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Demarginalisation and History

Dalit Re-Invention of the Past

Badri Narayan is a Hindi poet of national repute and a senior academic. A social historian and cultural anthropologist by training, he has been a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Shimla), MSH (Paris), and at the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. He has authored many books and articles in English and Hindi on popular culture, memory, migration, social and anthropological history, Dalit and subaltern issues of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and has also conducted national and international projects. Address: Centre for Culture, Power and Change, G.B.Pant Social Science Institute, Jhusi, Allahabad 211019, Uttar Pradesh, India. [email: bntiwari{at}gmail.com]

The article demonstrates how the ongoing demarginalisation of Dalits in India today works on a variety of levels. Through creating new narratives and virtually inventing a new alternative history and language, this movement for demarginalisation uses a particular style of popular and widely circulated booklets, vigorously read and disseminated by the neo-literate Dalit population. The construction of this alternative history through such new texts, seen as an existential necessity for the Dalits, works by weaving together stories found in religious Brahminical popular texts about dissenting lower caste characters, glorified as Dalit heroes who fought against upper caste oppression and injustice. It also includes stories of unsung Dalit freedom fighters, transformed into local myths. Importantly, the language used is different from Standard Hindi, since folk proverbs, idioms and symbols, as well as the grammar and vocabulary of local dialects, are used. The article demonstrates in some detail how these processes of constructing new literature work, and indicates that these new sources may well be laying foundations for the histories of the future of many subaltern communities of South Asia.

Key Words: Ambedkar • Brahminical discourse • caste • Dalits • democratisation • history • invention of history • mobilisation • myth • reservations • subaltern movements • texts

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