India’s publishing world has ‘hardly any diversity’. Dalit writers are changing that
- For decades, writers from India’s ‘lowest’ caste say their voices have been erased, softened or controlled by mainstream publishers
- But their stories are starting to be heard as Dalits open independent publishing houses to strengthen the community’s inclusion in modern Indian literature
Memory, author Yogesh Maitreya writes, is the only thing that cannot be taken from Dalits, Indian’s at the bottom of the hierarchical social structure born into a lifetime of discrimination.
Caste-society otherwise “has the heinous power to make a Dalit forget who they … are because they are made to hate themselves”, he says in his new memoir, Water in a Broken Pot.
The book is among a small, but growing canon of modern Dalit literature, many published independently by small houses in defiance of a literary establishment dominated by higher-caste Indians, who Dalit authors say have erased, softened or controlled the voices of India’s “lowest” people for decades.
Using the metaphor of a broken pot, Maitreya describes his family history as incomplete, smashed by its place outside the centuries-old caste hierarchy, in a personal history that has echoes in the experiences of an estimated 200 million other Indians at the lowest rung of society.
In its 1950 constitution, India abolished “untouchability” and later criminalised caste-based discrimination. Meanwhile, the government the following year established a “reservation scheme”, in theory saving spaces in government and education for members of under-represented castes or tribes, to level the playing field for Dalits.
Some Dalits and other low-caste Indians have punched through, including BR Ambedkar who scripted the Indian constitution, as well as KR Narayanan, who became the nation’s first Dalit president in 1997.