2 - Literature: ‘My World Is a Different World’ – Caste and Dalit Eco-Literary Traditions

Summary

Dalit and low-castes literature vividly portrays their ecological experiences, perspectives, and aspirations through a wide range of forms and themes. Within their literary works, there is a rich tapestry of both human and non-human elements, encompassing figurative and imaginative landscapes, as well as representations of natural and social environments. They reveal notions of belonging and marginalization in relation to nature, examining issues such as access and alienation from natural resources. The discourse on caste and environmental justice has made efforts to acknowledge and appreciate the Dalit eco-literary tradition. This involves critiquing the prevailing nature writing traditions and analysing Dalit literature through ecological lenses. Unlike the pursuit of an idyllic era of environmental harmony, this literary tradition aims to carve out Dalits’ distinct language, memory, and vibrancy.

In her autobiography, Bama, the first published Indian Tamil Dalit woman writer, describes herself as Karukku, meaning palmyra leaves with their serrated edges on both sides, like a double-edged sword challenging its oppressors. Her life of cruel caste oppression within the Catholic Church was like that of ‘a bird whose wings had been clipped’ and her recovery from social and institutional betrayal felt ‘like a falcon that treads the air, high in the skies’. Manohar Mouli Biswas, a Bengali Dalit writer from West Bengal, writing for over three decades, thought of himself as a water hyacinth. Initially he had named his autobiography Prisnika (water hyacinth). Later he renamed it as Life and Death of Prisnika, while expressing this self-identity as deeply hurtful for him. The world of Dr Siddalingaiah, one of India's foremost Dalit writers in Karnataka, breathes and dies in ooru keri – a separate space in a village or a city, where a Dalit resides – so much so that his autobiography is titled after this place.

Growing up as a ‘Namashudhra’ in a peasant family in West Bengal, a Dalit woman in Tamil Nadu, a Dalit man in southern Karnataka – a diverse range of contemporary Dalit writers, working in different regions and languages, identify themselves in nuanced ways with nature in their literary works. Their rich and varied stories – of discrimination and creation, humiliation and heartbreak, hope and freedom – are also nature stories, where they forge a relationship with the environment in diverse ways.