Realism, Revisited: The Case of Dalit Literature

Abstract

In The Flaming Feet, the Kannada critic D. R. Nagaraj expresses doubt that the aesthetics of realism can properly incorporate “lower caste cosmologies.” This is a sobering suggestion for protest literatures, which have often staked their transgressive claims precisely on radical forms of realism that can somehow do justice to their subject. In light of the putative inability of realist writing to properly narrativize Dalit life-worlds, one must ask: Why is it that Dalit fiction turns again and again to the basic tropes of realism? This paper will attempt to derive the origins of the realist turn in Hindi Dalit literature which clearly labors under another literary genealogy.