Untouchable Fictions - by Toral Jatin Gajarawala (Paperback)

About the Book

Untouchable Fictions dissects the aesthetic and political crises of realism in order to chart the development of Dalit or "untouchable caste" writing. Arguing that Dalit literature responds to a failure of older literary movement to properly accommodate caste, the book situates the aesthetic maneuvers of the Dalit text in dialectical relationship with older progressive literary movements.

Book Synopsis

Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism- progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental- in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit ("untouchable" caste) fiction. Drawing on a wide array of fiction from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V.S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce? Untouchable Fictions juxtaposes the Dalit text, and its radical critique, with a history of progressive literary movements in South Asia. Gajarawala reads Dalit writing dialectically, doing justice to its unique and groundbreaking literary interventions while also demanding that it be read as an integral moment in the literary genealogy of the 20th and 21st century. How might we trace the origins of the rise of Dalit fiction in the critical "realism" of the Progressive Writers Association of the 1930s, or in the gaps laid bare by the peasant novel of the 1950s? And what kind of dialogue does "untouchable caste" writing with its more famous counterpart: the Anglophone fiction of the last few decades? Under Gajarawala's lens the aesthetic languages of Hindi and English are intertwined and caste becomes a central category of literary analysis.

This book, grounded in the fields of postcolonial theory, South Asian literatures, and cultural studies will be important for all readers interested in the problematic relations between aesthetics and politics, between social movements and cultural production. Engaged as it is with contemporary theories of realism and the problem of aesthetics, it would also be of interest to students of English, comparative literature, contemporary Third World literature, and historians of literary movements. More specifically, as a text that considers recent developments in genre theory and South Asian fiction, it would interest scholars of the Indian and Indian Anglophone novel. Finally, this project, as an interrogation of caste politics in the cultural sphere, is an important contribution to the burgeoning field of Dalit studies.

Review Quotes

"Gajarawala is among the most intellectually ambitious of the contemporary Anglophone literary critics of Dalit writing, and she nicely manages to retain a stereoscopic focus on Dalit literary production and Dalit aesthetic theory."-----Parama Roy, University of California, Davis

Dalit writing has posed extremely serious and challenging questions to literary studies in India. This book presents a sustained, insightful, and original engagement with these questions as it maps the project of modern Dalit (primarily Hindi) fiction.-----Simona Sawhney, University of Minnesota

Untouchable Fictions goes beyond a mere recognition of the centrality of realism in the postcolonial imagination. Focusing on Dalit writing in India, Gajarawala shows how realism, like other terms, came up against the force of locality and the limits presented by a literature of protest. Gajarawala's work thus recuperates a Dalit literature that was driven by the need to go beyond a politics of identity to provide a critique of the formal logic of realism as it confronted the crisis of caste. Untouchable Fictions is outstanding in its recognition of the interplay of realism (as a formal structure), the literary canon (as the condition of possibility of nationalism), and the crisis of caste as the social force that could redirect or question all the narrative accounts on which a literary history of India was premised. The book's brilliant engagement with both the cultural politics of Dalit writing and the aesthetic ideology of Dalit literature makes it a model of the work that awaits to be done in our field.-----Simon Gikandi, Princeton University

About the Author

Toral Jatin Gajarawala is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University.