A Dalit writer and activist, Kancha Ilaiah, is issued a "fatwa' for writing about centuries of upper caste atrocities committed against the Dalits, in his book, Post- Hindu India: Discourse on Dalit Bahujan Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolution (2009), and another book, The Adivasi Will Not Dance (2015) by an Adivasi writer, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, is banned by Jharkhand state government on the charge of 'misrepresenting" the Adivasi, indigenous, people. Indian Independence "liberated" the elite Hindu upper caste Brahmin but maintained the colonial legacy of pushing Dalits, Adivasis, and tribal people to the margin. Colonized by the postcolonial elites in the postcolonial nation-states, and pushed beyond the limits of the nationalist
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The challenge to that negation, manifested in the texts coming from the Other in the contemporary South Asian literature, marks the break, not only, from the dominant discourse that perpetuates the Brahminic undertones in every aspect of life, but also, from the postcolonialist literary domain which fails to sufficiently address the nuances of heterogeneity. Much of the postcolonial scholarship is invested in theorising the relationship of postcoloniality and subalternity. However, the voice of the Other dismantles this binary, going beyond the coloniser-colonised framework, and shows that the nature and shape of Dalit, Adivasi, and tribal subalternity are quite unlike those produced by colonial relations. This marginal voice necessitates a consciousness that seeks to dismantle the elitist discourse and its systematic colonisation of the Other. In my dissertation, I propose to go beyond the theoretical paradigm of postcolonialism, and dissect the exclusionary singularity of Hinduism and its strategy of building a homogeneous …show more content…
The Subaltern Studies project, emerged in the eighties as a strong voice for the voiceless, attempted to interrogate the Indian historiography that systematically denied the space for the Other. The Subaltern scholars' interpretation of the problematics of the "elite bourgeois" nationalist narratives not only exposed the limitations of the dominant discourse, which failed "to produce historical analysis in which the subaltern groups were viewed as the subjects of history" (Chakrabarty 7), but also widened the scope of the area of study. By attempting to understand the marginalised people who had been out of the nationalist picture for centuries, the subaltern historians set a new paradigm for exploring the "history from below". The leading scholar of this project, Ranajit Guha, asserts that the nationalist historiography actively propagates, "all the fundamental ideas by which the bourgeoisie represents and explains the world both as it is and as it was. The function of this complicity is, . . . , to make liberal historiography speak from within the bourgeois consciousness itself" (7). Guha's claim of writing "history from below" achieved some momentum in its understanding of the need to engage in the diverse cultural, political and economic realities of the subaltern groups largely invisible in
The challenge to that negation, manifested in the texts coming from the Other in the contemporary South Asian literature, marks the break, not only, from the dominant discourse that perpetuates the Brahminic undertones in every aspect of life, but also, from the postcolonialist literary domain which fails to sufficiently address the nuances of heterogeneity. Much of the postcolonial scholarship is invested in theorising the relationship of postcoloniality and subalternity. However, the voice of the Other dismantles this binary, going beyond the coloniser-colonised framework, and shows that the nature and shape of Dalit, Adivasi, and tribal subalternity are quite unlike those produced by colonial relations. This marginal voice necessitates a consciousness that seeks to dismantle the elitist discourse and its systematic colonisation of the Other. In my dissertation, I propose to go beyond the theoretical paradigm of postcolonialism, and dissect the exclusionary singularity of Hinduism and its strategy of building a homogeneous …show more content…
The Subaltern Studies project, emerged in the eighties as a strong voice for the voiceless, attempted to interrogate the Indian historiography that systematically denied the space for the Other. The Subaltern scholars' interpretation of the problematics of the "elite bourgeois" nationalist narratives not only exposed the limitations of the dominant discourse, which failed "to produce historical analysis in which the subaltern groups were viewed as the subjects of history" (Chakrabarty 7), but also widened the scope of the area of study. By attempting to understand the marginalised people who had been out of the nationalist picture for centuries, the subaltern historians set a new paradigm for exploring the "history from below". The leading scholar of this project, Ranajit Guha, asserts that the nationalist historiography actively propagates, "all the fundamental ideas by which the bourgeoisie represents and explains the world both as it is and as it was. The function of this complicity is, . . . , to make liberal historiography speak from within the bourgeois consciousness itself" (7). Guha's claim of writing "history from below" achieved some momentum in its understanding of the need to engage in the diverse cultural, political and economic realities of the subaltern groups largely invisible in