemala. The novel problematises three issues relating to the production and reception of the testimonio: 1 2 3

the position of the mediator/compiler and the reader vis-à-vis the testimonio the relationship of the testimonio with other genres the representation of the subaltern

The position of the compiler/mediator is brought to the fore by using parody and irony as textual strategies. The narrator accepts the task of reconstructing the testimonios not from a position of solidarity but for monetary benefits. However, the reading of the testimonio produces an effect in him such that he reaches “the overwhelming conclusion that it was the entire population of this country that was not complete in the mind” (Kindle Locations 36–37), which in turn leads him to the conclusion that he too is not complete in the mind. Clearly, the description of extreme violence and brutality contained in the testimonios that he reads pushes him to the brink of madness and paranoia. The courage of testimonial subjects who survive the horror and tell their story contrasts with the cowardice of the narrator, who fails in the role of the committed intellectual or mediator. Through the process of editing, the narrator begins to identify more and more with the witnesses of the massacres, to such an extent that he imagines himself as the suffering ghost of the civil registrar in a town called Totonicapan, who would begin to narrate his story, always with the fingerless palms of his hands pressing together the two halves of his head to keep his brains in place, for I am not a total stranger to magical realism. (Kindle Locations 610–11) However, instead of empathising with the victims of senseless violence and torture and being moved to action, he privileges his desire to write fiction and fantasises about the possibilities of creating some sort of literary collage, by using the fragments that he has been obsessively noting down in a diary. Yet this identification is not quite complete; the narrator realises that he is only a “copyeditor” and can never quite identify with the souls of the witnesses, “my thoughts playing some kind of disorganized ping-pong game, if at the time I had been a novelist, needless to say, and not just a copyeditor of barbarous cruelties who dreamed of being what he was not” (Kindle Locations 617–18). The novelist/narrator believes that his obsessive thoughts are a result of an act of imagination, often overly fertile, so much so that he recognises in it something sick or macabre. On the other hand, his reading of the same testimonios as an editor or compiler of the report indicates a reliable and accurate compilation. As La Haije notes, “the distance between the narrator’s perspective and that of the indigenous population is never resolved, as the narrator continuously comes to himself, realizing that he is not the victim nor

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the perpetrator but a copyeditor” (3) pushed to the brink of madness by reading the testimonial accounts. Second, the writer problematises the relationship between the testimonio and other literary forms. The narrator is an autobiographical or autofictional self, though this is never made explicit. The literariness or the poetic quality of the testimonios moves him. He even compares the style employed in the testimonios with that of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo: “their intense figurative language and their curious syntactic constructions that reminded me of poets like the Peruvian César Vallejo, and I proceeded to read, now with more resolve” (Kindle Location 212–13). While the content of what he reads does not move him to a proactive position of empathy, the lyrical quality of the text makes an impression on him, as is evident in the following passage: intent on calmly relishing those sentences that seemed so astonishing from a literary point of view, . . . sentences I could, with luck, later use in some kind of literary collage, but which surprised me above all for their use of repetition and of adverbs, such as this one that said, What I think is that I think. . . . Wow. And this one, So much suffering we have suffered so much with them: . . . its musicality perplexed me when I first read it, its poetic quality too high not to suspect that it came from some great poet rather than from a very old indigenous woman who with this verse had brought to an end her wrenching testimony, which wasn’t the point at the moment. (Kindle Locations 316–20) He often imagines the plot of his future novel, “a story of suspense and adventure” (Kindle Locations 616–18), but simultaneously recognises the self-centredness and frivolity associated with such an endeavour, “because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples” (Kindle Locations 621–22). The testimonios that he reads relate unimaginable atrocities, but he even imagines himself in the role of the aggressor. He confesses that it was almost as if his “transformation into the lieutenant who exploded the heads of newborn babies against beams had been a catharsis, freeing me from the pain accumulated over the one thousand one hundred pages,” (Kindle Locations 1233–35), and it is only “the splattering of palpitating brains” (Kindle Locations 1230–31) that brings him back to his senses. This split between the experiencing and the narrating selves is further highlighted by the chasm between the two. In fact, the simple yet poetic words of the Indigenous witness quoted in the text starkly contrast with the verbose style of the narrator and set the two apart. Moreover, the narrator’s views on the lyrical quality of the testimonios also contrast with those of others, including those of the bishop, who stares at him in stupefaction: an indecipherable look in his eyes behind his glasses with tinted lenses and tortoise-shell frames, a look that made me afraid he might see me as a deluded

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literati seeking poetry where there were only brutal denunciations of crimes against humanity carried out by the army against the indigenous communities of his country, that he would think that I was a simple stylist who wasn’t paying any attention to the content of the report, so I abstained from reading any further sentences and instead began to talk about the structure and the table of contents, the psycho-social focus and the classification of the mental afflictions of the victims. (Kindle Locations 574–80) The reaction of his interlocutor – which is quite the same as the other people he knows and meets during his stay – brings into perspective the relationship between the form and the content of the testimonios and reflects on the authenticity debate that surrounded subaltern narratives, particularly the testimonio. In a sense, the novelist and the reader of Senselessness enter into a reading/writing task that is similar to that entrusted to the narrator of the novel. Agreeing with Henagar, all three reading/writing subjects arguably grapple with “how best to engage with marginalized voices and with foreignness or otherness in the texts being read, fictionalized, edited, and/or critiqued” (68). Finally, the politics of representation is emphasised by the narrator’s acerbic comment on the supposed broad-mindedness and humanitarianism of the Spanish royal family. The “Indian woman,” for them, is but a “noble savage” and the Europeans the magnanimous and benevolent colonisers who not only welcomed the aforementioned indigenous woman with their most exalted protocols but also had their pictures taken with her and allowed those pictures to be published in nothing less than the magazine Hola!; a short round chubby indigenous woman surrounded by kings, princes, marquises, and counts, just like in a fairy tale, I said in the same stumbling tone of voice; an indigenous woman whom none of the white, and so-called respectable, families in this country where we were now drinking coffee would have welcomed through the kitchen door unless she were delivering tortillas, that same indigenous woman who had won the most prestigious international prizes was the only citizen of this country to have appeared in Hola! surrounded by European royalty, a truly impressive occurrence  .  .  . to have appeared in Hola! was the highest honor a famous person could aspire to and something this country’s arrogant white masters would never forgive the chubby lady for because there was not then and never would be any chance of them ever appearing in those prestigious pages. (Kindle Locations 784–93) This ironic representation of the subaltern subject, clearly none other than Rigoberta Menchú, points to how the space for enunciation and active agency for transformation can be denied to a subaltern subject. The suggestion that her international “prestige” comes from the benevolence of the erstwhile-colonial masters

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or Western democracies is rather ironic. More ironic is that this happens through her photos’ appearing in the extremely popular Spanish tabloid magazine Hola!, which specialises in gossip about the lives of the rich and famous. This resonates with the sentiment expressed by Menchú in Crossing Borders when she refers to Western perceptions of subalterns in general and in particular of her representation as “that illiterate indigenous woman, that subversive born in squalor” (191) and with how she continues to be “the domestic servant” (191) in the eyes of the mestizos in Guatemala City. Castellanos Moya’s text has been characterised as “post-testimonial” (Sánchez Prado 79) and “meta-testimonial” (Kokotovic 559). Regardless of its generic categories, what it reveals is the struggle to find ways to reveal suppressed histories and recover the memory, individual as well as collective, of subaltern subjects. Although Castellanos Moya’s text has been read as a parody of the testimonio, the use of the REMHI report as a central intertext in the novel (Ortiz Wallner and Mackenbach; Grinberg) is an attempt, albeit failed, to see the report (read: testimonio) as literature as “a means of lessening its impact as merely ‘fiction,’ rather than fact” (Weiser n.p.). The citations from “real documents” are ploys to reflect on the relevance of the testimonio. Rather than inverting the testimonio as suggested by Ignacio Sánchez Prado (82), novels like Senselessness use writing, fictional as well as nonfictional, to discuss the effects of what has been called “oblique violence” (qtd. by Ortiz Wallner and Mackenbach) on the people who have lived through such experiences. As Thakkar too argues, novels such as Senselessness can still be approached and read as testimonios because they share “the denunciatory and critical impulse of classical testimonio, if not their faith in the potential power of social struggle” (57). Such texts that problematise both the representability of trauma in the testimonio and its representation in fiction suggest that the testimonio survives in newer forms, forcing readers to confront moral and ethical dilemmas in reading practices. By using witnessing as a trope, plot, and mise en scène, where the “witness” is the novelist, the character, and the reader, Senslessness proposes a new approach to understanding the production and reception of testimonios. Castellanos Moya uses extracts of testimonios to produce a literary text that combines the literary and aesthetic properties of both testimonio and fiction, to produce both affect and action (Whitlock 197). Approaching these narratives as mere works of fiction could lead to overlooking their referential dimensions, because they use discursive elements from journalism or historical narrative, and attempts to read them as mere testimonios subject to verification would wilfully obscure their literary aspects (148). Our engagement with the debates that emerged amid the controversy over the truth and authenticity of Menchú’s testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú, her second book, Crossing Borders, and the meta-testimonial gestures seen in contemporary fictional texts suggests that the testimonial moment did not pass and is not over. Testimonios will continue to be produced in Latin America and in other parts of the world as long as situations of emergency or those that warrant its production and reading remain. Nearly 50 years have passed since the testimonio as a genre

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caught the imagination of scholars. The epistemic shifts in the fields of memory and autobiographical studies have helped in the evolution of testimonio criticism. Examples of contemporary fictional texts that revive the past with the intention to recall trauma and its aftereffects abound, and these pave the way for reimagining the role of testimonial narratives. Hence, the relevance of the testimonio remains because it not only continues to display the ability to destabilise hegemonic systems of our society but also forwards possible interpretations, literary or otherwise, to a genre that flaunts its hybridity and resists straitjacketing. This protean characteristic allows its proliferation and adaptation to other contexts. Lying at the edge of truth and falsehood or fact and fiction, testimonios also permit an understanding that connects them. Thus, approaching the testimonio or testimonial narratives from the narrow confines of historical truth or fact or ignoring its extraliterary referent would only trap it within the false binaries of truth and falsehood. Contemporary fiction offers ways out of these false dichotomies.

Notes 1 The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Menchú in 1992, along with the book’s inclusion in the Stanford University reading list, elicited huge controversy and attracted the wrath of neoconservative assaults on the grounds of its authenticity. Menchú was denounced as a liar. Arturo Arias has put together an edited volume to make meaning out of the testimonio in the wake of the accusations against Menchú, which not only impacted the course that the testimonio was to take but also generated debates over the place for multicultural literatures. 2 The testimonios written by leaders of national liberation movements, such as Omar Cabeza’s Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista (1985) and Roque Dalton’s Miguel Mármol (1982); those of victims of state repression in the countries of the Southern Cone, such as Carlos Liscano’s Truck of Fools (2004) and Jacobo Timmerman’s Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (1981); or those of other subaltern subjects, such as Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s Let me speak!: Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines (1978) offer different flavours. 3 See Arias (2001) for a discussion on the differences that arose between Menchú and Burgos over questions of authorship, copyright, and distortions of Menchú’s account narrated to Burgos and compiled by her in I, Rigoberta Menchú. 4 Other fictional texts that engage with the testimonio and its production include Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Human Matter (2009), Dante Liano’s El hombre de Montserrat (2005), and Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (1996). 5 The historical referent alluded to in Moya’s text is the report presented by the Archdiocese of Guatemala on April 24, 1998, titled Guatemala: Nunca más. Informe Proyecto de Recuperación de la memoria histórica (REMHI) (Guatemala: Never Again. Report of The Recovery of the Historical Memory Project). The brutal assassination of Bishop Juan Gerardi, coordinator of the Office of Human Rights of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, by the military two days after the release of the report points to the deemed power of the text to uncover suppressed histories and expose those who continued in power in Guatemala even after the supposed return to democracy.

Works cited Arias, Arturo. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. U of Minnesota P, 2001. ———. Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America. U of Minnesota P, 2007.

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Beverly, John. “The Margin at the Centre: On Testimonio.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 35 no. 1, 1989, pp.  11–28.  Project MUSE,  doi:10.1353/mfs.0.0923. Accessed 13 Jan. 2017. ———. “ ‘Through All Things Modern’: Second Thoughts on Testimonio.” Boundary 2, vol. 18, no. 2, 1991, pp. 1–21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/303277. Accessed 3 Feb. 2017. ———. Against Literature. U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. “The Real Thing.” The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg Gugelberger. Duke UP, 1997. ———. “Subalternidad y testimonio.” Nueva Sociedad, no. 238, March–April 2012, https:// nuso.org/articulo/en-dialogo-con-me-llamo-rigoberta-menchú-y-asi-me-nacio-laconciencia-de-elizabeth-burgos-con-rigoberta-menchú/. Accessed 13 May 2020. Castellanos Moya, Horacio. Senselessness. Translated by Katherine Silver. New Directions Paperbooks, 2008 (First published in Spanish as Insensatez. Tusquets, 2004). Cixous, Hélène, and Calle-Gruber, Mireille. Rootprints. Memory and Life Writing. Routledge, 1994. Craft, Linda J. Novels of Testimony and Resistance from Central America. U of Florida P, 1997. Denegri, Francesca. “Testimonio and its Discontents.” Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, edited by Stephen Hart and Richard Young. Routledge, 2014, pp. 228–38. DeRocher, Patricia. Transnational Testimonios: The Politics of Collective Knowledge Production. U of Washington P, 2018. Dorfman, Ariel. “Political Code and Literary Code.” Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction, translated by George Shivers and Ariel Dorfman. Kindle Books. Duke UP, 1991, pp. 133–96. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge, 1992. González, Aníbal. “Nuevísimos: Truth and Authenticity in Latin America’s New TwentyFirst-Century Literature.” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, vol. 51, no. 1, 2018, pp. 3–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2018.1485280. Accessed 31 May 2019. Grinberg, Valeria. “Memoria, trauma y escritura en la posguerra centroamericana: Una lectura de Insensatez de Horacio Castellanos Moya.” Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos, no. 15, 2007. Gugelberger, Georg M., editor. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Duke UP, 1997. ———. “Remembering: The Post-Testimonio Memoirs of Rigoberta Menchú Tum.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 25, no. 6, Nov. 1998, pp. 62–68. Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature. Methuen, 1987. Henager, Eric. “Fenced-in Readings: Testimonio and Post-Conflict Narrative from Criticism to the U.S. Classroom.” Hispanic Studies Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 2019, pp.  66–79, https://hispanicstudiesreview.cofc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/HSR-V4-N1Henager-Eric.pdf. Accessed 31 May 2019. Horowitz, David. I, Rigoberta Menchú, Liar, 26 Sept. 1999, www.frontmag.com. Accessed 10 Sept. 2008. Kokotovic, Misha. “Testimonio Once Removed: Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 43, no. 3, 2009, pp. 545–62. La Haije, Marileen. “Narration and Madness: Schizophrenia, Paranoia and Autofiction in Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El material humano and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez.” The Free Library, University of Northern Colorado, 2017, www.thefreelibrary. com/Narration+and+madness%3a+schizophrenia%2c+paranoia+and+autofiction +in . . . -a0495830483. Accessed 31 May 2019.

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Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. “Founding Statement.” Boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 3, 1993, 110–21. Menchú Tum, Rigoberta. Rigoberta: La nieta de los mayas. With the Collaboration of Dante Liano and Gianni Mina. Aguilar, 1998a. ———. Crossing Borders. Translated by Ann Wright. Verso, 1998b. Menchú Tum, Rigoberta, and Elizabeth Burgos-Debray. I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Translated by Ann Wright. Verso, 1984. Nance, Kimberly A. Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio. Vanderbilt UP, 2006. Ortiz Wallner, Alexandra, and Werner Mackenbach. “(De)formaciones: Violencia y narrativa en Centroamérica.” Iberoamericana (2001): Nueva época, Año 8, no. 32, Dec. 2008, pp.  81–97, www.iai.spk-berlin.de/fileadmin/dokumentenbibliothek/Iberoamericana/ 2008/Nr_32/32_Mackenbach_y_Ortiz.pdf. Accessed 3 June 2016. Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios. Zubaan, 2015. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. “La ficción y el momento de peligro: Insensatez de Horacio Castellanos Moya.” Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Humanísticos y Literatura, vol. 14, 2010, pp. 79–86. Thakkar, Upasana. Reading Testimonio Today: Central American Literature from 1982 to the Present. U of British Columbia P, 2019. Urbina, Nicasio. “Las memorias y las autobiografías como bienes culturales de consumo.” Istmo, 2004, http://istmo.denison.edu/n08/articulos/memorias.html. Accessed 3 June 2016. Weiser, Frans. “Present-ing the Past: The Historicized Turn in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness.” Otherness: Essays and Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, August 2011, www.otherness. dk/fileadmin/www.othernessandthearts.org/Publications/Journal_Otherness/Other ness__Essays_and_Studies_2.1/2.Frans_Weiser.pdf. Accessed 3 June 2016. Whitlock, Gillian. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford UP, 2015. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991, pp. 15–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2633737. Accessed 3 Feb. 2007. Zimmerman, Marc. “Rigoberta Menchú, David Stoll, narrativa subalterna y la verdad testimonial: Una perspectiva personal.” Istmo Revista Virtual de Estudios Literarios y Culturales Centroamericanos, no. 8, 2004, http://collaborations.denison.edu/istmo/n08/articulos/ rigoberta.html. Accessed 3 Feb. 2007.

11 THE SMALL VOICE OF HISTORY Revisiting Biography of a Runaway Slave Sonya Surabhi Gupta1

Thought is not an instrument you apply to a content. The content moves, develops, changes, and creates new categories of thought, and gives them direction. (C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics 15)

In Aníbal Quijano’s influential conceptualisation of “coloniality of power,” the Peruvian sociologist drew attention to the fact that race is a mental category of modernity. Produced at the beginning of the conquest of the Americas and of the formative stages of capitalism, colonial domination imposed the idea of race as a codification of difference that allowed for a racial division of labour. The idea of race was then employed to grant legitimacy to the relations of domination, and with the worldwide expansion of European colonialism, it structured the world and constructed subjectivities on the naturalness of inferior beings and superior beings. While initially the idea of race and racial identities referred to the phenotypic differences between Indigenous peoples, Black people, and mestizos on one hand and Spanish and Portuguese conquerors on the other, it soon got codified as colour (2000). With the Atlantic slave trade, the first dominated people to whom the future Europeans applied the idea of “colour” were the slaves kidnapped and traded from the shores of what later came to be known as Africa (Quijano, “Questioning ‘Race’ ”). While this racial taxonomy created the negro and indio as different categories, the labour of both was used for colonial production, “under the white supremacist will to power” (Branche 2). Given the centrality of the idea of race in the recent epistemic shifts that have brought the Latin American region into the forefront of original visions and conceptualisations for an emancipatory future, any discussion on Latin American subalternity needs to take into account, apart from the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the African element that arrived with the slave trade and the

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Afro-Hispanic experience of racialised colonialism. The Dalit experience of untouchability has been compared with that of racial oppression, and several Dalit writers in India have drawn inspiration from Black American literature. “Dalit writers’ caste and Black writers’ colour shape their distinct experience,” asserted Sharankumar Limbale (93). Critical studies on the parallel experiences of racial marginalisation in the United States and the caste-based discrimination of Dalits in India as expressed in their autobiographies (Pandey; Limbale) as well as on the linkages between the Black American and South Asian struggles against racial segregation and untouchability (Slate) are based on the recognition of race and caste as markers of a stigmatised identity and underline that these struggles against discriminatory practices have borrowed from each other’s methods and idioms of resistance. The Latin American racial experience of Indigenous or Afro-descendant people has been almost absent from such a critical comparative framework. This chapter revisits one of the founding texts of the genre of Latin American testimonio, Biografía de un cimarrón (1966; Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1994), the story of a 106-year-old former slave, Esteban Montejo, narrated by him to Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet, who transcribed and compiled it. A  result of three years of collaboration and tape-recorded conversations between Barnet and Montejo just a few years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, this “documentary novel” has been recognised to be of singular importance because it has conserved for posterity the experiential account of one of the last surviving witnesses of slavery in the Caribbean. Its importance lies in its not only offering a literary portrayal of Montejo’s life as a cimarrón, a runaway slave but also chronicling epochal events of the history of the island, such as the institution of slavery and its racialised regimen, and its abolition in Cuba in 1886, Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spanish colonialism with the resultant occupation of the island by US troops, offering a vision quite different from the dominant one. Slave autobiographies and narratives are not abundant in Latin America and the Caribbean.2 Published around the same time as Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude), and Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1965/66), Biography of a Runaway Slave has had an enormous international reception and close to 70 editions and translations into more than 15 languages, and it has inspired documentaries and musicals. Revisiting this text as a subaltern narrative, deriving insights from the discussions around Dalit life narratives regarding the form and purpose of the genre, its diversity and richness, provides a vantage point from which to hear the suppressed voices in postcolonial literatures. In the first section, I begin by historicising the trope of the rebel slave through Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essay “Caliban” and then establishing the affinity of this concept metaphor with the charge of resistance in the term Dalit, taking race and caste as analogous systems of oppression. The second section offers a reading of the text as a subaltern narrative, or the “small voice of history” that enjoins us to give ear unto the narrative of Caliban/Montejo against dominant

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historiography. The concluding section then underlines the generic liminality of this text, which straddles the historical, the sociocultural and ethnographic, and the literary, demanding a counter-aesthetics beyond questions of form and content, and it argues that the African slave can have no nostalgia of lost origins, but the performance of the role of Caliban may be the field of resistance, and that is replete with new possibilities of an emancipatory universality.

The trope of the rebel slave as a decolonised emancipatory symbol There is an impressive trajectory of Black historiography on the opprobrious institution of slavery fostered by the Europeans in the New World between the 16th and the 19th centuries. In one of the earliest studies in this line, Trinidadian historian Eric Williams, in his classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944), had demonstrated how the triangular trade was crucial in the first phase of the formation of world capitalism. Slave labour in the plantations gave a fillip to intercontinental trade, which in turn led to the development of a whole set of processing industries such as sugar refining, fisheries, and textiles, and even insurance and banking, transforming British seaport towns into prosperous commercial centres, such that in Liverpool, Glasgow, and Bristol, “there is not a brick in the city but what is cemented with the blood of a slave” (Williams 61). The “human body . . . was the first machine invented by capitalism,” says Sylvia Federici (146). From the 17th century onwards, particularly in the Caribbean, African slaves became the most exploited group because the major part of economy was driven by their labour in the absence of the Indigenous peoples in those parts (Quijano, “Coloniality” 534). The history of resistance to colonialism is as long as colonialism itself. This long history of anticolonial uprisings that erupted all over the continent at different times and places is replete with numerous slave rebellions, the first one happening as early as 1521 in Hispaniola, and with instances of collaboration between the subordinated indios and negros and the support that the latter, particularly the runaway slaves, or the maroons, gave to Indigenous rebellions (Branche 3–4). The trope of the rebel slave has thus been a powerful subaltern symbol in the entire Caribbean, and took on a particular charge in the Cuban aesthetic project after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. In Roberto Fernández Retamar’s seminal essay “Caliban: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America” (1971), the well-known Cuban poet and essayist traced the literary origins of Caliban, beginning from Columbus’s logs, where the carib became the cannibal, and then through Montaigne and Shakespeare, in whose The Tempest (1612) the figure of the rude savage assumed the distinctive vision of the anthropological Other as a monstrous slave. In presenting a history of representation of the deformed Caliban through the Caribbean reworkings of the Shakespearean drama, Retamar’s concern is the cultural predicament of postcolonial societies in the context of postindependence debates in Latin America as to what ought to be the model for the Latin American intellectual of the new republics.

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Although throughout the 19th century, racialist ideology permeated the nationbuilding discourse in Latin America as a constant subtext, as is evident in the civilisation and barbarism debate, in Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó’s turn-of-thecentury anticolonial essay “Ariel” (1900), he had placed his belief in enlightened Americas, whose symbol for him was Shakespeare’s “spirit of the air.” If for Rubén Darío, in 1898, Caliban was the materialist neighbour of the north, Fernández Retamar, a post-1959 Cuban intellectual, posited the deformed slave to refer to a decolonised emancipatory identity. In Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993, Edward Said discussed Retamar’s essay quite aptly in a chapter titled “Resistance and Opposition.” Said set the Ariel–Caliban debate as a response to the question “How does a culture seeking to become independent of imperialism imagine its own past?” (214). The chapter discusses cultural decolonisation in its various aspects and implications, and Said rightly reads “Caliban” as addressing a process of decolonisation that has to be undergone after the achievement of formal independence as a nation (212–14). Retamar’s move has to be seen in the context of the fact that after independence, the model on which the new republics were fashioned in Latin America has been that of an exclusionary colonial republican state that upholds criollo/mestizo superiority. Quijano’s conceptualisation of coloniality of power highlights precisely this afterlife of colonialism beyond its historical duration. Retamar’s “Caliban” not only challenges this coloniality of power but also goes a step beyond by proposing the racialised subaltern Other as the symbol for Caribbean/Latin American identity in the tradition of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, or Aime Cesare’s Discourse on Colonialism – that is, from a standpoint of resistance to colonialism and coloniality of power. The term Dalit carries in itself this charge of resistance. Introduced by B.R. Ambedkar during the 1920s and popularised by the Dalit Panthers (a group of radical Dalit writers, poets, and intellectuals who drew inspiration from the Black Panthers) in the 1970s, it is, in the conception of Baburao Bagul, one of the Panthers, not a mere linguistic construction but historically constituted “as a revolutionary category for its hermeneutic ability to recover the emancipatory potential of the historical past of Dalit culture,” the culture of those placed at the bottom or outside of the caste hierarchy in Hinduism (qtd. in Guru). Literally, the term Dalit means “crushed, broken or ground down,” by those above them in the social hierarchy and by the intense labour that their bodies are subjected to. Miguel Barnet’s mentor, Fernando Ortiz, described this condition of “mutilation and social amputation,” with regard to the African slaves in the sugar plantations of Cuba: “deracinated, wounded, shattered, like the cane of the fields, and like it they were ground and crushed to extract the juice of their labour” (101– 2). Both “Dalit” and “Caliban” are thus not names but contestatory denominations that invoke a history of subjection to two infamous institutions of oppression and of resistance and resilience to them. If in “Caliban” Roberto Fernández Retamar’s concept metaphor represents the decolonised Latin American and Caribbean subaltern identity in the persona of the rebel slave, then Dalit is a loaded term referring to the resistance by the so-called Untouchables to caste oppression in the caste Hindu society in India.

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The juxtaposition of the two terms is not gratuitous. Race and caste have been seen as “comparable systems of oppression” (Reddy 545). The term caste, it would be apt to recall, owes its coinage to the Portuguese, when upon their arrival on the South West coast of India in 1498, they used the denomination of caste (from Portuguese casta) to refer to the endogamous social formations in India called jāti. These were the times when after the expulsion of Jews and Moors from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, the doctrine of “purity of blood” was invoked to create a hierarchy placing the old Christians, the “pure” ones, above the newly converted Jews and Muslims who had stayed back in the peninsula. Thus, the term casta, and castizo, meaning “pure,” became closely tied to the division of humans on the basis of descent. This emerging racism would be profitably applied in the Americas after 1492 to create a sistema de castas – that is, a caste system based on ethnic and social stratification by biological ancestry – which was nothing but a racialised regimen figuring the Indigenous peoples and the Africans brought from the transatlantic slave trade as naturally inferior beings in order to justify the exploitation of their labour, as mentioned earlier. Thus, when the Portuguese encountered the Indian jāti normative endogamous groups, who had their own ideas of purity and contamination by bodily touch, they used the term caste, which designated the European notion of racial purity to refer to these social hierarchies. In this way, caste and caste system (casta and sistema de castas), terms used by the Iberians to create a racialised regimen in Amerindia, were passed on to India also and thereon absorbed by the later Western colonisers, including the British, who borrowed it into the English language. While the European colonisers did not bring the caste system to India, which already had its hierarchical stratification in jati communities and an ancient varna system of four categories drawn from Brahmanic texts, the term has endured (Guha, Beyond Caste 19–25). Unlike race, which is an invention of modernity/coloniality, caste predates colonial rule in India. Dalit scholars have been pointing out that colonial modernity, in fact, opened up avenues of social mobility for the Untouchable castes through access to education and entry into the rights discourse denied to them by caste Hindus. However, caste was transformed in a significant way by colonial policies. In the name of following “native tradition,” the British disenfranchised the Dalits of their lands and commons to use their labour in accordance with the ancient division of the caste system in collusion with the caste Hindus in several instances (Hans 147; Prashad 137–38). Prashad, and this is supremely relevant to our study, points to the production of knowledge on India by the East India Company and its connections to the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791 in the use of “raciology as a means to justify the brutal control over labour with dark skin” (137). In Abbe Dubois’s influential text, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, which was purchased and published by the East India Company, Dubois, who came to Pondicherry in the south of India in 1792, fleeing the French Revolution with the Missions Ètrangères, writes, “I am persuaded that it is simply and solely due to the distribution of the people into castes that India did not lapse into a state of barbarism.” He adds, on the Pariahs and Parayars, the Untouchable castes of Tamil Nadu: “a nation of Pariahs left to themselves would speedily become worse

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than the hordes of cannibals who wander in the vast waste of Africa” (qtd. in Prashad 138, emphasis mine). “The notion of race,” Prashad concludes, “was at the foundation of the reconstruction of caste in modern times” (139). The Caliban/cannibal identity imposed on the basis of race was also the foundation of global capitalism, which is why Sylvia Federici, in her classic work, argues that Caliban represents not only the anti-colonial rebel whose struggle still resonates in contemporary Caribbean literature, but is a symbol for the world proletariat and, more specifically, for the proletarian body as a terrain and instrument of resistance to the logic of capitalism. (11) Mignolo, thus sees in the figure of the runaway slave the “unmistakable energy of liberation,” whereby the plantation “could be a metaphor for ‘modernity/coloniality’ and Marronage a singular form of delinking” (6).

The speaking subject of Runaway Slave: the voice of Caliban This section reads Esteban Montejo and Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave in the framework of such a history of resistance. This text is a part as much of the literature of the African diaspora as it is of the Latin American testimonio, which developed as a potent narrative form that privileged the voice of subaltern subjects and posited them as agents capable of creating knowledge out of subaltern experience and out of their “silent memory” (Racine and Racine 311). Testimonio contains what Edward Said in another context has referred to as “repressed or resistant history” (“Orientalism Reconsidered” 94). Such “repressed history” and “silent memory” unveil themselves at moments when hegemonic structures are challenged. In Barbara Harlowe’s words, Just as institutions of power (whether those developed within a society or political order or those inspired by external hegemonic practices and domination) are subverted by the demand on the part of the dispossessed groups for an access to history, power, and resources, so too are the narrative paradigms and their textual authority transformed by the historical and literary articulation of those demands. (122) Commenting on the impetus given by the Cuban Revolution to testimonio, Miguel Barnet wrote that The lessons of Latin American history in the 1960s give a devastating impulse to works of testimony. I believe the Cuban Revolution, with its powerful

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organic influence, provided all the literature of this type that developed in the Americas with a rejuvenating nutrient. (203) Although the Boom novel too is associated with the Cuban Revolution’s call for a revolutionary artistic vanguard, the testimonio has been seen as a “rebuke to the Boom’s fetish of vanguardism and its disdain for the popular” (Colás 391). In one of Beverly’s definitions, he defines testimonio as a petit récit: “As the voice of a singular subject, testimonio was almost by definition a petit récit, or in Ranajit Guha’s phrase, ‘the small voice of history’ ” (Testimonio xii). The apparatus of historiography is designed for big events and institutions, Guha tells us in “Chandra’s death,” and historical scholarship “tends to ignore the small drama and fine detail of social existence, especially at its lower depths” (274). The historian is responsible for cultivating the disposition to hear the myriad voices, because “a re-writing that heeds the small voice of history will put the question of agency and instrumentality back into the narrative” (316). This is what Barnet did as a young ethnologist: He listened. He listened and conversed with Esteban Montejo for three years, and the result was this dense and rich narrative in which the voice of the solitary, pensive slave acquires the weight of an agent of history who has risen from the debris of the past to tell his story. Runaway Slave is “the small voice of history,” the voice of Caliban recounting the memory of slavery and his flight from it in a captivating text with a mythic and epic quality. That Miguel Barnet is not just an ethnographer but also a poet and novelist also helped. Runaway Slave at the same time as it is a valuable social and historical document is also a literary masterpiece. Some critics (Sklodowska 92) consider Fidel Castro to have acted as an inspirational force to testimonio compilers such as Barnet when in his famous “Words to the Intellectuals” speech in 1961 he asked writers and intellectuals to be participants in the revolution. At the end of this speech, he recalled his encounter with an old female former slave in whom he saw a repository of knowledge that had to be tapped for the revolution to be able to make the cultural transformation.3 Indeed, as Peter Hulme has underscored, A radical history presenting a new version of the past will usually draw on new sources, even though those sources might well be “new” only in the sense that the dominant version had repressed them by never even considering them as sources. (8) The racial question was central to the Cuban revolutionary project, and soon after the triumph of the revolution, Cuban historians and social scientists such as Manuel  Moreno  Fraginals, Juan  Perez de la  Riva, Pedro  Deschamps  Chapeaux, and others began directing their energies through archival and ethnographic work towards putting together “the history of the people without history.” In the

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introduction to the first edition of Runaway Slave, published in 1966 by the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, Barnet tells us that the project grew out of a newspaper article that appeared in 1963 about a nursing home honouring its centenarian residents, including some former slaves. Barnet was then, as a young ethnologist, researching Afro-Cuban religions, so he visited the nursing home, and there he met Esteban Montejo, who was then 103 years old (b. 1860). Barnet’s aim was to reconstruct historical information on the subject of slavery in order to fill a void in the history of Cuba. In other words, writing or rewriting history was an important component of Barnet’s project, which has since been seen as a corrective to ethnographic life histories such as those of Oscar Lewis and his representation of subaltern Latin Americans as bearers of a “culture of poverty” (Gugelberger and Kearny 12) and, more recently, also as a testimonio of the war of 1898 from a subaltern vantage point (Saldívar). In the afterword, titled “The Alchemy of Memory,” which was appended to the 1994 English translation of this testimonio, Barnet writes, I aspire to be a sounding board for the collective memory of my country. . . . The only desire I have is to reveal the . . . heart of the men that traditional historiography has marked with the sign of a proverbial fatalism by writing them off as people without a history.” He adds that the life of men of the so-called culture of poverty as defined by Oscar Lewis, doesn’t always lack the will to exist, or lack a consciousness of history. And even when such a life is anchored in a sense of marginality, the flame of that life glows towards the future. (205–6) This flame of life kindles the entire narration in Runaway Slave and brings out “the hidden gesture” and “the quiet rumble” that is lost behind “the invisible walls of history” (203). Although Montejo was born in 1860, he was witness to slave life in that after the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the sugarcrats moved their business to Cuba, which became a major exporter of sugar and a major centre for the slave trade as thousands of slaves were trafficked across to Cuba till the abolition in 1886. “For me, none of that is forgotten. I lived through it all,” asserts Montejo, early in the narration (18). Montejo’s parents must have been from among them because he mentions that his mother was of French origin, though he never met his parents: “Blacks were sold like piglets, they sold me right off” (19). Young still, he made an attempt to escape from the plantation of Flor de Sagua but was caught. As Montejo recalls, I rebelled, by God, and I ran away. Who wanted to work! But they caught me like a little lamb, and they put some shackles on me that I can still feel if

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I really think about it. They tied them on me tight and put me to work and all that. You talk about this kind of a thing now and folks don’t believe you. But I experienced it, and now I’ve got to talk about it. (20) “Yo vide” – I  saw, I  experienced it, I’ve got to talk about it  – the need to rememorise the harsh slave conditions and the violence inflicted on Montejo’s persona or on others as witnessed by him is palpable throughout the narration. In the classic work The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy says that Black autobiography “becomes an act or process of simultaneous self-creation and self-emancipation” (69). In the case of Runaway Slave, reliving through language the life in the barracoons, the back-breaking labour in the sugar mills or cutting the cane in the plantations, and the violence (men being tied to the stocks and locked up for two to three months, pregnant women whipped without damaging the babies, who were needed in abundance) are part of the self-creation of Montejo’s identity as a rebel subject who refuses to accept the life of a slave and escapes to the mountains: “It was better to be alone, on the loose, than in that corral with all the slime and rot” (40). However, the subjecthood is not constructed as a narrative of trauma or victimhood, even though these are inescapable parts of his experience. Montejo assumes the identity of a rebel slave as an ontological condition: “I was a cimarrón from birth” (22).4 Living alone in the woods after a successful attempt at escape, he says, “I felt good being a cimarrón. Because I was my own boss and I defended myself on my own” (52). Montejo’s account includes a joyful description of the social and cultural life in the barracoons: the music, the dance, the games they played after a hard day’s work, relations with women, and the difference in the lives of the house slaves and those of the ones who worked on the fields. Runaway Slave is also a storehouse of Afro-Cuban cultural and religious traditions in late-19thcentury Cuba, since the slaves continued to practise santeria and follow their own gods. On the special traditions of artistic expression that emerge from slave culture, Gilroy says that art, particularly in the form of music and dance, was offered to slaves as a substitute for the formal political freedoms they were denied under the plantation regimes. . . . In this severely restricted space, sacred or profane, art became the backbone of the slaves’ political culture and their cultural history. (56–57) In the second section of the narrative, Montejo gives an account of the decade that followed the abolition of slavery in Cuba and the first stirrings of the war of independence. Slaves were now free workers and laboured in the sugar mills, but abolition did little to change the race relations in colonial society: There were masters, or rather owners, who believed that blacks were made for locking up and whipping. So they treated them the same as before. To

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my mind many blacks didn’t realize things had changed because they kept on saying, “Your blessing, Master.” (62) Black women continued to be exploited, including by church priests, who, Montejo recounts, “converted the sacristy into a whorehouse” (80). The slaves who were free workers now continued to be doomed to a life of drudgery because they lacked the possibility of upwards social mobility given that Black people had no access to education, and even if they had, they were barred from taking up jobs: You never saw a black lawyer, because they said that blacks were only good for the forest. You never saw any black teacher. It was all for the white Spaniards. . . . And everything was like that. There was no freedom. That’s why the war was necessary. (155–56) There was a cognizance of the essentially racial nature of colonialism and a growing realisation that Black people should participate in the Cuban War of Independence for their real freedom. The Cuban War of Independence lasted from 1895 to 1898. Montejo joined it in December 1895 and recounts the heroic participation of African Black people alongside the criollos: Whenever I see one of those blacks in my memory, I see him fighting. . . . they just fought. . . . When someone asked them how they felt, they would say, “Cuba libre, Me’s a liberator.” Not a one wanted to continue under the Spanish rule. Not a one wanted to see himself in shackles again or eating beef jerky or cutting cane at dawn. (153) The third section of Montejo’s narrative chronicles the Cuban War of Independence. Its importance lies in the fact that it is a subaltern account of the war and highlights the role of the Black community of former slaves, a role that was fundamental in ending the Spanish colonial rule and that is absent from mainstream historical accounts of the war. Black people fought as full subjects: “We Cubans acquitted ourselves well,” remembers Montejo with pride (162). The former slaves fought bravely with machetes, and the fearful Spaniards, many of them young soldiers, bestialised them by calling them mambises, mambi meaning the child of a monkey crossed with a buzzard: “It was a taunting phrase, but we used it to cut off their heads,” Montejo recalls (163). As is known, the Cubans had almost won the war when the US intervened in 1898 in what came to be known as the Spanish– US War. Disrupting mainstream historical accounts, which give centrality to the role of the US, Montejo reminds us that “the story of the [US] intervention in Santiago de Cuba was poppycock. . . . they couldn’t have taken the town by themselves” (196). The US intervention in the Spanish Cuban War of 1898, and the

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Platt Amendment thereafter, turned Cuba into its protectorate, where US troops remained in occupation until 1902. The US intervention, for Montejo, actually institutionalised ethno-racial segregation: Not even one percent of the police force were blacks because the Americans claimed that when a black gets power, when he’s educated, it hurts the white race. So then they separated the blacks completely. White Cubans kept quiet, they didn’t do a thing, and that’s how it was until nowadays (195) In an insightful essay, “Looking Awry at the War of 1898: Theodore Roosevelt versus Miguel Barnet and Esteban Montejo,” expressly employing the epistemic experiences of the South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies, José David Saldívar contrasts Roosevelt’s account of the 1898 Spanish–US War in The Rough Riders with Montejo’s subaltern testimonio and shows how Roosevelt’s “boastful, nationalist, and narcissistic” account is undergirded by racial overtones in his treatment of his own Afro-American troops and in how his account erases the role of the Cuban liberation army, 60 percent of whom was made up of mambises. Montejo’s testimonio disrupts this white supremacist mainstream history and proffers a valuable subaltern account as the small voice of history.

Some final considerations Runaway Slave is a hybrid work that is at once documentary novel, history, ethnology, and reportage. Although it has also been considered as forming part of the slave narrative tradition, it is different from usual slave narratives in its structure and form and most of all in the shaping of the autobiographical subject. Miguel Barnet called it “novela testimonial”, and it stands indisputably as one of the originators of the genre of testimonio. One of the most discussed aspects of the genre has been its relation to literature, which is also a central point in the discussions around Dalit testimonios, and we should appropriately deal with this relation as we revisit Runaway Slave. While Runaway Slave is a corrective to mainstream history and ethnography, its singularity lies in its affective value. Barnet did not explicitly intend to write a “novela testimonial” – that is, a literary work; the book was first published by the Cuban Institute of Ethnology. However, the text acquired its aesthetic value from the experiential dimension of Montejo’s narrative and from the equilibrium that Barnet creates as the gestor, which is achieved not merely “with a microphone or the mistaken use of computers” but also by the ability “to hear the intonations and music of history, to hear the most guarded, introspective form of oral discourse . . . in order to achieve the real understanding of identity” (206), or in Guha’s words, by the historian’s ability of “bending closer to the ground” (138). For Barnet, language is the key to this strategy: “All lives are important but one has to know how to extract from them the tone of their universal resonance” (206). The historical, the sociocultural and ethnographic, and the literary

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are interwoven in the text, which is what gives it its rich, dense texture. Barnet says in the afterword, I am not a pure writer but something like the cross between a falcon and a tortoise. I have tried to bring together sociological-anthropological interests and the literary, convinced that they travel together in underground caverns, seeking each other out and nourishing each other in joyful reciprocity. (205) Fernández Retamar insisted that “we must avoid the aprioristic attempt to draw the lines of demarcation of our literature” (85, emphasis original). He argued that the main line of Latin American literature, Cuban literature in particular, is a mulatto, a hybrid, whereas the purist, the strictly and narrowly “literary” one is marginal (86), such that a revision of the literary canon would reveal that the margin has been straining to be the centre in Latin American literature.5 The testimonio also does not erupt at the margin and suddenly occupy the centre, as the title of Beverly’s essay – “The Margin at the Center” – might seem to suggest. The institution of testimonio in the 1970s was thanks to the decolonised vantage point provided by the cultural politics of the Cuban Revolution and other Latin American revolutionary projects for national liberation. In one of the early theorisations on Dalit literature, Sharan Kumar Limbale, in Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, stressed the need for a separate Dalit aesthetic, pointing out that Dalit literature is a new literary stream of the post-independence period and differs in its form and purpose from Savarna Marathi literature and therefore cannot be appraised by using traditional aesthetics. The collective voice, the textual politics, and the identitarian and social revolutionary agenda demand a counter-literary theory and not a debate of form and content. As in the case of other mediated testimonios, the key question of the narrative relationship between Montejo, the slave narrator, and Barnet, the lettered editor-compiler has occasioned much discussion. Who controls the discourse? Who shapes memory? Who is the agent creating knowledge? Whose voice is it finally? Some critics have looked at this question from the criteria of power, hierarchy, and manipulation of memory by the transcriber (Luis). Roberto González Echevarría, in an important essay on Runaway Slave and the novel of the Cuban Revolution has commented extensively on the Montejo/Barnet narrative relationship, arguing that the figures of Montejo and Barnet re-enact the original novelistic dialogue between Dante and Virgil, Celestina and Calixto, Lazarillo and Vuestra Merced, between Cervantes and his friend in the 1605 prologue, between Don Quixote and Sancho. The question of voice is an important one, and it makes us go back to Retamar’s “Caliban.” Barnet and Montejo actually re-enact the roles of Ariel and Caliban. Ariel, as interpreted by Retamar, is the intellectual from the same island as Caliban. He has the choice to serve Prospero or ally himself with Caliban in his struggle for true freedom. Even within the Caliban paradigm, Said saw two contrasting but, in the end, mutually reinforcing models – that of a Caliban who

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acknowledges “his mongrel past but (is) not disabled for future development” (Culture and Imperialism 214) and of a Caliban who desires a return to the precolonial past, which is a nativist position. Retamar’s Caliban is unquestionably the former rather than the latter. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak briefly discusses Retamar’s “Caliban.” She reads it as having more elements of a nativist position that is “driven by a nostalgia for lost origins” (118). “The stagings of Caliban work alongside the narrativization of history: claiming to be Caliban legitimises the very individualism that we must persistently attempt to undermine from within” (118). Retamar’s construction of Caliban as a metaphor for a transculturated hybridity, as Said also recognises, can be seen precisely as opposing the “individualism” that Spivak points out. The African slave, uprooted from their culture and geography, cannot go back to their roots but has only the promise of a new universal identity, which cannot be the false universalism of a Europeanised white Ariel but a Caliban seeking their place as an equal in a new universality. In the challenging new formulation of Caliban, Retamar is able to show up the inherent instability of these seemingly stable, cohesive categories. Although Caliban was represented as a deformed rude savage, by beginning to think and feel like him, by assuming the identity of Caliban and not Ariel as the symbol of Latin American/Cuban identity, Retamar was also pointing out that the battle of culture is a political battle and is one of signification: This is the dialectic of Caliban. To offend us they call us mambí, they call us black, but we reclaim as a mark of glory the honour of considering ourselves descendants of mambí, descendants of the rebel, runaway, independista black – never the descendants of the slave holder. (16) The implication of its key insight – that the performance of the role of Caliban may be the field of resistance  – is replete with new possibilities of an enabling politics. Replace the Mambí with the Bhangi, Chamar, Chuhra, and Mahar, whose stories of discrimination, self-assertion, and rebellion the Dalit autobiographies tell, and a similar dialectic unfolds in the context of the Dalit writer, the reader, and the literary critic. More than 50 years later, in the face of systemic racism (and systemic casteism), Esteban Montejo’s testimony reminds us of the possibility of and the need for an emancipatory universality.

Notes 1 Some ideas in this chapter were derived from my earlier essay “Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave: Revisiting Testimonio from a Dalit-Caliban Vantage Point.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 46, 2008–2009, pp. 87–108. 2 This owes to the fact that slavery continued in Cuba and Brazil, the two major centres of slave trade in Latin America, till much after its abolition elsewhere. Juan Francisco Manzano (1797–1854) wrote the brief Autobiografía (1835), which is the only known Afro-Cuban slave narrative of the 19th century. It appeared first in an English translation,

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though not under his name, and the original was published in 1937, nearly 100 years after it was written. After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, given the renewed interest in Afro-Cuban heritage, the Cuban Book Institute published an edition in 1972. 3 Fidel’s speech is part of the rich debates that took place after the Cuban Revolution on questions of culture, art, and aesthetics and on the role of the intellectual. For Fidel’s role in the Cuban revolutionary cultural project, see Gupta. 4 The Spanish word cimarrón (“maroon” in English) has an Amerindian origin. José Arrom tells us that it starts appearing in chronicles and letters as early as the 1530s and comes from the Arawak term símaran, which means to shoot like an arrow or like an arrow shot into the forest. It refers to the fugitives who escaped from slavery in the plantations or from the encomienda. 5 This is from an essay titled “Some Theoretical Problems of Spanish American Literature,” included in the English edition of the essay “Caliban.”

Works cited Arrom, José. “Cimarrón: Apuntes sobre sus primeras documentaciones y su probable origen (Cimarrón: Notes on Its First Documentations and Its Probable Origin).” Revista Española de Antropología Americana, vol. XIII, 1983, pp. 47–57. Barnet, Miguel, and Esteban Montejo. Biography of a Runaway Slave. Translated by W. Nick Hill. Curbstone Press, 1994 (First appeared as Biografía de un cimarrón. Academia de Ciencias de Cuba, Instituto de Etnología y Folklore, 1966). Beverly, John. “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio.” The Real Thing, edited by Georg Gugelberger, 1996, pp. 23–41. ———. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. U of Minnesota P, 2004. Branche, Jerome, editor. Race, Colonialism, and Social Transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean. U of Florida P, 2008. Castro, Fidel. “Words to the Intellectuals.” Radical Perspectives in the Arts, edited by Lee Baxandall. Penguin, 1973, pp. 267–98. Colás, Santiago. “Of Creole Symptoms, Cuban Fantasies, and Other Latin American Postcolonial Ideologies.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 110, no. 3, 1995, pp. 382–96. Echevarría, Roberto González. “Biografía de un cimarrón and the Novel of the Cuban Revolution.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 13, no. 3, 1980, pp. 249–63. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2004. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Caliban and Other Essays. U of Minnesota P, 1989. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993. Gugelberger, George, editor. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Duke UP, 1996. Gugelberger, George, and Michael Kearny. “Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991, pp. 3–14. Guha, Ranajit. The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays. Permanent Black, 2002. Guha, Sumit. Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present. Brill, 2013. Gupta, Sonya Surabhi. “Fidel and the Cuban Revolutionary Cultural Project.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. LI, no. 51, Dec. 2016, pp. 24–26. Guru, Gopal. “The Politics of Naming.” Seminar, no. 471, 1998, pp. 14–18, www.indiaseminar.com/2018/710/710_gopal_guru.htm. Accessed 12 Dec. 2019. Hans, Raj Kumar. “Making Sense of Dalit Sikh History.” Dalit Studies, edited by Ram Narayan Rawat and K. Satyanarayana. Duke UP, 2016, pp. 131–51. Harlowe, Barbara. Resistance Literature. Methuen and Co., 1987.

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Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. Methuen, 1986. James, C.L.R. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. Lawrence, Hill & Co., 1980 (Originally published in 1948). Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature. Translated by Alok Mukherjee. Orient Longman, 2004. Luis, William. “The Politics of Memory and Miguel Barnet’s the Autobiography of a Runaway Slave.” MLN: Modern Language Notes, vol. 104, no. 2, Hispanic Issue, 1989, pp. 475–91. Manzano, Juan Francisco. Autobiography of a Slave/Autobiografia de un esclavo. Translated by Evelyn Picon Garfield. A Bilingual edition. Wayne State UP, 1996. Mignolo, Walter. “The Politics od Respectability: Marronage, White Innocence and Epistemic Disobedience.” Coalitions Facing White Innocence: Performance, Activism, and Afropean Decoloniality. Brochure of BE.BOP 2018. Black Europe Body Politics, Curated by Alanna Lockward, https://monoskop.org/images/b/b9/BE.BOP_2018_Coalitions_ Facing_White_Innocence.pdf. Accessed 29 Oct. 2019. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Translated from the Spanish by Harriet de Onis. Duke UP, 1995 (Original published Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, 1940). Pandey, Gyanendra. A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste and Difference in India and the United States. Cambridge UP, 2013. Prashad, Vijay. “Cataracts of Silence: Race on the Edge of Indian Thought.” Claiming Power from Below: Dalits and the Subaltern Question in India, edited by Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus. Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 133–50. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from the South, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000, pp. 533–80. ———. “Questioning ‘Race’.” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 21, no. 1, 2007, pp. 45–53. Racine, Josain, and Jean-Luc Racine. “Under the Banyan Tree: Speaking from the Ground.” Viramma: Life of a Dalit, edited by Josain Racine Viramma and Racine, Jean-Luc and translated by Will Hobson. Social Science Press. 2000 [(Originally published in French Une vie paria: Le rire des asservis. Inde du sud). Plon UNESCO, 1995, First edition in English, Verso, 1997]. Reddy, D. “The Ethnicity of Caste.” Against Stigma: Studies in Caste, Race and Justice Since Durban, edited by Balmurli Natarajan and Paul Greenough. Orient Blackswan, 2009, pp. 250–97. Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. U of Texas P, 1988. Said, Edward. “Orientalism Reconsidered.” Cultural Critique, vol. 1, Fall 1985, pp. 89–107. ———. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993. Saldívar, José David. “Looking Awry at the War of 1898: Theodore Roosevelt Versus Miguel Barnet and Esteban Montejo.” Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico. Duke UP, 2012, pp. 57–74. Sklodowska, Elzbieta. “Spanish American Testimonial Novel: Some Afterthoughts.” The Real Thing, edited by Georg Gugelberger. Duke UP, 1996, pp. 84–100. Slate, Nico. Coloured Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. Harvard UP, 2012. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard UP, 1999. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. U of North Carolina P, 1994 (Original in 1944).

12 RESISTANCE THROUGH RECIPES Locating testimonial aspects in Dalit and Chicana food narratives Grace Mariam Raju

Although testimonio originated in Latin America as a discrete literary genre, it has greatly evolved from its original form without changing its quintessential character of political assertion through powerful writing of experience. Contemporary life narratives have now begun to incorporate testimonial aspects in order to convey a nuanced representation of the individual experience that transcends to become a collective experience of a larger community. Such a method of writing life narratives, which incorporates testimonial aspects, especially those written by people who belong to the oppressed sections of a society, has been successful in projecting suffering and injustice through experience-inspired narratives. As a literary genre, testimonio tries to present the power relation between the subject who is made to experience and the content of that experience while refraining from objectifying the experience. In this mode of writing, the subject and the experience remain intact in the material reality of an incident, which leaves no space or any means to duplicate that experience. Consequently, testimonio emerges as a powerful form of assertion for subaltern communities because it documents experiences and can thus be considered an epistemology of experiences. This chapter reads Denise Chavez’s Taco Testimony: Meditations on Food, Family, and Culture (2006) and Sharmila Rege and colleagues’ Isn’t This Plate Indian? Dalit Histories and Memories of Food (2009) as testimonios and identifies patterns of exclusion and subjugation related to caste/ race/gender that are articulated through food writings. Culinary traditions in South American and South Asian continents are marked by ethnicity, caste, religion, and race. Food often becomes a site of identity, culture, contestations, and resistance. Scholarship on food writings has focused largely on diaspora literature, migration narratives, and life writings, wherein culinary routes are essentially traced for affirming cultural roots. Since the idea of traditional food, for any community, is a harmonious project of connecting history and memory, the idea of belonging is often established through dietary practices. Within nation-building projects, food

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plays a vital role in creating a sense of belonging, in establishing brotherhood, and more importantly in propagating nationalist ideology. However, food practices include not only particular diets but also the ways and means “in which food is prepared, commodified, and consumed by a society” (Ranta and Mendel 414). The idea of a single culinary tradition is a simulated project propagated by a state or a dominant community. Generally, culinary traditions are influenced by external factors such as geography, religion, ethnicity, class, and so on and cannot be contained within an exclusive meal. Food is therefore a political and a cultural need, besides being a biological need. Many marginalised communities have different associations with eating practices because they have experienced food through deprivation, humiliation, and abstinence. Guru argues that cooked food is a potential site for humiliation (3) and that denial of food is a violation of human rights because every human being has the right to eat food (1–4). For example, Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan (1999) (Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, 2003) exposes the atrocities of the caste system because of which the Valmiki community survived on the stale leftover food that was given to them by rich upper-caste landowning families. Urmila Pawar’s Aaydaan (2003) (The Weave of My Life) talks about humiliation faced by Untouchables for having “insatiable hunger.” Baby Kamble in her autobiography Jina Amucha (1986) (The Prisons We Broke) recalls that her community survived on the meat of dead animals because of caste hierarchies. Likewise, many Chicana writers, such as Gloria Anzaldua, Anna Castillo, and Lorna de Cervantes, use food metaphors to talk about mestizo consciousness and to demonstrate resistance against cultural invasion, displacement, homophobia, and starvation. Dalits in India and the Chicanxs at the border share a common ground of marginality that simultaneously affects their food consumption and their dietary practices. Consequently, oppressed communities, especially women, tend to develop a profound relationship with food because food has the potential to communicate varied emotions. Barthes aptly defines food as a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour (24). In literary texts, food appears as a system of signs that often problematises social structures because it allows introspection and analysis: “Food is endlessly interpretable,” asserts literary theorist Terry Eagleton (204), and anthropologist Carol M. Counihan explains that “food is a product and mirror of the organization of society on the broadest and most intimate levels” (6). Although food metaphors are used by male and female writers equally, gender has emerged to be a significant issue in food narratives. Chicana writer Cherrie Moraga uses starvation as a metaphor to describe her closeted life as a Chicana lesbian (44). Counihan contended that the act of eating is a sexual and gendered experience because the social processes associated with the production, distribution, and consumption of food have shaped the cultural conception of gender (9). Sherrie Inness, in the book Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food, opines that the gendered messages that are conjured in the paradigm of food consumption can help in understanding gender differences and social inequalities (xv). The ritualistic endeavours of cooking a meal form a part of common labour that is shared by women of all ethnicities. Therefore, foodways have immensely

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shaped women’s writing, which helps refine our understanding of gender, sex, race, and caste. Drawing on the similarities and differences found in foodways, this chapter looks at the role of recipes as mnemonic sites of violence, discrimination, hunger, and poverty among Dalits and Chicanxs. The Dalit community was denied eating healthy food because of the unequal distribution of wealth and natural resources, while the Chicanx community, particularly Chicana women, struggled economically and culturally to sustain food practices while living at the borderlands where agriculture cultivation barely takes place, because borderlands are often used as dumping grounds of pollutants and waste materials. While battling deprivation and gender division, these women succeeded in developing a taste that is symbolic of their constricted existence as women of caste and colour. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first two sections discuss the use of recipes in the two primary texts as sites of resistance against politics of exclusion, and the third section analyses the points of similarities and differences. The aim is to explore recipes through the politics of caste and race in order to interpret cooking as a resistive act. The chapter thus argues that women from the marginalised sections use recipes and food memories to demolish the romantic idea of the kitchen as an intimate feminine space.

Testimonio and Dalit food narratives Ethnic communities take great interest in preserving traditional culinary practices because food practices reflect tradition, culture, and prosperity. In India, the idea of a complete meal involves incorporating different kinds of elements onto a single thali,1 which denotes prosperity. Each community has a distinct platter that exhibits the culture and traditional value systems. In metropolitan cities, various restaurants specialise in regional food, such as Vaishno Dhaba, Marwari Bhojanalya, Udupi Kitchen, Malabar Kitchen, Manipuri Kitchen, Kashmiri Wazwan, and Parsi delicacies, to name a few. Such eating joints are popular across India, but they are exclusive in nature, and at the same time, they tend to homogenise the idea of ethnic food by making an unconscious claim that all people who belong to the region eat the same kind of food that is being served at the eatery. But Indians eat differently depending on region, religion, caste, and class. Therefore, the idea of Indian food or Indian thali is a problematic concept. Indian food is a generic term that encompasses all kinds of regional diversity, but Dalit food culture remains unfamiliar in this broad category. The Dalit recipes have not only been excluded from this generic term, but Dalit food practices continue to remain absent in public spaces. Unlike ethnic culinary traditions that exclusively belong to a certain class and caste, such as Marwadi Bhojan, Satvik Bhojan, Kerala Sadhya, and Mughlai Cuisine, Dalit food practices have never been acknowledged by Indian society. Dalit communities in the past have never been vocal about their food practices, because they were prohibited from eating the food that belonged to the upper caste and upper class. Dalit writer Om Prakash Valmiki’s community does not

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have a traditional food platter, because they ate the leftovers (Joothan) that were given to them by the upper-caste community. These food traditions have never been a part of Dalit dietary habits, and thus, Dalit cuisine came into existence as a result of prohibition and discrimination. Most of them consumed meat because the Brahmans and other non-Brahmanical upper castes in India were mostly vegetarian. Today numerous cookbooks offer various kinds of ethnic recipes from India. Similarly, there are various fiction and nonfiction texts that talk about gastronomical stories and culinary adventures. But there are no Dalit cookbooks that are available, and popular food narratives do not talk about Dalit cuisine. Across the world, most of the food items that are identified as Indian delicacies belong to a homogenised upper-caste and upper-class Indian platter. Dalit meal comes into the mainstream public domain only during electoral campaigns, when powerful politicians visit Dalit colonies and villages and share their meal to secure votes. The rigidity of the caste division has immensely shaped Dalit dietary habits. For example, even though Dalit communities mostly ate meat, they were forced to eat specific animal parts only, such as intestines, blood, and other organs that were thrown away by the meat-eating non-Brahmanical upper-caste communities as animal waste. Dalit culinary tradition, therefore, was born out of stigma, coercion, and poverty. To counter the absence of Dalit cookbooks in popular imagination, Sharmila Rege and some colleagues along with the 2009 batch of students of Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre in Pune University, came out with the book Isn’t This Plate Indian? Dalit Histories and Memories of Food (2009). This book has been documented by using the conventional form of testimonio, which includes a narrator and an interlocutor. The book consists of 12 narrators who have contributed two or more than two recipes each, along with their memories around food. Each recipe emerges from the experience of caste that they were made to endure as individuals, in families, and in communities. Recipes based on caste reinscribe the idea that social stratification can influence dietary habits and violate the basic human right to eat nutritional food. The idea of Dalit cuisine is a complicated subject because Dalits do not subscribe to the mandates of Hindu religion, which says that for a complete meal, every plate should consist of four satvik flavours.2 The recipes in this book indicate that because of a lack of resources and other social constraints, food prepared by the “Untouchables” was purely out of the necessity to eat. For example, dishes such as sukhat, made of dried fish, salt, red chilli powder, and chunchini, which comprises pigskin and meat cooked with salt, are delicacies of Valimiki, neo-Buddhist, Matang, and Mahar castes. Sukhat, chanya, and chunchini are central to Dalit identity, which is both individual as well as collective and cultural as well as political. Such recipes tend to challenge the upper-caste idea of India’s being a country of vegetarians, because they are composed of dried meat portions that are preserved because of a lack of amenities to store food items. These dishes are examples of caste brutality, where preserved food is used to battle hunger, malnutrition, and oppression. The idea of a pan-Indian culinary identity’s being premised on vegetarian food is

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a form of institutional violence against many other Indian communities, including Dalits and tribal groups. Most of the recipes in the book try to balance taste and nutrition because the upper-caste community largely controlled access to food grains. For instance, Dhondabhai Kamble, from the Matang caste, says that her social background and economic status have greatly shaped her food practices, so it consisted of jowar, bhakri, and daal, while chapathi was rarely eaten. She also says that the Matang community eats beef at night to break fasts. Ambedkar observes in his The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables (1948) that in the Hindu scriptures, the Brahmans are referred to as beefeaters. However, when Brahminism came into conflict with Buddhism, the former became vegetarians to impose a social hierarchy wherein they placed themselves at the highest point and began to denounce consuming beef and adopted the practice of worshipping cows instead. The purity and pollution that surrounds caste is determined by types of food consumed by different groups. Abhorrence towards Dalit communities comes from their consumption of both beef and pork, abhorred by Brahmans and Muslims respectively. However, a closer look at the economic status of all ethnic communities reveals that each community’s occupation is dictated by caste laws, wherein Dalits’ occupations included skinning animals for making leather, manual scavenging, and cleaning carcasses. These occupations do not yield any kind of monetary benefits or assets, and therefore, economic survival becomes difficult. Under these circumstances, Dalit communities began using food articles that are not consumed by any other upper-class/caste communities. Gopal Guru contends that ‘beef ’ is a powerful symbol that is used by Dalits to counter the nationalist project imagined around the idea of Indian thali which consists of vegetarian items. The idea of Dalits’ being savage and dirty also stems from their choice of food practices. For instance, Abidabai Shinde, who belongs to the Matang community, recounts in her testimonio that in her neighbourhood, people never exchanged food with Mahar and Chamar families, because they were often stereotyped as people who ate anything and everything. She also says that today many people have changed their attitude towards lower-caste communities, but they still do not exchange food. Due to severe economic conditions, Abidabai Shinde, says that she never got to eat things such as meat, sweets, and dry fruits. Hence, she shares her recipes on dried meat called chanya and beef intestines known as wajdi (Rege 91). Dalit recipes vary from one region to another, but they all share a common history of discrimination and stigma. As a result of this history, the choice of ingredients, the cooking technique, and the absence of traditional cookbooks indicate that displaced and disposed communities are far removed from the mainstream idea of Indian cuisine. Dalits in India cooked food in conditions that were worse than famine and always faced the challenge of finding nutrition in limited ingredients, leftovers, and edible offal. For instance, Ashabai Kharat shares that although she likes to prepare mutton with thin gravy, she usually prepares Rakti

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(coagulated animal blood) because it is cheaper than meat and because she often gets it for free: Rakti Ingredients: oil, goat blood, red chilli powder, salt. Process: Clean the blood well. Heat oil in pan. Add onion and roast till it turns brown. Add rakti until is cooked. Add chilli and salt, and fry. (85) Food items such as animal fat for frying, animal blood, and intestines are Dalit delicacies because they are discarded by the upper-class communities and therefore act as nutrition supplements for outcastes. Due to economic poverty, Dalit communities often preserved meat and fish, from which they developed dishes such as sukaat and chanya, and chunchune and mande are animal fats that are used as greasing agents. This clearly shows that Dalit communities did not have access to quality meat and vegetables; consequently, they were categorised as tamas,3 which constituted pollution and negativity. Besides, Dalit recipes have been developed through experiences of abjection. Julia Kristeva in her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982) talks of the abject as referring to unsettling items that are ambiguously located at the physical borders of the self, such that they are neither completely inside nor completely outside. Examples include excreta, bodily excretions, and babies that excite nausea and contempt. Dalit recipes’ use of meat, blood, and intestines are unsettling food items for the upper caste and upper class. Thus, dominant communities have instilled a sense of humiliation through food practices among the Dalit community, and distancing themselves from those food practices as a result of abhorrence is an act of degradation towards the Dalit community. Hence, Dalit recipes are born out of deprivation and abjection.

Testimonial aspects in Denise Chavez’s Taco Testimony Denise Chavez’s Taco Testimony is not a formal cookbook, but her recipes are ruminations on family, history, and the self. Most of her recipes are for preparing different kinds of tacos,4 because, throughout her narration, she constantly says that tacos are important to her. Tacos signify the history and culture of Mexicans who migrated as cheap labourers to the US Southwest (Pilcher 24). In Mexico, tacos signify colonial mestizaje,5 which is central to the modern nationalist ideology, while in the US, tacos are a reminiscence of racism, slavery, and displacement faced by the people of New Mexico.6 Despite the multiculturalism that the US promotes, homesickness is prevalent in most US societies, as a result of exile (Reed 8). For Chicanx writers, food and language help them resist forceful cultural assimilation. Chavez’s text is divided into an appetiser, a main course, soup, and desserts. Each section carries a set of recipes and offers detailed descriptions of growing up on the border between the US and Mexico. While most of the recipes belong to Chicanx community, a few belong only to the Chavez family. These recipes are a source

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of nourishment and hope for the family, who live in Las Cruces, New Mexico, 68 kilometres away from the US–Mexico border. It is also a site where numerous nuclear tests are conducted, and it experienced the detonation of the first atomic bomb. Chavez’s writings are shaped by geographical displacement, cultural alienation, and ecological challenges. In an interview at the University of Houston, she confesses that both the border and the atomic bomb have manoeuvred her to be what she is now, a child of heat and little rain and who belongs to a land that has experienced many assaults. Through food and culture, her community seeks physical and spiritual nourishment to battle against mental and physical damage. Chavez belongs to a place that has a challenging environment and as a result, her recipes are not romanticised celebrations of ethnic roots but instead reflect greatly on survival and sustenance. As a border woman, Chavez has given basic recipes to fight against hunger and malnourishment. For instance, a recipe titled “Un Taco de Sal” is a simple recipe for eating tacos with no meat or vegetable filling but sprinkled with salt and a little butter (50). Chavez dedicates this recipe to all those people who live on the border between a rich, powerful country and a poor developing country. Human survival on the US–Mexico border is painstakingly excruciating, as there are no houses with permanent roofs and walls but instead shacks made of tin, cardboard boxes, and cans. Chavez’s affinity with food arises from such shrinking spaces where a warm taco is surprisingly reassuring and nourishing. She says that her testimonio comes from a place where people are constantly worried about food and language. Her parents grew up hiding beans and burritos in paper sacks and would eat their lunches away from the gazes of who would otherwise mock her parents’ Mexican identity and hurl derogatory names such as “beaners or mojados/wetback” (124). The derogatory use of food metaphors against ethnic communities is an act of humiliation. Thus, Chicana culinary writings aim to counter humiliation, displacement, and xenophobia. Chavez describes Las Cruces as a place with “incredible poverty, dire conditions” and no drinking water (49). In such an economically challenging place, food has a vital role to play because food not only provides nourishment for the body but also acts as an agent for political mobilisation. In another recipe, titled “Dog Food Tacos,” Chavez says that she found this recipe in a local newspaper when there was a report on a woman who was arrested by the border police in Juarez as she made several trips across the border and returned with US dog food: Dog Food Tacos 1 can dog food. I suggest you experiment with various brands. You will eventually discern your favourites. 1 can opener 1 dozen warm tortillas, homemade if possible. Open dog food. Warm dog food over low fire, stirring often, or heat in microwave.

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Slater warm dog food on a warm tortilla. ¡Buen provecho! Mmmm! Upon being questioned by the officers, this woman confessed that she had been feeding her family with US dog food for several years, because it contained better nutrients and vitamins (51). Chavez compares this recipe to that other side of the story, history, and border that is often ignored and unheard. The other side of the border that is often silenced and subjected to deprivation consists of displaced, dispossessed, and colonised people who emerge as survivors through their everyday struggle of existence. Denise Chavez’s testimonio captures the ordinary lives of people whose resistance is simply through existence. Testimonios’ engagement with the everyday experience of injustice makes it different from other forms of life narratives – such as biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs, where the self is placed within the privileged space of agency and the experience is narrated through an “I” that has been overpowered by a strong sense of individualism. The “I” in the testimonio no longer remains a singular entity but instead is juxtaposed with the collective “we.” Chavez’s use of “I” is therefore embedded within the collective “we” that represents the Chicanx community at the US–Mexico border. For example, in the text, Chavez talks about both the internal racism and the external racism that she has been experiencing since her childhood. She, therefore, uses her mother’s preparation of rice recipe, “Delfina’s Spanish-Really Mexican-Rice,” to talk about the internal racism between Spanish descendants and Mexicans. She says that many people in New Mexico are embarrassed to claim their Mexican identities and happily claim themselves as descendants of Spanish conquerors (76). To counter this, Chavez shares her mother’s recipe and argues that Mexicans cannot make Spanish rice while Spaniards can never make Mexican rice. She uses this recipe as a premise to discuss the racism that operates inside and outside her community, especially towards Black people and Chinese people (77). Taco Testimony thus emerges from a ghetto that lives on the US–Mexico border. However, this border gets extended and separates the ghettos from the hinterlands due to which the border not simply is another physically demarcating line but instead permeates into societies and incites differential politics of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Each recipe, therefore, is embedded within a sociopolitical context, and thereby, each recipe becomes a point of departure to depict experiences of injustice, harmony, and resistance. For many Chicana writers in the US, kitchen space becomes a “safe refuge” against a culture that propagates white supremacy (Blend 58). By writing about food, such writers try to assert themselves politically in a misogynist and imperialist cultural space. Ellen M. Gil Gomez suggests that the act of cooking as a metaphor as used by writers can reinscribe the subordinate position of women in society rather than articulate women’s agency or power (Gomez 40). Debra Castillo counters this argument by maintaining that a “female cook can symbolize female creativity,” because in the actual world, a woman’s labour and desires often go unnoticed (xiv). The tradition of allocating kitchen responsibilities to the women of the house is a result of patriarchy, but in Latin America, women

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have challenged heteronormative gender roles by transforming kitchen spaces into more-discursive spaces. For example, 17th-century baroque poet and nun Sor Juana saw her kitchen as a ruminating space: What could I tell you, my lady, of the secrets of nature that I have discovered while cooking? I observed that an egg unifies and fries in butter or oil, but to the contrary dissolves in syrup; that in order to keep sugar liquid, it suffices to throw on it a very little bit of water flavored with quince or another bitter fruit; that the yolk and white of the same egg when separated and combined with sugar have an opposite effect, and one different from when they are both used together. I do not mean to tire you with such foolishness, which I  only recount to give you a complete picture of my nature and because I think it will amuse you. But, my lady, what can women know except philosophy of the kitchen? Lupercio Leonardo has said it well: it is possible to philosophize while preparing dinner. As I often say on observing these little things, if Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more. (274) In the feminist movements in the US, white women and women of colour have stood at two different ends. The choice to work outside the home was a new concept for middle-class white women, but women of colour had no such choice, because they have been parts of slavery and labour capitalism for years (Ward 212). In the US, women of colour as domestic labourers enabled the white middle class to take up employment outside the home. Many Latinas worked as a domestic help at white Anglo homes in the US. This is visibly present in US fiction, wherein Hispanic women are often portrayed as funny housemaids who are unable to pronounce English words and create a storm in the kitchen (Cofer 576). Women’s association with the kitchen has always been problematic. On the one hand, the kitchen can be a confining space by restricting women to domestic chores, and on the other hand, women work as cooks and domestic helpers to earn a living. For Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua, the kitchen is rough terrain wherein two cultures grapple against each other, in an act of kneading that is a continuous and overlapping process (81). Anzaldua’s choice of culinary metaphors to describe her position as a queer, Chicana woman comes from a tradition of women’s writing who use domestic space as a potential site for resistance. She uses strong images of a “rolling pin,” “hot tortilla,” “mortar and pestle,” and the “chile colorado” to describe Chicana women. In a similar vein, Denise Chavez uses the burnt side of the tortilla that first hits the hot pan to describe her experience of the borderlands. These images break the romantic idea which has been conventionally associated with food narratives and in a way conveys hard labour that women in borderlands put in to sustain life. The recipes presented in Chavez’s text do not follow the prescriptive method of writing recipes with accurate measurement of ingredients as found in a conventional cookbook. Chavez warns her reader that this book is not a formal cookbook

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and that if they are looking for a formal cookbook, then they should go to bookstores that sell them (1–3). Chavez develops her narration around recipes, ones that she has grown up eating and cooking, to lay the foundations for her introspection around food and domesticity. For Chavez, food has both pleasant and unpleasant memories; nevertheless, its potential to physically and spiritually nourish remains unaffected. Chavez corroborates this argument with an example of an oatmeal recipe. Oatmeal is considered healthy and as comfort food by many people, but for Chavez, it has always been an unsettling food. Oatmeal reminds her of her mother, who was doing multiple jobs to sustain her family. Burnt, lumpy oatmeal was a regular breakfast at Chavez’s house. However, Chavez appreciates oatmeal because that was what her mother could afford for breakfast, so it saved them from starvation. Chavez’s recipes not only reflect on her intimate connection with food but reveal her association with her family and her community. She can connect with people who have cooked for her, fed her, and shared their food with her. The “taco table” or the dining table at Chavez’s house has witnessed different kinds of people who were being fed with tacos, such as homeless people, impoverished people, people with addiction problems, white missionary nuns, migrant labourers, and ignorant Anglos. Hunger and starvation often brought such people from different races and classes together at the same dining table, to enjoy a plate of fresh tacos. Therefore, for Chavez, tacos became a medium to connect with different people. Border for Chavez is a polyvalent space where “deracinated” people live. Chavez’s attempt to connect with her geographical space and its inhabitants through food reiterates the fact that hunger can nullify physical borders, ethnic differences, and geographical barriers. This is what motivated Denise Chavez’s mother, Delfina Chavez, to teach her children to be “ethnic food lovers.” Her fight against racism by using ethnic food also aims to demolish the multiculturalism that the US imparts through its sale of ethnic food items, which acts as a camouflage to colonialism, annexation, xenophobia, and slavery. Chavez’s recipes symbolise experiences that she has endured from her hyphenated identity. The lack of freedom to move into an experience or to move out from experience and the choice to endure the contents of experience make experience burdensome for vulnerable communities who occupy peripheral spaces in societies (Sarrukkai 34–37). Border zones are considered spaces where cultures grapple against each other. Literature has celebrated linguistic, cultural, and social intermixing of culture at the border zone, but it rarely talks about the issue of food scarcity and eventually how eating habits shape individual habits or how poverty and scarcity affect food habits. Not only is Chavez exploring the Chicana kitchen, but the food is the new purveyor in her text. She says that this is not a cookbook but a food memoir. Simone Smith and Julia Watson define such life writings as “gastrography,” wherein a food memoir incorporates food-laced memories that feed readers’ desire to redefine themselves. Chavez’s food writing is a border testimonio that talks about kitchen space and food as mediums to cross the border and to survive the border. Her food writing does not rest in the bourgeois individualism of the “I” but belongs to the collective “we” that has been geographically displaced and historically dislocated.

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Narratives of culinary marginalisation Susan Leonardi argues that food is an “embedded discourse,” so it can have a “variety of relationships with its frame” (340). Each recipe, in a text, is a careful choice made by the author to contextualise personal memories, political ideologies, and socioeconomic conditions. Women use food metaphors in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and life writings more than men, because women, irrespective of class, ethnicity, race, or caste, have emerged as survivors from their domesticating confinements. In the case of subaltern communities such as Dalits and Chicanxs, food acts as a method to document their history of oppression. Most of the food narratives are celebratory narratives of culinary rituals, offer delicious gastro-nostalgic memories, and transform the act of cooking into an act of performance that strives to preserve social identities and traditional value systems. However, for many subaltern communities, such as slaves, illegal migrants, displaced migrants, refugees, and Dalits, celebrating food is a personal and social challenge. In peripheral spaces, such as borderlands, slums, colonies, and ghettos, cooking becomes a means of survival. At the US–Mexico border, people are victims of historical annexation that was followed by subsequent internal colonisation. Such geographical spaces often become “third spaces” wherein discrete cultures counter and encounter each other while they grapple in violence to coexist and overcome ecological challenges, economic crises, and cultural subordination. Denise Chavez’s testimonio is located in a similar space, and therefore, her recipes are reminiscence of the racism, slavery, and displacement that her community has been experiencing since the Mexican–US War in 1846. Hence, Chavez repeatedly says that when a taco is rolled, the face that hits the comal/girdle represents the border zone. This side or “the alternate side of the tortilla” is darker in colour than the other side (10). This alternate side of the tortilla is the first side to hit the hot frying pan and experiences the heat of the sarten, which for Chavez symbolises life at the borderland. Chavez says that life at the borderlands greatly reflects the preparation of tacos. Therefore, tacos for the Chicanx community are a source of nourishment and a celebration of hope and prosperity. Food thus not only satiates hunger but nourishes cultural and political appetites. For communities who are victims of social prejudice, food is a part of political resistance. This is because all kinds of revolutions demand a healthy body and mind. Gandhi always maintained that unhealthy people can never achieve Swaraj. His nationalism was embedded within the discourse of self-control, and he gave up all kinds of food that would instigate bodily cravings. He thus rejected salt, because he believed that his abstinence from salt was an example of satyagraha. He believed that salt catalyses bodily desires and therefore would prevent him from attaining spiritual purity (Slate 11–14). However, Gandhi’s choice to prefer a saltless diet comes from a privileged position of experience in which he chose to experience food habits that were devoid of the six flavours that Ayurveda recommends. He saw taste as a hindrance to practising celibacy. Arguably, Gandhi could not theorise about the experience of Dalits, who solely depended on salt and red chilli for

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taste. As documented in Isn’t This Plate Indian?, Dalits used basic ingredients to cook their food. Likewise, according to Denise Chavez’s recipes, people at the borderlands used limited ingredients to cook their food, because they never had access to other condiments that would enrich the taste of the food. This shows that Gandhi’s nationalism that is embedded within the discourse of a healthy body that is devoid of cravings or desire comes from an experience that Gandhi chose for himself. But for marginalised communities, experience does not depend on choice; rather, they are made to endure the experience by force. Sundar Sarukkai argues that an experience that involves the subject’s will while partaking in that experience is a “vicarious experience” because it involves three aspects namely, “the freedom to be a part of that experience, the freedom to leave that particular experience at any point of time and finally the privilege to modify the experience to suit one’s needs” (35). On the other hand, Sarukkai says, a lived experience arises from bondage between the subject and the experience wherein the subject is forced to partake in the contents of the experience due to the absence of a choice (36). Consequently, a lived experience remains as a distinct feature of the self that cannot be re-created or duplicated for other people by any means. It is within this divide between experience and lived experience that testimonios differ from other life writings. Testimonio is a product of experience where the experience is neither replicated nor interpreted but organically documented in the form of testimonio that emerges from the conflict between community and society. Because of this, the “I” in the testimonio is not embedded within an individualistic self but within the community. In a similar vein, testimonios arguably defy generic boundaries that are observed in defining other forms of life narratives, by juxtaposing the individual “I” with the collective “we.” John Beverly mentions that “any attempt to specify a generic definition as I do here” is “at best provisional and at worst repressive” (24–25). This claim greatly helps in expanding generic boundaries of testimonio, eventually making it more inclusive and allowing the genre to grow and develop further. Contemporary testimonios have eliminated the conventional structure of narrator and interlocutor, although Isn’t This Plate Indian? follows the traditional form of the genre, leaving it intact. Sharmila Rege’s reading of Dalit life narratives as testimonio strengthens the idea that this genre of self-writing should be located within the interstices of historical amnesia (70). Gopal Guru’s reading of testimonio sums up the argument that testimonio moves from the shackles of bourgeois narratives of life writings and plays a critically effective role. He says that testimonios possess an unconventional ability to convert a pathological condition into subversive chemicals by inflicting inferiority complexes in the minds of adversaries and to bring out the guilt in the minds of the upper caste (“Dalit Women Talk Differently” 71). Undaunted by criticism that classifies cooking as frivolous and restraining, food narratives form a stimulating area of varied interest. This is because food helps draw attention to significant issues such as hunger, sustainability, environmental issues, questions pertaining to self, and identity, to name a few. While food also helps

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determine the differential nature of caste, class, and gender, food writing helps transform people (especially women) who document their experiences around food into historians, writers, ethnographers, and anthropologists. Both Chavez and Rege et al. explore the dynamics of language, gender, and culture in their food writing. While Chavez uses both English and Spanish in her narrative because she grew up in bilingual/bicultural barrio, Rege et  al. have documented Dalit food recipes in both Marathi and English. Chavez’s food memoir documents an emerging women’s voice from the border. Isn’t This Plate Indian? is a seminal work on Dalit culinary practice and as such tries to establish a discourse on the correlation between caste, gender, and food. In this text there are only two male respondents, namely Salim Sheik Raza and Vishnu Sirse, out of the total of 12 respondents. Both of them share their passion for cooking food, though patriarchy does not allow them to cook every day. While Raza cooks special delicacies like Biryani or Puranpoli, Vishnu cooks for large gatherings or on special occasions. Unlike the female respondents, both Vishnu and Raza are popular within their communities for their culinary skills. Also, the female respondents mention that they do not know any man who cooks for his family. The idea of gendered kitchen space is thus common to race and caste politics. Chavez’s testimonio is also an attempt to invert the idea of machismo. As a woman of colour, Chavez says that women are victims of gender discrimination inside and outside the community. A macho is portrayed by Chavez as neither a war veteran nor the head of the family. It is the woman of the house who takes the responsibility of the family and feeds her children from scraps. Feeding, for women who belong to marginalised sections of society, is a battle that they fight against hunger, deprivation, and malnutrition. However, political nationalism and cultural nationalism do not recognise contributions made by women. Chicanx cultural nationalism emphasises constructing Aztlan7 to create a sense of belonging by using spatial imaginaries. However, such projects fail to look at the problems of consumption, gender, poverty, and malnutrition. This proves that the nationalist discourse is premised on material realities such as land, language, state, and community. For Dalits in India, the freedom to eat is as important as any other fundamental right. Before independence, the upper-caste/class landlords controlled the consumption practices of the lower caste. Since independence, the state has regulated the dietary practices of Dalits. The ban of arrack in many states is a cultural attack on many Dalit and tribal communities wherein arrack was often used as offerings made to gods and ancestors. This has led to the illegal production of arrack, especially in Kerala, which is dangerous for consumption and has greatly contributed to the rise of alcoholism in the state. Similarly, the outrage of Hindu fundamentalism on eating beef is a cultural violation of Dalit culinary tradition. The Indian national sentiments are largely premised on Gandhi’s idea of vegetarianism, which secluded tribal peoples, Dalits, Muslims, and Christians from the Gandhian nationalism. While he advocated for Dalits to quit eating meat, he never suggested that the upper-caste Brahmans take up menial jobs that are performed by cobblers, tanners, and scavengers to end the varna system. Gandhi’s imposition of vegetarianism

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for Swaraj was a Hindu nation-building project that abdicated meat, thereby perpetuating structural violence through a reform movement onto Dalits and tribal peoples. The dominant society distances itself from the consumption practices of subaltern communities because the former wants to dissociate itself from the latter. As a result of which, dominant communities always maintain a power position by inducing humiliation and inferiority among subaltern communities, especially through food and other cultural practices. In the case of food, humiliation is built through deprivation and food-based ethnic slurs, which lead to the othering of racial communities such that the consumed food becomes a constant reminder of their outsider status and eventually degrades their culture. Thus, food becomes a potential site for propagating institutionalised violence and abasement. Both texts discussed here are culinary testimonios that act as resistive voices against gender and cultural oppression. Chavez says that her mother’s cooking, as well as those numerous women who fed her, has shaped her border experience greatly. And testimonio enables her to share her experience of border crossing that eventually aims to destabilise rigid nationalist ideologies. Consequently, her testimonio constructs epistemological consciousness by engaging with domestic spaces. Sharmila Rege and colleagues’ book Isn’t This Plate Indian? is a testimonio that engages with Dalit recipes and aims to reveal the history of ‘Untouchables’ through food practices. Both texts are successful in breaking the romanticised images of food and kitchen space and instead portray food as a site of contestations. Because hunger is a prevalent issue in both the texts, cooking and eating can be understood as performative acts of everyday resistance by socially marginalised people who live in societies that function on prejudices. As demonstrated through these texts, the process of consumption nullifies discriminatory practices of dehumanising the “other.” The two texts discussed in this chapter use recipes to disseminate their food culture through testimonio. Testimonio uses memory in a critically reflexive role that is usually not seen in other forms of self-writing. As a result, these two testimonios are successful in shattering the romanticised, feminine imageries of kitchen space, by establishing that food is neither a politically neutral component nor entirely a personal choice, because the act of eating depends on various factors, such as race, caste, class, and gender.

Conclusion The two testimonios in this chapter tell a brutal history of caste and racial oppression where food is used as a powerful weapon to maintain power structures. Both texts lay out recipes to delineate matters of racial discrimination, caste, slavery, and sexual oppression. These recipes archive the foodways of Dalit and Chicanx for whom both education and food have been sparingly accessible. These narratives also contest the common notion of savagery associated with Dalit and Chicanx food habits and call attention to these two communities’ everyday struggles and resistance under the caste system and racial prejudice through varied emotions,

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such as hunger, deprivation, joy, humiliation, ingenuity, and trauma associated with dietary practices. These two testimonios allude to a lifestyle premised on political choices that are largely made by women. Therefore, testimonios that incorporate food recipes not only address caste and race but also portray the gender dimension through which it problematises the popular notion of the kitchen as an exclusive place for cooking. The culling of recipes is thus a political act that unsettles shame and humiliation associated with the culinary practices of people who occupy the margins of the social strata while recounting the experience of the complex relationship between caste, race, servitude, and unflinching acts of survival. In this act of survival and resistance, women from marginalised communities run their kitchens. Therefore, the kitchens that belong to the margins are not intimate spaces but are deeply rooted in the political realities of race, gender, and caste. These recipes unswervingly attack servitude and are symptomatic of a lifestyle that is deeply embedded in the everyday political lives of Dalits and Chicanas. In the hegemonical cultural space, the reinvention and the celebration of subaltern food recipes and food exhibitions offer political resilience and resistance against parochial homogenous food culture. The adoption and rejection of particular food culture not only is a personal choice but also reflects the political position and dissent against the existing dominant hegemonical system. Hence, the revival of Indigenous food habits, critical analyses, and the rejection of dominant food culture also depict the subaltern resistance against oppressors.

Notes 1 Thali refers to a plate on which food is served, but it is deeply entrenched in the establishment of social structure and hierarchies. It aims to provide a balanced meal in varying proportions. The Hindu scriptures say that thali is a complete source of nutrients. Depending on regional traditions, each thali is different, though the basic elements remain same. 2 The satvik meal requires having all six flavours in a meal – sweet, salt, sour, bitter, pungent, and astringent – to make the meal delicious and balanced. It is derived from the word satva, which means “pure, clean, and organic.” 3 According to Ayurveda, tamas refers to something that is dirty, stale, and weak. Tamasic food consumes large amount of energy while being digested. 4 Tacos have a history of colonialism and slavery. Initially, the mine workers from the town of Pachuca, 97 kilometres from North Mexico, used the word tacos to refer to their gunpowder that was wrapped in paper. However, during the independence struggle in the 1810s, civil unrest affected the state’s economy, so many people began to migrate in search of work. The unemployed miners brought tacos to Mexico City, where urban workers found it to be a convenient lunch (Pilcher 122). In the late 1960s, tacos were unknown to people outside Mexico and its former territories in the US Southwest. And 50 years later, US corporations began to ship taco shells across the world, thus making a national cuisine into a globalised food (Pilcher 91). 5 The term mestizo means “mixed” in Spanish and is generally used throughout Latin America to describe people of mixed white European and Indigenous ancestry. They represent a racial majority in Mexico, most of Central America, and the Andean countries. Around the mid-20th century, several Latin American countries adopted the concept of mestizaje, which means “blending or mixing.”

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6 After the signing of Treaty of Guadalupe at the end of the Mexican–US War, parts of Mexico were annexed, and Rio Grande was officially declared the official border between two countries. The people of New Mexico were not expelled but were displaced from their motherland and eventually conquered. 7 For the Chicanx community, Aztlan refers to the Mexican territories that were annexed by the United States of America as result of the Mexican-US War of 1846–1848. Aztlan became the symbolic homeland for the Chicanx community, because many symbols and ideas of the Chicanx movement were taken from the Aztec history. In Aztec history, Aztlan is the mythic homeland for the ancient Mesoamerican civilization.

Works cited Alarcon, Norma E. “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of the Native Woman.” Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, Sept. 2004, pp. 103–40. Ambedkar, B.R. The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables? Google Books, 1948. Anzaldua, Gloria E. La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute, 1987. Barthes, Roland. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.” Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esternik. Routledge, 2013, pp. 23–30. Beverly, John. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. U of Minnesota P, 2004. Blend, Benay. “In the Kitchen Family Bread Is Always Rising.” Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food, edited by Sherrie A. Inness. U of Massachusetts P, 2001, pp. 145–60. Castillo, Debra A., and Tabuenca Cordoba Maria Socorro. Border Women: Writing from La Frontera. U of Minnesota P, 2002. Chavez, Denise. A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture. Rio Nuevo, 2006. Cofer, Judith Ortiz. “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named María.” Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry. U of Georgia P, 1993, pp. 203–7. Counnihan, C.M. “The Border as a Barrier and Bridge: Food, Gender, and Ethnicity in the San Louis Valley of Colorado.” From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Food Studies, edited by A.V. Avakian and B. Hader. U of Massachusetts P, 2005. Eagleton, Terry. “Edible Ecriture.” Consuming Passion: Food in the Age of Anxiety, edited by Sian Griffiths and Jennifer Wallace. Mandolin, 1998, pp. 203–8. Guru, Gopal. “Dalit Women Talk Differently.” Gender and Caste, edited by Anupama Rao. Kali for Woman, 2003, pp. 70–73. ———. Food as a Metaphor for Cultural Hierarchies. Centre for the Advanced Study of India Working Paper Series of the University of Pennsylvania, 2009, https://casi.sas.upenn. edu/sites/default/files/research/Food%2Bas%2Ba%2BMetaphor%2Bfor%2BCultural%2 BHierarchies%2B%2BGopal%2BGuru%2B%28working%2Bpaper%29.pdf. Accessed 20 Jan. 2020. Ines de la Cruz, Sor Juana. Selected Writings. Translated by Edith Grossman. Paulist, 2005. Inness, Sherrie A. “Introduction.” Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food. U of Massachusetts P, 2001. Kamble, Baby. The Prisons We Broke. Translated by Maya Pandit. Orient Black Swan, 2008. Kimberly, Nance. Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio. Vanderbilt UP, 2006. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez. Columbia UP, 1982.

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Leonardi, Susan J. “Recipes for Reading: Pasta Salad, Lobster a la Riseholme, Key Lime Pie.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 104, no. 3, 1989, pp. 340–47. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/462443. Accessed 30 Jan. 2020. Moraga, Cherrie. “Passage.” Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca paso por sus labios. South End, 2000, pp. 44–47. Ranta, Ronald, and Yonatan Mendel. “Consuming Palestine: Palestine and Palestinians in Israeli Food Culture.” Ethnicities, vol. 14, no. 3, June 2014, pp. 412–35. Pawar, Urmila. The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs. Translated by Maya Pandit. Columbia UP, 2009. Pilcher, Jeffry. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. Oxford UP, 2012. Reed, Maureen E. A Woman’s Place: Women Writing in New Mexico. U of New Mexico P, 2005. Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios. Zubaan, 2006. Rege, Sharmila et al. Isn’t This Plate Indian? Dalit Histories and Memories of Food. Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Study Centre, 2009. Sarukkai, Sundar. “Experience and Theory: From Habermas to Gopal Guru.” The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, edited by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, 2012, pp. 29–45. Slate, Nico. Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet. U of Washington P, 2019. Valmiki, Omprakash. Joothan: A Dalit’s Life. Translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. Samya, 2003. Ward, Kathryn B. “Lifting as We Climb: How Scholarship by and About Women of Colour Has Shaped My Life as a White Feminist.” Color, Class, and Country: Experiences of Gender, edited by Gay Young and Bette J. Dickenson. Zed Books, 1994, pp. 212–40.

13 TESTIMONIO AS A REPOSITORY OF SUBALTERN MEMORY Reading women’s narratives from Guatemala and India Smriti Handoo

The cradle of violence and trauma has been intimately linked with women since time immemorial. That the testimony of their excruciating pain is often inundated with silence is ironic. Critically engaging with their stories and trying to assess their reality are therefore crucial. The present work manifests the position of women as a subaltern category and tries to evaluate the functioning of memory in their testimonial narratives, a preferred form of expression by women and one that has held currency in the past few decades in Latin America and in India.1 A significant paraphernalia of this genre is memory, which helps the victim to narrate the horrendous atrocities of the past. Even though memory studies have been mainly associated with the Holocaust, bringing in the narratives from the other sites, such as India and Latin America, can be vital to widening its corpus and understanding. In this chapter, I scrutinise testimonies by women from India and Guatemala and dwell on their relative similarities in the use of memory. The texts that I have chosen for this include I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), by Rigoberta Menchú from Guatemala; Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell Their Stories (1988), by Sumitra Bhave; and Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? (2016), by Essar Batool et al. from India. The texts deal with the issue of women under conflict. Whether the topic is their struggle against the oppression and impunity provided by the state in India/Guatemala or women fighting the quotidian dogmas of caste, all of them present us with brave narratives of strength in scenarios of conflict2 and violence. Moreover, the varied subaltern identities of all these women render them doubly marginalised. Only their memories resuscitate them from the void of anonymity. I have chosen these three texts because all three of them include testimonies of victims who have experienced some or the other kind of annihilation of being and therefore are exemplary literary specimens containing subaltern women’s voices. Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio I, Rigoberta Menchú is a classic example of testimonial literature. The other two texts from India are also testimonios and structurally

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similar to Menchú’s text. All three texts have a single voice or multiple subaltern voices of the narrator’s/victim’s telling the tale and mediation by a lettered interlocutor. Moreover, even though in Menchú’s text we have a single narrator in the voice of Menchú herself and in Pan on Fire and Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? we have multiple subaltern voices, they still all illustrate the collective memory of the marginalised communities that they respectively represent. Thus, the current chapter is a deliberation on reading Indian women’s subaltern memories in testimonial narratives in relation to Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony, which is an exemplary specimen of the genre testimonio. Memory is a quintessential element in understanding testimonio. Testimonio, as mentioned by George Yúdice, is a genuine, veritable account articulated by an eyewitness who is compelled to chronicle history because of the severity of the situation, highlighting the popular medium of orality (17). It is a genre that depicts a scuffle for hegemony between the upper class (i.e. the section of society with power) and the subaltern classes. Francesca Denegri asserts that this genre gave a positive answer to Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s query, “Can the subaltern speak?” Denegri calls the genre resistance literature, “which offered a new cultural model, horizontal instead of vertical, in terms of the relationship established between writer and the speaker which seemed to question the situation of structural inequality between representatives of dominant and subaltern cultures” (231). This model of writing has been appreciated for its role in providing agency to the subaltern, who weaves their stories with little interposition by lettered scholars. Resembling the model discussed earlier, the text from Kashmir Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? is a piece of investigative journalism and a testimonial work that unearths an unfortunate night in 1991, when in the two twin villages at the borders of Indian-administered Kashmir women were raped and men tortured to inestimable limits. It stretches, covers, and follows a long “trail” of time – specifically 25 years – during which the veracity of sexual assault on women and abuse of men in the two villages near the Kupwara district by Indian forces was controlled, dismissed, and concealed by the guardians of the state and its institutions. Suppression and constant disquietude had prevailed in the valley regarding the matter. However, there were people – such as the female authors – who were fighting hard for accountability and justice from the state. The text is an articulation of “stories” of the horrible night for the victims: records, proofs, and questions raised by the female authors who were otherwise rendered forbidden. Pan on Fire, a compilation of narrated tales by urban slum-dwelling Dalit women, is furnished by a penetrating version of the Dalit lifeworld and views on matters like Dalit family arrangement, childhood, culture of poverty, puberty as experienced by Dalit women, and Dalit women’s part in the community, witnessed through relationships with family members. The life stories of eight women in Pan on Fire exhibit the combined agonies of Dalit patriarchy and caste d­ iscrimination. Sangeeta articulates the forceful physical subordination of these women by the men of their own caste. She verbalises her repugnance at the conjugal relation that she feels at the outset of her marriage: “Then one day in the afternoon, they

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had all gone out and in rushes my husband, catches hold of me, and there I was – a wife in no time at all! I was scared and I was disgusted” (Bhave 12). The text is a compilation of unsaid voices that the women articulate; for example. “My father hated me from the moment I was born” (Bhave 164). As they remember and reassess the notable incidents in their lives to verbalise self-perception, these women eliminate the belief that Dalit women are miserable casualties. Wrestling to trounce impoverishment, prejudice, and abuse, they communicate agency in articulating a hankering for action. I, Rigoberta Menchú is a personal account of a life of a K'iche' woman and her community, who are struggling to survive amid forces determined to erase their existence. Menchú’s narrative articulates the voice of the defeated. She articulates the truth of her community, who witnessed brutal genocide at the hands of their country’s army. The statistics about human rights violations, sexual violence, and rape against women and children are attested in the Guatemalan truth commission reports: In its final report, the CEH estimated that approximately 200,000 Guatemalans had been disappeared or extra-judicially executed during the armed conflict. It also found that the Guatemalan army had committed approximately 93% of the total war crimes, and had conducted over 600 massacres. (Crandall 6) Hers is the voice of Indigenous communities in Latin America, and she expresses the collective agony of Indigenous women: And the woman compañera.  .  .  . They had shaved her private parts. The nipple of one of her breasts was missing and her other breast was cut off. She had the marks of bites on different parts of her body. She was bitten all over. (Menchú 460) Thus, the texts bear testimony to women’s experiences being inundated in pain and violence. The expression of this pain is made visible through memory. Literature is one of the repositories of knowing the past, a deliberately calculated move to penetrate the forgotten aspects of what formulates our present reality. It invades the extinguished expanse of memory, stifled by the militarised mechanisms of power. The politics of how history is examined through the multifarious lens of memory, with the power of the elite stage crafting the theatrical reality, undergirds the foundation of this chapter. Or rather, this chapter is a deliberation of the positions and meanings of history and memory. It is a rumination on how these two terms, colloquially and synonymously linked, have semantically shifted. For this, I have taken up Pierre Nora’s “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” which also informs how the primary texts understand memory. History has always been a captive of prejudice, prisoner of ideologies, internee of memory, and detainee of power and its compliances. The disturbing ordeals

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witnessed in the past have a proclivity for whispering the damage done through literary symphonies, crucial for understanding the present. Memory is the substructure for beholding the past, executed in an act of spatiotemporal translation. Fazil Moradi et al. remind us in Memory and Genocide that “works of art, poetry, ruins and aesthetics translate acts of extermination and destruction.” And since “the past assumes numerous memories and always extends in space and time” (Moradi et al. 1), one of the mediums for its translation is literature, which is used as a mnemonic tool to exorcise the haunting ghosts of the past. As an act of translation, literature is productive, “as it renders annihilatory past filled with violence narratable, hearable, readable and seeable” (Moradi et al. 1). Memory transcribes the knowledge of procedures of violence and destruction, corroded by time and abraded by structures of power. It illuminates a recognition of barbarity and provides substance for personalised knowledge in the market. The life stories narrated in the three texts study the transferral of the past in the present via memories, and their possible inferences constitute an incessant process: “Translation renders the past never fully understood, never ending, always evolving and surviving as words, bodily performance and something visual” (Moradi et al. 1). Consequently, this idea of perennial metamorphosis with respect to memory, severed by violence, substantiates the contention that annihilatory violence is untranslatable. In this chapter, I also argue that past is investigated in the light of what remains in the present – even though there is immense question regarding how violence can be represented after the fact, because violence is beyond representation. However, memory in its splintered form is of unparalleled importance, which despite its being restrictive and imperfect emerges as a complete entity and not as a cautiously generated historiographical account of truth.

Assimilating the cognizance of the imbalance between history and memory through the lens of Pierre Nora The thread of similarity between women’s narratives from Guatemala and India include the continuous slippage of their subaltern identity from the structures of mainstream consciousness. In a manner that Guatemala’s Indigenous people have continued to slip from frameworks incapsulating nation-building processes, Dalits in India have similarly continued to slip from the rhetoric of collective nationalist memory. Furthermore, in a corresponding fashion, the Kashmiri identity and its version of stories have also continued to slither away from the nationalist narrative of India. Testimonio reorganises the mainstream cultural and sociological aesthetics and inspects the negated self of a social community through their memories. It encapsulates translating the reality of those at the margins by using the tool of memory. Pierre Nora is well known for his work on memory. He talks about the expeditious slippage of the present into a historical past (7). He talks about the acceleration of history, an idea that is present in Andreas Huyssen’s Present Pasts,3 where Huyssen refers to Nietzsche’s concept of hypertrophy of history4 and his scream

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for creative forgetting (Huyssen 2). However, this acceleration towards history is met with a certain break with the past. Nora associates this break with a turning point or rupture in the past with what he calls lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory. He explains that the emergence of lieux de mémoire as sites, where memory solidifies, then occurs at a specific moment in history: a locale where awareness of a fracture with the past is mixed with the idea that memory has been lacerated but lacerated in such a manner as to make difficult its representation and manifestation in certain areas or sites where the flow of “historical continuity” survives (Nora 7). “There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory” (Nora 7). This can be seen in the text Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? – where the testimonies of the women, victims of that unfortunate night, can be considered as examples of Nora’s lieux de mémoire. The text, Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora, is a site of forgotten memories of those whose presence is denied and not wanted in a society. It is a site of information, of knowledge, and the evidences of their brutal reality in the current atmosphere where there are forces ready to negate its occurrence in history. Similar is the problem with Dalit historiography. Because of the removal of Dalit history by the upper caste, Dalits are “still in search of an inclusive civilization that would ensure them at least a sense of decent time and space,” writes Gopal Guru (758). Dalit historiography is “stripped of liberatory overtones, [and] the historical chronology that frames Dalit literature bears little sense of triumphant nationalism or privileged modernity despite being ‘postcolonial’ ” (Gajarwala 576). The isolation and separation of the Dalits was viciously brutal, and those writing about caste discrimination narrate lives on the edge of the sociocultural margins, as voiceless subalterns of their situation. In Pan on Fire, Sangeeta writes that A woman never thinks in terms of opposing, of speaking out, or of standing up for herself. She is brought up since a baby to think in terms of bearing with life, tolerating everything. Mothers tell their daughters: bear it, don’t say a word. (Bhave 20) The legacy of not saying a word is internalised by the victim and is transferred from generation to generation, hence stopping their realities to be a part of the “truth.” In a similar way, Menchú’s testimony is a site of memory: “We have kept our identity hidden because we have resisted” (Menchú 561). The knowledge of the fact that history has been a product of tampering of memories and its ultimate collapse is to be understood with the current hypertrophy of memory experienced in academic circles. In other words, the decayed crumbling of memory in past (for the reign of history) is to be understood in line with the contemporary upsurge in memory. Memory studies involve the study of history previously subdued, realities that have been quashed and completely extinguished. The upsurge in the direction of memory is, first, partly explained by the

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smashing up of the belief that history is the most uninterrupted, permanent characteristic of the modern world. Memory disintegrated the unity of historical time that was established on unbending linearity, that conventionally tied the present and the future to the past. Second, it is partly explained by a pressing responsibility to remember. Memory is a liberating tool for the oppressed; it is a weapon against oppression. Batool and colleagues’ statement in the text Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? affirms it: “Oblivion is a luxury the oppressed cannot afford” (137). They add that recollecting is a constituent element of reclaiming and recuperating identity: “Reminiscences, against oppression, are an important part of resistance. The dream of liberation will die the day people cease to remember their excruciating past” (137). The blast of memories mentioned heretofore has modified the respective standing between history and memory; has highlighted that the relationship between the two is more reciprocal than synonymous; and has helped enhance collective memory. This can be seen in Menchu’s employment of a collective rather than a single referent. All throughout her narrative she stresses on the fact of her being a part of a larger community. “I’d like to say here, that I wasn’t the only important one. I was part of a family, just like all my brothers and sisters. The whole community was important” (Menchú 316). Contrary to history, which has consistently been in the control of intellectuals and exclusive academic batches, memory has obtained the latest entitlements and esteem of popular remonstrations. It is a fulminatory dissent; a reprisal of the victim/underdog or the bruised party, the outcast, the homo sacer;5 a history of those declined a licence on history. Chapter 6 in Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? starts with The layers of silence that surround the memory of Kunan Poshpora are still strong, 25 years later. This chapter is haunted by lost documents, burnt papers and destroyed history. It is full of ghostly voices that have been silenced, other voices that have spoken out but have not been heard, and those who can’t speak at all. (Batool et al. 139) Memory manifests the disgraceful agony of the preceding century and a truth more truthful than history. Menchú’s account of the atrocities committed on her community are also a result of alternate memory not saved in the legitimate historical archives. She writes that It was in 1978, when Lucas García came to power with such a lust for killing, that the repression really began in El Quiché. It was like a piece of rag in his hands. He set up military bases in many of the villages and there were rapes, tortures, kidnappings. And massacres. (Menchú 420) Memory has come to be a form of justice. Alternately stated, memory remembers, and history forgets. History is expected to give details and memory meaning.

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Nora elaborates: memory and history are not identical or interchangeable terms, as commonly thought. Memory is an entity which is in persistent flux, while history, on the other hand, is something which is more fixed and rigged. Memory and history, far from being synonymous appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory . . . remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to be long dormant and periodically revived. History on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete of what is no longer. (Nora 8) Going by this definition, memory appears to be unreliable, fickle, and capricious. Memory, with its copper-bottomed foundation, seems to be more undependable and unsafe. “Nobody knows if repressed memories are accurate or not because recalling such memories often takes the form of reliving the anguish” (Batool et  al. 138). The same undependability appears in Sangeeta’s testimony in Pan on Fire: “Glaring inconsistencies and improbabilities exist in this narrative. . . . These cast serious doubts on the veracity of the account, but according to our stated policy, we present it as it is” (Bhave 1). However, memory emerges as unadulterated and complete: memory is by nature multiple yet specific – collective, plural and yet individual. History on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claims to universal authority. Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative. (Nora 9) Hence, the output of the relationship between these two seemingly analogous ideas is quite ironic. Despite the oscillatory alterations of memory, it is a complete, unequivocal entity, whereas history is sketchy and partial. History is incessantly sceptical of memory: “History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (Nora 9). That is because, according to Nora, history’s aim is not to elevate but to slaughter reality (9). Nora says that a “generalized critical history” (9) would undoubtedly conserve certain medallions, museums, and monuments but would vacate them of being lieux de mémoire. In a nutshell, a society that is surviving under the influence of history cannot devise such manifested sites for harbouring memory. I, Rigoberta Menchú contains an extreme case, one where society does not even allow cadavers to be there with the survivors, never mind memorials: “They’re dead but our people keep their memory alive through our struggle against the government, against an

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enemy who oppresses us” (352). This is why memory needs to be kept in sheltered dominions that illustrate the veracity of lieux de mémoire: “without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away” (Nora 12). Another one of the deciding qualities of a lieu de mémoire that differentiates it from any category of history that has become standard and customary is the remoteness with realia. Every preceding historical and scientific perspective to memory has involved itself with “realia, with things in themselves and in their immediate reality” (Nora 23). Opposite to historical entities, lieux de mémoire have no import in reality, and preferably, they should be their own referents  – unmixed, self-referential signs: “This is not to say that they are without content, physical presence or history; it indicates that what makes them lieux de mémoire is precisely that by which they escape from history” (Nora 23). By this, Nora means that lieux de mémoire have no anchoring in reality, because “reality” comprises what history wants to be “real.” The reality of atrocious horror in Menchú’s community that they were trying to protest against is perennially crushed: “The march on the capital was organized to demand that the army leave El Quiché. They brought many orphaned children with them as proof of the repression” (475). History as a specialisation is grounded on memory, but it also is determined according to a scientific ranking, where it is in direct contrast with memory. Memory is considered to be idiosyncratic and fallacious, nothing more than a personal attestation. Since time immemorial, history has been a discipline in the collective domain, whereas memory has been considered to be in the individual domain. History was singular, whereas memory was plural and so by character separate and discreet. The notion that memory can be collective and thus enfranchising and absolute turns the meaning of the term inside out. Memory as a collective experience is seen in I, Rigoberta Menchú in the opening sentences: My name is Rigoberta Menchú. I  am twenty-three years old. This is my testimony. I didn’t learn it from a book and I didn’t learn it alone. I’d like to stress that it’s not only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people. . . . my story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people. (43) The proposal that views collectivities with memory directs a sweeping mutation of the footing of individuals in society and their connection with community as a whole. In the initial world, we had collective history and an individual memory. Historians relished undivided jurisdiction over the past. Only the historian was tasked with demonstrating facts, assembling proofs, and determining verified truth. But this changes when the focus veers to memory in testimonial narratives.

Memory as an impressionistic echo To look back and recapitulate an incident of extreme violence is a sensitive, uncomfortable act, one that people usually want to skip. The hurdles witnessed by

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marginalised memory come from not only the structures of power against which it can potentially pose threats but also the barriers of voluntary/involuntary amnesia that victims imposed on themselves. Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1991) writes that “The responses to an unexpected or overwhelming violence are not fully grasped but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares” (183). This kind of heart-breaking contusion is witnessed in the text Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? – where one of the survivors says, “We are still living that nightmare. We have lost our sense of self-esteem . . . we often cry and break down. We don’t remember things; we don’t have good memories. Our minds are blocked” (Batool et al. 115). Similarly, Menchú is unable to deal with her emotions after her father’s murder: “I couldn’t bear to be the only one left. I actually wanted to die” (478). The occurrences from the aforementioned texts suggest a paradox that the straightest reception of an excessively ferocious brutality may come to pass as a complete inability to be conscious; the immediateness of the situation may take the shape of belatedness. The vigorous magnitude of the torturous spasm has an ability to transmute into memory, memory that is impotent, hidden in the cavernous depths of the subconscious. Moreover, society, working on the principles of providing impunity to the powerful, forms the foundation for memory submerged to the level of forgetting: “The fragility of memory coupled with the general patriarchal nature of society tends to make us forgetful or at least ignorant of the participation of women in resistance” (Batool et al. 5). The state actively works to furnish carte blanch to offenders and manslaughterers of the highest order. Nevertheless, no matter how hard and sturdy the process of recapitulation might be, memory is an important paraphernalia in countering wrongs. Hence, regardless of its incomplete appearance, flashing in fragmentary versions, which are susceptible to being long dormant and susceptible to its subjective orientation, its usage is of unparalleled importance and is like a repetitive visitor of impressions, echoing in the recesses of the mind. Memory helps to recapitulate and understand what has happened. Menchú’s description about the horrible torture inflicted upon her brother helps her to process the extremity of violence: They took my brother away, bleeding from different places. When they’d done with him, he didn’t look like a person anymore. His whole face was disfigured with beating, from striking against the stones, the tree trunks. . . . they’d even forced stones into his eyes, my brother’s eyes. (450) Also, despite its being disintegrated and splintered, memory is more complete than the singular version of historiographical accounts suited for the fancies of the elite. Menchú relays the official account of the violent incident of burning the compañeros: “Some of the versions they gave out were, that the peasants were armed, that they burned themselves, etc.” (479). And Menchú mentions the importance of the memory of the victimised: “we had to prevail over these times through the living memory of our ancestors” (483).

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However, the concern at stake is not simply that of reproducing the utterance of witnessing of trauma and abuse but also that of questioning the method by which the emotions can, if they can be winnowed, contextualised in their initial context. Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? raises such doubt: Sometimes, as with many of the Kunan Poshpora survivors, the anguish itself is so great that they would rather forget. Time also has a way of making us forget or remember differently; what happens after the event alters our memory, sometimes in ways we do not recognize ourselves. (Batool et al. 138) This disillusionment after testimonial literature’s miscarriage or its failure to create political change demands asking, how is a text to seize the consequences and enormity of horrors inflected on the people, in a way that will engage readers rather than leave them desensitised, overwhelmed, and indifferent? This is a contradiction with regard to testimonial literature that comes up while dealing with its literary corpus. However, resistance is contained within the narratives of personal memory that provides a means for communication, otherwise denied. Through the platform of narrating, their testimonies provide the women in Pan on Fire a means to assess their self-image and past life choices and makes them more confident because it articulates their miseries and problems: “Rakhma has made up her mind about how to live, how to bring up her children, how to behave with her neighbour. She thinks about all these things. . . . These sometimes give a new direction to her thoughts” (63). Thus, testimonial stories from the past – giving indispensable evidences and verbal trials of the sufferers – are both communal and private histories that otherwise may not be voiced or conceded. The stories these texts tell of the past chronicle histories of brutality, terror, oppression, and fear – “proceedings too terrible to relate” – or they authenticate memories of those who have conventionally been quietened, adding impediments to presiding narratives and according different ways of designing memories and identities. Writings coming from such corners thus supply repressed versions of memory and history, posing threats to certified absolutist models of history, and these counter-histories can withstand and amend narrow notions of culture and identity. Accounts of history and memory fashion people’s ideas and beliefs about their selves, their collective identification, and the world in general. Memory in its essence is entwined and moves back and forth, connecting past and present, now and then. Discussing this pattern in memory, psychologist Dan McAdams states, “Certain events from our past take on extraordinary meaning over time as their significance in the overall story of our lives and times come to be known” (qtd. in Vinson 5). This can be related to lines from Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? – “That one night has become my life. No matter what I do, where I go, or what I think, that night never leaves me” (Batool et al. 85). Furthermore, McAdams also asserts that memories’ getting modified and undergoing transition

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over time not only signifies the capacity of past memories to influence present and what lies ahead in future but also highlights that the current moment and future can have major impacts on our past memories. Indeed, memory is raised, when an individual strives to “remember,” they integrate concealed details with certain signals visible there in the present in order to pilot a memory. However, the impression salvaged or recuperated is not a perfect image; instead, this latest past record is constructed from how it was initially ciphered in the person’s brain and by their present shape. In Pan on Fire, Mangala while articulating her views on men in general and her father in particular says, “I really feel for my mother. She has worked herself to death for us children. Men are like that – callous and irresponsible. My father was just that – and now my brother-in-law. My father too made life miserable for her” (Bhave 107). Mangala’s memory about her unheeding and imprudent father is strengthened and her views about men reinforced by the present life situation of women around her, like her sister, whose husband is having an affair and not treating her right. Thus, in the words of memory theorist Daniel Schacter, memory “is constructed from influences operating in the present as well as from information [that has been] stored about the past” (qtd. in Vinson 6). How the recollecter interpreted an event at the start on one hand and how the event was originally encrypted, at what frequency was it thought or talked about, and the rememberer’s current frame of mind on the other structure that person’s knowledge of the past. Because of this reason, if history is compiled out from memories of past occurrences, then credible documented reports about the past are obliged to accompany the structure of memory narratives. This indicates that in authentic records of history, facts and figures are excluded and schematised and are brewed into cohesive plots. Concurrently, confirmed ratifications about the information coming from unaccredited realms of memory also come under scrutiny – an example of which can be seen in the discrediting of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony. According to David Stoll’s assertion, professors who aided her were stooges of Marxist revolutionaries. More broadly, Stoll raised suspicions on the testimonial genre, which has assisted as a critical apparatus for those in academia who were striving to circumvent Eurocentric and imperialist knowledge setups. Rigoberta’s life and story were held up as specimens of left-wing subterfuge. Testimony is prone to the frailty of remembrance. The same fragility of fact is seen in autobiography, memoirs, and biographies. An example of this fragility is given by the writers in Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? While investigating the researcher, a survivor asked “about the electricity schedule of the night” (Batool et al. 138), to which the survivor replied, “the event brought darkness to our whole lives, how can I  recall whether there was electricity that time or not when this was happening to me” (Batool et al. 138). However, testimonies and oral histories have gathered a spectrum of strong voices and strike a blow to efforts to exclude or belittle the outlook of subjugated people. Also, memory’s flux and its vacillatory nature permits it to be enhanced as an apparatus of retaliation and an area for the construction, writing, and rewriting of the self, world, and groups.

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The link between narrative and memory is what manifests the rudimentary fabric of testimonio. The sample of recognised and recorded details mutates into a narrative, a tale of personal experience. Talking in the similar light, Nelson and Fivush also believe that memories are storied, such that one may incorporate not only particulars of experiences but also “spatial-temporal indicators, such as indicating that one event occurred before another in one’s life story – before/after; cause/ effect – thus allowing the rememberer to understand events over the continuum of a lifetime” (qtd. in Vinson 30). However, the incapacity to form coherent, reasoned stories is also prevalent in victims of violence and trauma. Repeatedly, victims of violence and trauma experience an inefficacy to seize the complete purview of terrors that they have witnessed in language. That is because a narrative of trauma is inadequate to capture a comprehensive degree of the terrifying experience. Various victims/survivors find themselves incapacitated to tell the tale, and therefore, silence often persists. Moreover, the more the process and the actual narration of the story is prolonged, the more contorted and buckled it becomes in the mind of the survivor, so much so that they start to question the occurrence of the event. Thus, a victim’s memory of trauma fashioned in a form of a story may not be able to arrest the past in its complete materiality, but that same truth might stray even if a victim chooses to remain quiet. The time when victims decide to articulate their stories of horrendous experiences is when they start the procedure of translating their indescribable memories into achievable storied memories and feel validated and visible. The introduction to Pan on Fire mentions that the work is a research project that “attempts to find out a woman’s image of herself. It is an attempt to see what she sees herself as” (Bhave xvii). All the stories from the chosen texts are about women being identified and heard for what they have experienced and for who they actually are. The journey from carrying the burden of concealed suffering to that of reporting the experience is transformative and therapeutic. The consolation comes from the fact that a victim who was unable to act ultimately has a prospect of declaring agency through the vocalisation of storied memory. It is a recovery from emotional paralysis. The recitation of disturbing memory, then, supplies a supreme opening for the traumatised individual to combat, or outdo, prolonged oppression: That is my cause. As I’ve already said, it wasn’t born out of something good, it was born out of wretchedness and bitterness. It has been radicalized by the poverty in which my people live. It has been radicalized by the malnutrition which I, as an Indian, have seen and experienced. And by the exploitation and discrimination that I’ve felt in the flesh. And by the oppression which prevents us performing our ceremonies, and shows no respect for our way of life, the way we are. (Menchú 621–22) Thus, according to the argumentation in this chapter, what emerges in the texts under investigation are memories of women quelled by those who benefit

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from women’s absences. Also, recapitulating the experience of trauma changes the individual. This switch is apparent in the shift “from understanding oneself as a victim to viewing oneself as a survivor” (Vinson 105) – an expression that is normally used for those who have deliberately re-evaluated their association with the experience. Reaching a stage at which one recognises and identifies not as a victim but as a survivor is a long journey that has to cross the hurdle of acknowledging the agonies that one experienced. The narrative of suffering assuages the survivor. Memory narratives therefore act as important endeavours to appreciate the various approaches to which memories are rehabilitated in the stories of those who have been routinely persecuted and oppressed. Moreover, these valuable memories of survivors contain stories of survivors’ resilience and examples of their incredible strength. Memories and testimonies are thus useful ways of comprehending the past and outlining the present and future.

Notes 1 Many Dalit autobiographies in India have been categorised as testimonios. These are narratives filled with violence that document strategies of survival. One famous example is Bama’a Karukku. 2 Even the issue of caste can be read under the domains of conflict, as it encapsulates a matter of disagreement from a clash of interests between the Brahmins and the lower castes. 3 Huyssen, in the introduction of his book Present Past, mentions the anachronism of the model of the historical narration of time and charts out the contemporary disturbances between memory and history. 4 Nietzsche mentions the concept of the hypertrophy of history in Untimely Meditations. 5 Agamben expounds on this idea in an obscure and Delphian figure of the roman legal thought homo sacer: a man who can be murdered with impunity. Homo sacer is an individual who has been removed from the bios and brought down to zoē. He is a man from whom bios has been extracted or withdrawn and has been relegated to the category of zoē.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller Roazen. Stanford UP, 1998. Batool, Essar et al. Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? Zubaan, 2016. Bhave, Sumitra. Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell Their Story. Indian Social Institute, 1988. Caruth, Cathy. “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History.” Yale French Studies, no. 79, 1991, pp. 181–92. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2930251. Accessed 30 Jan. 2020. Crandall, Joanna. “Truth Commissions in Guatemala and Peru: Perpetual Impunity and a Transitional Justice Compared.” Journal of Peace Conflict and Development, no. iv, 2004, pp. 1–19. Denegri, Francesca. “Testimonio and Its Discontents.” Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, edited by Stephen Hart and Richard Young. Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 228–38. Gajarwala, Toral Jatin. “Some Time Between Revisionist and Revolutionary: Unreading History in Dalit Literature.”  PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 126, no. 3, 2011, pp.  575–91.  JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41414131. Accessed 22 Jan. 2020.

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Guru, Gopal. “Dalit Vision of India: From Bahishkrut to Inclusive Bharat.” Futures, vol. 36, no. 6–7, 2004, pp. 757–63. Huyssen, Andreas.  Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford UP, 2003. Menchu, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Edited by ­Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Translated by Ann Wright. Verso, 1984. Moradi, Fazil et al., editors. Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation. Routledge, 2017. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations, no. 26, 1989, pp. 7–24. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2928520. Accessed 20 Mar. 2020. Vinson, Sarah Catherine Foust. Storied Memories: Memory as Resistance in Contemporary Women’s Literature, 2010, Loyola University Chicago, PhD dissertation, https://ecommons. luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1175& context=luc_diss. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.”  Latin American Perspectives, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991, pp. 15–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2633737. Accessed 25 Feb. 2020.

INDEX

Abraham, Joshil K.: Dalit Literatures in India 6 “accident of birth” 142 Acta Antropológica (Ricardo Pozas) 44 Activist Approaches to Social Justice (2018) 57 Adi Hindu movement 3, 32 African diaspora 168 African slave 165 – 6, 175 Against Literature (Beverly) 150 Agamben, Giorgio: homo sacer 200, 207n5 “agrahara” 138 AIIMS 138, 142n4 Ak’abal, Humberto 153 Akhtar, Shaheen: Rising from the Ashes: Women’s Narratives of 1971 60 Akkarmashi (Limbale) 14n8, 62, 98 “Alchemy of Memory, The” 170 Ambedkar, B.R. 3, 8, 133, 166; Annihilation of Caste 12, 124, 127, 134; Buddha and his Dhamma, The 127; Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables, The 182; Waiting for a Visa 133 Ambedkar Age Collective: Hatred in the Belly 12, 124, 127; What Babasaheb Ambedkar Means to Me 12, 124, 126 ambiguity 28, 37, 75, 120, 121n3 Amcha Baap Aani Amhi ( Jadhav) 98 Andean Oral History Workshop 8 “Andean socialism” 3 Anderson, Linda: Autobiography 87, 97 Annihilation of Caste (Ambedkar) 12, 124, 127, 134

“anti-reservation” 127 Ants Among Elephants (Gidla) 11 – 12, 15nn8 – 9 Anzaldua, Gloria 179, 186 Argentina 11, 41, 46, 66, 77, 82n4 Argueta, Manlio: One Day of Life 151 Arias, Arturo 11, 151, 160n1 autobiographical narrative 12, 21, 59, 87, 89, 101 “Autobiography as De-facement” (de Man) 90 Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Chaudhuri) 97 Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (Barnet) 10, 168, 175n1 Autobiography or My Experiments with Truth (Gandhi) 97 Ayurveda 189, 192n3 Ayyankali (1863–1941) 3 Aztec 35, 36, 193n7 Aztlan 190, 193n7 Bagul, Baburao 4, 30, 95n2, 166 Bala, Manju: “Aar Neeche Nambo Na” 113; “Dain” 119 – 20 Baluch, Akhtar: Sister, Are You Still Here? 41n7, 59 Bama 29; Karukku 14n3, 14n8, 38, 60, 207n1; orality and subalternity 36; Sangati 38, 61 “Bama’s Karukku: Dalit Autobiography as Testimonio” (Nayar) 9, 14n3 Bangla 5, 15n8, 60, 111 – 14

210 Index

Barnet, Miguel 47; Autobiography of a Runaway Slave 10, 168, 175n1; Biografía de un cimarrón 48, 164 Barrios de Chungara, Domitila: Let Me Speak: Testimonio of Domitila, Woman of the Bolivian Mines, A 9, 22, 36, 51, 64, 160n2 Barthes, Roland 128, 179 Batool, Essar: Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? 11, 195 – 6, 200, 203 – 5 Belli, Gioconda: Inhabited Woman, The 151 “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” (Nora) 11, 197 – 9 Beth, Sarah 32 Beverley, John: Against Literature 150; “Margin at the Centre, The” 25, 61, 174; Real Thing, The 148, 149, 151 – 2; “Through All Things Modern” 154 Beyond Caste (Guha) 167 Bhagavad Gita 33 Bharatiya Dalit Sahitya Academy (BDSA) 27 Bharatiya Jnanpith 56 “Bhartiya Achambha” (Kumar) 33 Bhave, Sumitra: Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell Their Stories 11, 98, 195 – 6, 199, 201, 204 – 6 Biografía de un cimarrón (Barnet) 48, 164 Biography of a Runaway Slave (Barnet) 168 Biswas, Bimal: Prem Number Four 113 Black and African movements 23 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy) 171 Black autobiography 1, 171 Black Panthers 4, 23, 166 Black people 96, 163, 172, 185 Bohemia (magazine) 48 – 9 Bórquez, Josefina 24, 37, 53n2 Bouddh, Arvind: “Scene-2: Pandey, a Clerk” 129; “You Don’t Matter: Caste Matters” 126 Bourdieu, Pierre 141, 142n6 bourgeois 1, 8, 9, 25, 36, 50, 62, 65, 73, 75, 79, 94, 100, 134, 187, 189 Brahman/Shudra culture 32 Brahmins 23, 33, 37, 112, 116 – 20, 127, 134 – 5, 138, 141, 207n2 Branded, The (Kolkarkar) 14n8 Bristol 165 Brueck, Laura R. 24; Writing Resistance 27 Buddha and his Dhamma, The (Ambedkar) 127 Burgos-Debray, Elisabeth 10, 24, 37, 41n11, 52, 152 – 3; I, Rigoberta Menchú 51, 64 Byapari, M.: “Ekti Debisthaner Pattan Kahini” 115; Interrogating My Chandal

Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit 5, 13, 14n8, 121n2; “Is there Dalit Writing in Bangla?” 113; “Maar” 115; “Manusher Mukh” 115; “Ribaj” 114, 116, 119; There’s Gunpowder in the Air 121n2 Cabezas, Omar: Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista 36, 160n2 “Caliban” (Fernández Retamar) 76, 82n5, 164 – 6, 174 – 5 campesino 37 capital 141; cultural 37, 141, 154; economic 141, 142n6; social 141, 142n6 capitalism 15n9, 40, 71, 74, 80, 82n4, 163, 165, 168, 186 Capitalism and Slavery (Williams) 165 Capote, Truman 49; In Cold Blood 46, 164 Carpentier, Alejo 48 Caruth, Cathy: Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History 203 Casa de las Américas Literary Award 51 caste 2 – 9, 11 – 17, 23 – 8, 30 – 1, 33 – 4, 62 – 3, 71, 91, 97 – 9, 101 – 29, 134 – 42, 167 – 8, 178 – 82, 190 – 6, 199, 207n2 casteism 12, 129, 139, 141 – 2, 175 “Caste is structure” (Wilkerson) 142 Castillo, Debra 185 Castro, Fidel 40n2, 169, 176n3 Catholic Church 82n6, 155 Central America 6, 40n2, 54, 155, 192n5 Centre for Studies in Latin American Literatures and Cultures (CSLALC) 67n6 Cesare, Aime: Discourse on Colonialism 166 Chakraborty, Harinarayan 115, 116 Chandragiri, Chandana 127 Chatterjee, Partha: Nation and Its Fragments, The 7 Chaudhuri, Nirad Chandra: Autobiography of an Unknown Indian 97 Chavez, Denise: Taco Testimony: Meditations on Food, Family, and Culture 11, 178, 183, 185 Cimarron 48, 164, 171, 176n4 civil war 30, 153 Clandestine News Agency (ANCLA) 46 classical testimonio 24 – 5, 36 – 7, 40n3, 159; definition of 40 Codex of Dresden, The 35 collective voice 54 – 5, 58, 64 – 6, 174 colonialism 5, 15n9, 26, 71 – 3, 75, 81, 163 – 6, 172, 187, 192n4 “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” (Quijano) 83n9, 163, 165

Index  211

Columbia University 140 – 1 Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir (Dutt) 12, 15n8, 134 – 6, 142, 142n1 Committee of Peasant Union (CUC) 153 Communist Party 41n7 community 4, 7, 9, 22 – 4, 26, 63, 66, 101, 184 – 5, 189, 197, 200, 202; Black 172; caste 181 – 3; Chicanx 180, 183, 188; Dalit 180, 182 – 3 (see also Dalit(s), community); ethical 3, 180, 182, 184; marginalised 55, 179 Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE) 81 “constitutive act” 6 contact zone 12, 26 – 8, 32, 34 – 6, 61, 99; definition 26 Cooking Lessons: Politics of Gender and Food, The (Inness) 179 Coronil, Fernando 80, 83n12 Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Spivak) 175 Crossing Borders (Menchú) 11, 147 – 8, 151 – 2, 154, 159 Cuba 22, 40n2, 48, 49, 77 Cuban Academy of Sciences 170 Cuban Casa de las Américas Prize 150 Cuban Institute of Ethnology 173 Cuban literature 48, 174 Cuban Revolution 26, 47, 49, 61, 77, 99, 164, 168, 174, 176nn2 – 3 Cuban revolutionary project 169, 176n3 Cuban War of Independence 172 cultural capital 37, 141, 154 Dalit(s): autobiography 1 – 2, 5, 8 – 10, 12 – 13, 14n2, 25, 87 – 9, 91, 94, 98, 126, 128, 175, 207n1; Christian community 41n5; community 5, 8, 63, 113, 180, 183; critics 95n1; culture 38; intellectuals 10, 37, 64, 131n1; lifeworld 134 – 5, 142, 196; movement 3, 93; narratives 37, 60 – 1, 66n1, 89, 109n1; in Odisha 100, 105, 108 – 9, 110n5; poet 93, 109; students 57, 137 – 9; studies 2, 4, 8, 57; testimonio 15n8, 25, 98 – 9, 173; texts 13; women 24 – 5, 39, 56 – 7, 59, 63, 94, 133, 196 – 7 Dalit ancestors, divisions of 33; Other Backward Classes (OBCs) 33; Scheduled Castes (SCs) 33; Scheduled Tribes (STs) 33 Dalit Panthers 4, 23, 166

Dalit Studies (Rawat and Satyanarayana) 4 Dalit Text (Misrahi-Barak) 6 Dalton, Roque: Miguel Mármol 36, 160n2 Dangle, Arjun: Poisoned Bread 4 Das, D.P.: Untouchable Story, The 98 Das, Veena 55 Delgado, Bernal 56 de Man, Paul: “Autobiography as De-facement” 90 Denegri, Francesca 12, 27, 39, 40n2, 61, 99, 149 – 50, 196; Soy señora 39; “Testimonio and Its Discontents” 40 DeRocher, Patricia 150 Diálogos de amor contra el silencio; memorias de prisión, sueños de libertad (Sillato) 66 Dirty War (1976–83) 66 Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire) 166 Disgust Factor, The 23 Dorfman, Ariel 56; “Testimonial Genre in Chile Today: Political Code and Literary Code, The” 151 Dubois, Abbe: Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies 167 Dussel, Enrique Domingo 80, 83n10 Dutt, Yashica: Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir 9, 12, 15n8, 134 – 6, 142, 142n1 Eagleton, Terry 179 East India Company 167 Echevarría, Roberto González 174 “echo chambers” 131 Economic and Political Weekly (2007) 113 education 3 – 5, 15n9, 21, 25, 30 – 1, 37 – 8, 57 – 8, 97 – 8, 100 – 1, 103 – 4, 109, 120, 135 – 8, 140 – 1, 150, 167, 172, 191 “Ek Sandhyar Galpo” (Thakur) 112 “Ekti Debisthaner Pattan Kahini” (Byapari) 115 El hombre de Montserrat (Liano) 160n4 Escobar, Arturo 80, 83n11 Facebook 124 – 5 Federici, Sylvia 165, 168 Fernández Retamar, Roberto: “Caliban” 76, 82n5, 164 – 6, 174 – 5 Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista (Cabezas) 36, 160n2 Fraser, Nancy 32 Freeman, James: Untouchable: An Indian Life History 62, 100, 102 – 3, 108 Gajarwala, Toral Jatin 199 Gandhi, Mohandas 41n8, 73; Autobiography or My Experiments with Truth 97

212 Index

Ganguly, Debjani 9, 14n3 gastrography 187 Gavilán, Lurgio: Memorias de un soldado desconocido 22 Ghanar Ma 119 – 20 Gidla, Sujatha: Ants Among Elephants 11 – 12, 15nn8 – 9 Gilroy, Paul: Black Atlantic, The 171 Global South 2, 7 – 8, 13, 70 Gomez, Ellen M. Gil 185 González, Anibal 148 Gopalkrishnan, Amulya: Times of India, The 124 Gramsci, Antonio 74, 79, 82n3 Grosfoguel, Ramón 80 – 1 guerrilleros 40n2 Gugelberger, Georg 5, 150 – 1; Real Thing, The 148 Guha, Ranajit: Dominance without Hegemony 72, 79; Small Voice of History, The 169 Guha, Sumit: Beyond Caste 167 Gunasekhran, K.A.: Vadu 13, 14n8 Gupta, Sonya Surabhi 11, 14n3, 14n4, 15n10, 61 Guru, Gopal 3, 9, 13, 14n3, 27, 59, 62, 64, 166, 179, 182, 189, 199 Haitian Revolution 170 Hanyaman: One Who is in the Process of Being Killed (Mitra) 41n7, 60 Hanyaman (Mitra) 41n7, 60 Harding, Sandra 135, 142n3 Harijan (children of God) 3 Harlow, Barbara 149, 168 Hasta no verte Jesús mío (Poniatowska) 24, 40n2, 53n2 Hazari: Untouchable: An Autobiography of an Indian Outcaste 98 Hindu echelons 2 Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies (Dubois) 167 Hispaniola 165 Hobsbawm, Eric 70, 74 Hola! (magazine) 158 homo sacer (Agamben) 200, 207n5 Honduras 155 Hulme, Peter 169 Human Matter (Rey Rosa) 13, 160n4 human rights 41n4, 62, 99, 155 – 6, 179, 181, 197 Huyssen, Andreas: Present Pasts 198, 207n4 I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Menchú) 11, 36, 40n2, 147, 195, 197, 201

Iberian Peninsula 167 In Cold Blood (Capote) 46, 164 Indian Civil Services 135 Indian languages 13n1, 88, 111 – 12, 142n1 India Untouched: Stories of a People Apart (Stalin K) 28 Indigenista 3 Indigenous people 6, 10, 26, 34 – 5, 54, 64, 79, 82n7, 152 – 5, 157, 163, 165, 167, 198 indigenous woman 81, 152 – 4, 157 – 9; see also Indigenous people individualism 8, 55, 175, 185, 187 informants 22, 49 Inness, Sherrie: Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food 179 Institute of Ethnology and Folklore of the Cuban Academy of Sciences 170 Internet Dalits 123 – 4 Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit (Byapari) 5, 13, 14n8, 121n2 “Is there Dalit Writing in Bangla?” (Byapari) 113 Jaaware, Aniket 91 Jadhav, Narendra 65; Amcha Baap Aani Amhi 98; Outcaste: A_Memoir 62 Jailer Bhetor Jail (Sen) 41n7, 60 Jangam, Chinaiah 5, 7, 11; “How Not to Write a Dalit Memoir” 11 Jatav, D.R.: Silent Soldier: An Autobiography, A 98 Jati 30, 37, 129, 167 Jijibishar Galpo 114 Jina Amucha (Kamble) 11, 13n1, 14n8, 179 Juan Pérez Jolote: biografia de un tzotsil (Pozas) 10, 40n2, 44 Kamble, Baby 5, 59, 61; Jina Amucha 11, 13n1, 14n8, 179; Prisons We Broke, The 1, 13n1, 14n8, 179 Karukku (Bama) 14n3, 14n8, 38, 60, 207n1 Kindle Locations 148, 156 – 8 Kolkarkar, P.A.: Branded, The 14n8 Kotal, Chuni 112 Kristeva, Julia: Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 183 Kumar, Raj 9, 14n7, 62 – 3, 110n5, 110n8 Kumar, Umesh: “Bhartiya Achambha” 33 “Lakshmanrekha” 32 Lander, Edgardo 80, 83n13 Latin America 1 – 3, 7 – 10, 12 – 13, 15 – 17, 21, 30, 35, 37, 40n2, 44, 46, 54, 61, 63, 75 – 81, 82n5, 83n14, 98 – 100, 149, 178, 195, 197

Index  213

Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) 83n14 Latin American Group 6, 78 Lejeune, Philippe 87, 90, 101 Leonardi, Susan J. 188 Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines (Barrios de Chungara) 9, 36, 51, 64, 160n2 lettered city 5, 8, 10, 23, 25, 61 Lewis, Oscar 49, 170; Los hijos de Sánchez 40n2 Liano, Dante: El hombre de Montserrat 160n4 Limbale, Sharan Kumar: Akkarmashi 14n8, 62, 98; Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature 174 Liscano, Carlos: Truck of Fools 160n2 Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina, The (Partnoy) 63 Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Mignolo) 81, 82n8 Lord Jagannath. 105 – 6, 110n7 lower caste 127, 134, 141, 190, 207n2; see also caste “Maar” (Byapari) 115 Macher, Sofía: “Quechua Women: Agency in the Testimonies of the CVR-Peru Public Hearings” 24 – 5 Mackenbach, Werner 159 Mahanadi River 106 Mandal Commission 4 Mane, Laxman: Upara 14n8, 98 “Manusher Mukh” (Byapari) 115 Manzano, Juan Francisco 175n2 “Margin at the Centre, The” (Beverley) 25, 61, 174 Márquez, Gabriel García 46, 77; Cien años de soledad 164 Marxism 3, 7, 69 – 71, 73 – 4, 77, 79 – 80, 205 Memorias de un soldado desconocido (Gavilán) 22 Menchú, Rigoberta 22; Crossing Borders 11, 147 – 8, 151 – 2, 154, 159; I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala 11, 36, 40n2, 147, 195, 197, 201 Mendel, Yonatan 179 Mendoza, Juan 152 Mexican Revolution 53n2, 77 Mexican–US War 188, 193nn6 – 7 Mexico 22, 24, 27, 35, 40n2, 53n2, 153, 183, 193n6 Mexico City 83n10, 192n4

Mignolo, Walter 80 – 1, 83n15, 168; Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking 81, 82n8 Miguel Mármol (Dalton) 36, 160n2 Mishra, Deonandan 117 – 18, 120 Mishra, Vijay: “Writing Indenture History through Testimonios and Oral Narratives” 59 Misrahi-Barak, Judith: Dalit Literatures in India 6; Dalit Text 6 Mitra, Abhishek 100 Mitra, Jaya 61; Hanyaman: One Who is in the Process of Being Killed 41n7, 60 modernity 3 – 7, 15n9, 62, 74, 78 – 81, 131n2, 138, 163, 167 – 8, 199 Mondal, Sudipto 139 Montejo, Esteban 22, 24, 48, 170, 173, 175; Biography of a Runaway Slave 11, 168 Moon, Vasant: Vasti 98 Moradi, Fazil: Memory and Genocide 198 Moraes, Dom: My Son’s Father 27 Moraga, Cherrie 179 moral economy 27 Moraña, Mabel 44, 51 Moya, Castellanos: Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador 160n4; Senselessness 11, 147, 155, 158 – 9 mutuality 36 Nagaraj, D.R. 89 Naik, Purnachandra 12 Nance, Kimberly 151 narrative 1 – 2, 8 – 12, 21 – 3, 25 – 6, 28, 33 – 4, 36 – 8, 44, 59 – 61, 63 – 5, 67n3, 70 – 1, 73 – 4, 77, 81, 88 – 9, 91, 93 – 4, 97 – 9, 101, 123, 125 – 9, 133 – 4, 142n1, 148 – 9, 154 – 5, 158 – 60, 164, 173, 178 – 81, 185 – 6, 188 – 9, 191, 195 – 6, 198, 202, 204 – 5, 207 National Institute of Social Work and Social Sciences (NISWASS) 110n3 nationalism 5, 67n3, 72 – 3, 78, 188 – 90, 199 National Park and Indigenous Territory Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS) movement 81 Nation and Its Fragments, The (Chatterjee) 7 Nayar, Pramod K.: “Bama’s Karukku: Dalit Autobiography as Testimonio” 9, 14n3; “Poetics of Postcolonial Atrocity: Dalit Life Writing, Testimonio, and Human Rights, The” 9, 14n3 negation 75, 78 Nehru, Jawaharlal 73; Autobiography 97 network capital 141

214 Index

New Mexico 183 – 5, 193n6 New World 6, 26, 34, 53n4, 165 Nicaraguan Revolution 14n2, 78 Nobel Peace Prize 35, 51, 54, 82n7, 147, 150, 160n1 Nora, Pierre: “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” 11, 197 – 9 Occidentalism 80 Odia Dalit 103, 105, 109, 110n4, 110n8 Odisha 100, 101, 103 – 5 One Day of Life (Argueta) 151 Ooru Keri (Siddalingaiah) 10, 87 – 8, 91, 93 – 5 Operation Massacre (Walsh) 10, 44, 46 Ortiz Wallner, Alexandra 2, 159 Other Backward Classes (OBCs) 33 Outcaste: A_Memoir (Jadhav) 62 Ovichegan, Samson 137 Pain of the Trap, The (Thakbhaure) 24 Palma, Milagros: Nuestra existencia: La vida de una mujer intocable 1 Pan-Africanism 23 Pandey, Gyanendra 1, 69, 82nn1 – 2, 164 Pandian, M.S.S. 8, 13, 38, 82n1, 134; “On a Dalit Woman’s Testimonio” 14n3 Panjabi, Kavita: “Transcultural Politics and Aesthetics” 23 Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell Their Stories (Bhave) 11, 98, 195 – 6, 199, 201, 204 – 6 Partnoy, Alicia 151; Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina, The 63 Pawar, Daya: Baluta 14n8 Pawar, Urmila 61; Aaydaan 179 peasant consciousness 74 – 5 Peru 22, 24, 27, 30, 34 – 5, 40n2, 41n4; terror years (1980–2000) 30 Phule, Jyotiba 32 Pilcher, Jeffry 183, 192n4 “Poetics of Postcolonial Atrocity: Dalit Life Writing, Testimonio, and Human Rights, The” (Nayar) 9, 14n3 political consciousness 55 Poniatowska, Elena 40n2, 47, 49; Hasta no verte Jesús mío 24, 40n2, 53n2 Popol Vuh 34, 35 postcolonialism 1 – 2, 4 – 8, 40n3, 53n4, 67n3, 78 – 9, 149, 155, 164 – 5, 199 poverty 31, 38 – 9, 100, 106 – 7, 114 – 16, 134, 170, 180 – 1, 183 – 4, 187, 190, 196, 206 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Kristeva) 183

Pozas, Ricardo: Juan Pérez Jolote: biografi a de un tzotsil 10, 40n2, 44 Pratt, Mary Louise 26 Prem Number Four (Biswas) 113 Present Pasts (Huyssen) 198, 207n4 prestige 10, 37, 45, 49, 52, 158 Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (Timmerman) 160n2 Prisons We Broke, The (Kamble) 1, 13n1, 14n8, 179 “Quechua Women: Agency in the Testimonies of the CVR-Peru Public Hearings” (Macher) 24 – 5 “Questioning ‘Race’ ” (Quijano) 163 ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (Walsh) 48 Quijano, Aníbal 6, 80, 82n9, 166; “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” 83n9, 163, 165; “Questioning ‘Race’ ” 163 Race and Class (1977) 59 race/racism 2 – 3, 11, 27, 33, 77 – 8, 80, 99, 163 – 4, 167 – 8, 171, 173, 175, 178, 180, 183, 185, 187 – 8, 190 – 2 Racine, Jean-Luc: Viramma: Life of an Untouchable 21, 37, 98 Rama, Ángel 23, 50 Randall, Margaret: Sandino’s Daughters 9, 14n2, 23, 36, 54, 59, 64, 67n3 Ranta, Ronald 179 Real Thing, The (Beverly) 148, 149, 151 – 2 refugee 147, 155, 188 Rege, Sharmila 25, 148; Isn’t This Plate Indian? Dalit Histories and Memories of Food 11, 178, 181, 189, 191; Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios 8, 59 Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (Moya) 160n4 Reyes, Kathryn Blackmer: “Testimonio: Origins, Terms, and Resources” 99 Rey Rosa, Rodrigo: Human Matter 13, 160n4 “Ribaj” (Byapari) 114, 116, 119 Ricoeur, Paul: “What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding” 130 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia 7, 15n12 Rodó, José Enrique: “Ariel” 166 Rodriguez, Ileana 76, 78 – 9 Rodriguez, Julia E. Curry: “Testimonio: Origins, Terms, and Resources” 99 Roosevelt, Theodore 173 Roy, Arundhati: God of Small Things, The 7

Index  215

Said, Edward: Culture and Imperialism 166, 168 Saint Augustine: Confessions 96 Saldívar, José David: Transamericanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico 7 Sandino’s Daughters (Randall) 9, 14n2, 23, 36, 54, 59, 64, 67n3 Sangati (Bama) 38, 61 San Marcos University 40 Sarkar, Sumit 7, 82n1 satyagraha 188 Satyanarayana, K.: “Dalit Autobiography” 9, 14n3; No Alphabet in Sight 14n6 “Scene-2: Pandey, a Clerk” (Bouddh) 129 Scheduled Castes (SCs) 33, 116 Scheduled Tribes (STs) 33 Self-Respect Movement 3 Sen, Meenakshi 61; Jailer Bhetor Jail 41n7, 60 Senselessness (Moya) 11, 147, 155, 158 – 9 serialization 125, 127 Shakespeare, William: Tempest, The 53n4, 165 shudhdhu korar jagni 119 Shyamala, G. 29 Shyamlal: Untold Story of a Bhangi Vice-chancellor 98 Siddalingaiah, D.: Ooru Keri 10, 87 – 8, 91, 93 – 5 Silent Soldier: An Autobiography, A (Jatav) 98 Sillato, María del Carmen: Diálogos de amor contra el silencio; memorias de prisión, sueños de libertad 66 Silva Santisteban, Rocío 30; El factor asco 23 Singh, Balwant: Untouchable in the IAS, An 98 Sister, Are You Still Here? (Baluch) 41n7, 59 Sklodowska, Elzbieta 40n2, 169 slavery 26, 40n2, 164 – 5, 169 – 71, 175n2, 176n4, 183, 186 – 8, 191, 192n4 Small Voice of History, The (Guha) 169 social mobility 103, 167, 172 solidarity 2, 51, 57, 64 – 6, 71, 75, 100, 149, 156 South America 25, 178 South Asia 6, 9, 70 – 1, 74, 87, 164, 173, 178 South Asian Subaltern Studies Group 6 – 7, 15n12, 69, 76 Southey, Robert 96 Spanish–US War 172, 173

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 41n3, 51; Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present 175 Stoll, David 52, 150, 205 Stree Shakti Sangathana 24; We Were Making History: Women and the Telengana Uprising 21, 23, 25, 41n6, 59, 67n3 subaltern studies 6 – 8, 15n12, 69 – 74, 79 – 81, 149 Swami Achutanand 32 Taco Testimony: Meditations on Food, Family, and Culture (Chavez) 11, 178, 183, 185 Taracena, Arturo 51 – 2, 152 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 53n4, 165 Territory Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS) 81 testimonial narratives 21 – 2, 25 – 6, 28, 33 – 4, 36, 38, 51, 59, 61, 122, 128, 160, 195 – 6, 202 Thakbhaure, Susheela: Pain of the Trap, The 24 Thakur, Kapil Krishna 114; “Ek Sandhyar Galpo” 112 Tharu, Susie 14n6, 82n1, 88, 138 There’s Gunpowder in the Air (Byapari) 121n2 Thomas, Sara Sindhu 9, 14n3 Thompson, E.P. 70, 74 Thorat, Sukhadeo 139, 141 Thorat Committee Report 142n4 Third World literature 5 “Through All Things Modern” (Beverly) 154 Times of India, The (Gopalkrishnan) 124 Timmerman, Jacobo: Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number 160n2 Totonicapan 156 Transamericanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Saldívar) 7 trauma 11, 151, 159 – 60, 171, 192, 195, 204, 206 – 7 Treaty of Guadalupe 193n6 Truck of Fools (Liscano) 160n2 truth commission 22, 24, 41n4, 52, 197 Twitter 124 Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Caruth) 203 United States 23, 77, 83n14, 164, 193n7 University of Hyderabad (UoH) 137 – 9 unskilled labourer 103, 106 Untouchable in the IAS, An (Singh) 98

216 Index

Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables, The (Ambedkar) 182 Upara (Mane) 14n8, 98 upper castes 26 – 8, 57, 61, 104 – 5, 107 – 8, 127 – 8, 134, 136 – 7, 139 – 41, 180 – 1, 183, 189; see also caste United States (US): intervention 172 – 3; troops 164, 173 US–Mexico border 184 – 5, 188 Valle Revolution 45 Valmiki, Omprakash 31; Joothan 12, 14n8, 22, 28, 30, 32, 33, 38, 98, 179 Velayudhan, Meera 4 Velivadas 138 Vemula, Rohith 137 Venkataraman, Vijaya 11, 14n3, 53n1, 62, 147 – 60 victim 9, 22, 33, 41n4, 89, 91 – 2, 101, 103, 127, 155 – 6, 158, 160n2, 188, 190, 195 – 6, 199 – 200, 203, 206 – 7 Viezzer, Moema: Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines 9, 36, 51, 64, 160n2 violence 4, 11, 22, 30, 36 – 9, 41n4, 63, 71, 89, 109, 127, 129, 133, 138 – 9, 142, 151, 153 – 6, 159, 171, 180, 182, 188, 191, 195, 197 – 8, 203, 206, 207n1; see also trauma

Viramma: Life of an Untouchable (Racine) 21, 37, 98 Waiting for a Visa (Ambedkar) 133 Wakankar, Milind 129, 131n2 Walsh, Rodolfo 46 – 7; Acta Antropológica 44; Operation Massacre 10, 44, 46; ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? 48 We Were Making History: Women and the Telengana Uprising (Stree Shakti Sangathana) 21, 23, 25, 41n6, 59, 67n3 Whitlock, Gillian 155, 159 Wilkerson, Isabel 139, 142 Williams, Eric: Capitalism and Slavery 165 witnesses 22, 66n2, 154, 156, 164 Women’s Studies Centre 181 World Conference Against Racism (2001) 4 Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios (Rege) 8, 59 “Writing Indenture History through Testimonios and Oral Narratives” (Mishra) 59 xenophobia 184, 187 “You Don’t Matter: Caste Matters” (Bouddh) 126 Yúdice, George 40n3, 150, 196 Zilla Parishad (ZP) 122