The consciousness of Dalit Selfhood: Narration of history in Dalit autobiographies

Abstract

The proposed study analyses the construction of the dalit selfhood in two dalit autobiographies, Aravind Malagatti's Government Brahmane and Baby Kamble's The Prisons We Broke by using history as a dominant metaphor. Both the texts contest the construction of the Indian elitist history and involve an intense engagement with history itself. The self nanratives which have brought to the centre-stage a gendered marginalised self through a gendered genre create a new literary space where the registers of aesthetic and literary are formulated. The writing of the self by the marginalised results in writing of resistance and the texts emerge as a site for reclaiming the lost histories.