ariel: a review of international english literature

ISSN 0004-1327 Vol. 42 No. 3-4 Pages 237–264 Copyright © 2012

The Poetics of Postcolonial Atrocity: Dalit Life

Writing, Testimonio, and Human Rights
Pramod K. Nayar

If, as Michael Ignatief proposes, human rights is the lingua franca to

articulate and address the problems of sufering (7), then it follows that
particular forms of sufering might generate speciic forms of narrative
within this language of rights. Local social and cultural conditions of
atrocity are tied in to universal discourses—including legal—of human
rights via a narrative that is simultaneously local and global, even as the
legal domain of human rights permeates other realms of politics and
culture (Ahmed and Stacey 1). An atrocity narrative is, then, irreducibly
“double voiced”: it is located within a discursive structure speciic to a
time and place, thus ensuring that the atrocity is made recognizable,
and the demand for rights is made part of a universal schema of values.
Anthony Langlois argues that the discourse of human rights presup-
poses deinitions of the “human,” thereby proposing a narrative tradi-
tion in which the “human” emerges (Langlois). he circulation and/or
acceptance of narratives about what it means to be human determine
what is deined as a “human right” (Slaughter).
My essay discusses Dalit life writing, a genre of Indian texts that
emerged irst in regional languages, and, in the1990s, in English; the
genre situates personal and collective sufering within a larger discourse
of human rights. “Dalit,” derived from the Marathi—the predominant
language of Maharashtra state—literally means “of the earth” and “that
which has been ground down” and now signiies socially oppressed caste
groups and tribals. Ironically, these marginalized Dalit peoples consti-
tute a large segment of the population, and have been forced to mobilize
themselves in order to ight for rights and justice in postcolonial India.
Dalit human rights emerge in a national context but, as this essay shows,
can be usefully integrated with a larger international-global discourse of
sufering, trauma and human rights. While Dalit life writing explicitly

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references conditions of atrocity in India, it also develops a notion of the

human subject that can be serviceable within multiple contexts of suf-
fering. Indeed, the genre’s narrative tradition of recognizing the outcast
human in India ofers strong parallels with other such humans the world
over. In its representation of sufering humans, Dalit life writing gener-
ates abject-types for (possible) ethical appropriation by a global literary
ield for human rights. I invoke “abjectiication”—deliberately echoing
“objectiication”—to signal social processes of economic and political
oppression, modes of atrocity and injustice, but also the representational
process. Abject-types are igures of abjection occurring in literatures of
trauma across the world. hey demonstrate the consequences of politi-
cal and social processes and emerge through representations of atrocity
and sufering.
“Life writing” includes genres as diverse as autobiographies, autoic-
tions, and confessional forms (Henke). Dalit life writing is a personal
atrocity memoir that calls attention to oppressive conditions within a
community. It folds the atrocity narrative into testimonies and eviden-
tiary statements that are explicitly political; as Kay Schafer and Sidonie
Smith have demonstrated, memoirs by victims are intrinsically linked to
contemporary global rights movements (Schafer and Smith).
hus far, studies of Dalit people have been largely sociological and
rarely attentive to the narrative, aesthetic, and formal properties of
Dalit writings (Dumont; Omvedt; Ghose). Such studies foreground
crucial issues such as oppression, atrocity, and protest as major themes
in Dalit writing but do not investigate or provide an account of the
forms in which these themes are conveyed (exceptions include the
works of Limbale, Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature; Dharwadker;
Beth; Nayar, “Bama’s Karukku”; Rege). My earlier work proposed that
Dalit writing may be treated as testimonio (Nayar, “Bama’s Karukku”).
Testimonio is deined as “a novel or novella-length book or pamphlet
. . . , told in the irst person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist
of the events he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually
a ‘life’ or ‘signiicant life experience’” (Beverley 92). It is also a narrative
in which the protagonist writes her or his own experience as an agent of
a collective memory, identity, and experience (Yudice).

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he present essay builds upon my earlier reading of Dalit texts and

explores the formal and aesthetic properties of Dalit life writing in order
to investigate how the genre generates a discourse of human rights. I
suggest that, through a narrative strategy that includes trauma writing
and “performance,” the Dalit text generates (political) roles for the nar-
rator as a primary witness. I identify these narratives as “claims nar-
ratives” that are in dialogue with global human rights discourses and
with national-local contexts. I argue that Dalit human rights politics
adopts particular narrative conventions and aesthetic modes to stake
political claims and that human rights discourses are implicit in Dalit
life writing. Trauma and testimony discourses in Dalit texts reveal the
construction of an abject human subject both denied his or her human
rights and seeking to advance rights claims. In moving from trauma to
witness to human rights, this essay maps the emergence of an implicit
human rights narrative rather than itting Dalit texts into an already ex-
istent paradigm. he genre can be aligned with other similar narratives
in an “afective cosmopolitanism” that maps global atrocity and sufer-
ing, thereby ofering a truly global literature of human rights.
Testimonio narratives are at once personal and public, singular and
collective, autobiographical and biographical. Written testimony also
possesses an aesthetic dimension because there is a clear literary com-
ponent to the works of Dalit writers such as Laxman Mane, Laxman
Gaikwad, Bama, Omprakash Valmiki, and Sharankumar Limbale;
Linda Brooks has termed this the “poetics” of testimonio (Brooks). his
poetics of testimonio is, in fact, a poetics of atrocity wherein the poet-
ics of trauma and sufering slides into or is informed by a politics of
rights. Mane’s Upara (1997), literally “outsider,” was irst published in
Marathi, and is an account of his life as a member of the Kaikadi caste.
Uchalya (1998), or “branded,” is Gaikwad’s autobiography of his life as
a member of a caste declared a “criminal tribe” by the colonial adminis-
tration in nineteenth century India as well as his evolution into a Dalit
activist and Ambedkarite, as the followers of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s
ideology, politics, and ideals are called. Bama’s Karukku (2000) is the
irst autobiography by a Dalit woman in Tamizh, the language of the
southern Indian state of Tamizh Nadu. Karukku difers from other Dalit

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autobiographies in that Bama’s position as a Christian allows her to

unpack the caste prejudices that exist even in the convent and demon-
strate the pernicious hold of caste across India. Bama writes that, despite
the Dalits’ conversion to Christianity, they remain “lower castes” in the
convent: at once outside the caste system, yet always inside it. Valmiki’s
Joothan (2003), irst published in Hindi, is an autobiographical account
of growing up as a member of the “lower castes” in rural India and his
journey through education to a metropolitan life, even as caste contin-
ues to haunt him and his family. Limbale’s he Outcaste (2003), again
translated from the Marathi, is the autobiography of a Mahar, or “lower-
caste,” boy who ights all caste-informed odds and goes on to become a
major literary igure and government oicial. Each text is primarily an
autobiography. he narrator in each shows a remarkable ability to shift
narration between her or his own life and the lives of the communities,
with the text functioning as a social document with a speciic political
agenda. his agenda, I argue, is one of human rights.

I. Trauma and the Dalit Memoir

he Dalit atrocity memoir is a trauma narrative that embodies individ-
ual, collective, and cultural injury through a “traumatic realism” (Roth-
berg), a method through which the reader is shocked into recognition
of a world that violates all previous experiences. he Dalit memoir’s
“traumatic realism” foregrounds the body as the principal site of oppres-
sion. Dirt, starvation, and pain intersect to make the Dalit body truly
abject. Valmiki’s Joothan emphasizes the material conditions of Dalit
life entirely in bodily terms. Describing the village community’s habits
of personal hygiene, Valmiki writes, “he stench was so overpowering
that one would choke within a minute” (1). Narendra Jadhav’s Outcaste:
A Memoir describes how his father was asked to guard a dead body for
hours on end and then beaten even though he was starving (3–6, 9). In
Karukku, Bama begins her Preface with a description that metaphorizes
her caste-based sufering in corporeal terms:

I pick[ed] up the scattered palmyra karukku [a kind of leaf

with spikes] in the days when I was sent out to gather irewood,

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scratching and tearing my skin as I played with them. . . . he

driving forces that shaped this book are many: events that oc-
curred during many stages of my life, cutting me like karukku
and making me bleed. (xiii)

In Dalit life writing, the body is the center of various kinds of unpleas-
ant discrimination. Insults, for instance, impinge primarily upon the
body. Valmiki recounts experiences at school where he is insulted and
then physically abused by his headmaster (5; see also 47–8, 55, 68–70).
Insults, he states, “penetrated [his] breast like a knife” (11), were felt
as “a thousand stings on [his] body” (57), and continue to hurt him
in (metaphorically) corporeal ways (95, 134). Each day, writes Bama,
“brings new wounds” (Karukku 105).
“Traumatic realism” demands such a rhetoric of intensiication, which
forces readers to focus on the human nature of sufering by revealing
what Jeannine DeLombard calls the embodied subjectivity of the ex-
periences. Dalit life writing presents embodied sufering because speak-
ing of vulnerability, brutalized bodies, and pain deines the Dalit as a
human (body).1
Dalit life writing links the individual body’s sufering with collective
trauma. hus, Dalit trauma’s “body” is more than the biological body
of the individual: it is the body of a community/caste, and “trauma” is a
name “for experiences of socially situated political violence” (Cvetkovich
3). Dalit life writing links the individual body’s sufering with collec-
tive trauma. he survivor or traumatized body is located within a social
body, where the sufering is not simply inscribed upon the individual
but proceeds from a systemic condition and afects the social body of a
community. Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collective feel
they have been subject to events that leave an “indelible mark upon
their consciousnesses” (Alexander 2). It enables them to build solidarity,
assign responsibility for the causes of the trauma, and thereby to consti-
tute a domain of political action (Alexander 2).
Valmiki gestures at the location of his physical trauma within the cul-
tural trauma of his entire community when he writes: “he cuts I have
received in the name of caste, even aeons won’t suice to heal them” (52,

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emphasis added). Valmiki also states that “he Dalit readers had seen
their own pain in those pages of mine” (vii). Mane is informed that his
“ofspring can claim the caste of any one of the parents.” He responds,
“hat meant that the caste system . . . should be consolidated!” (191). In
both cases the protagonist situates his own sufering within the cultural-
economic condition of caste and caste discrimination. Mane discovers
the persistence of caste identity even as he hopes to erase it. His experi-
ence is a metonym for cultural trauma experienced by his family over
generations and his community as a whole. His “location” of cultural
trauma within a social system stakes a claim for recognizing the collec-
tive nature of an individual’s pain; cultural trauma must irst be claimed
by a people before it can be recognized by others.
Dalit trauma consists of not one injurious event, but instead exists as
a continuum; it is less a major catastrophe than a series of horriic inci-
dents. Hence, Dalit trauma cannot be placed alongside trauma “events”
such as the Holocaust because the former’s trauma is “insidious” trauma,
with no single point or cause of origin (Cvetkovich 32–3). Trauma is ex-
perienced in what Lawrence Langer has called “durational time,” never-
ending and perpetually returning (69). Even subsequent developments
and changes do not erase the sufering, for the Dalit’s trauma has “an
endless impact on life” (Caruth 7). In most cases, then, Dalit mem-
oirs eschew speciicity of time, chronology, and place. As a narrative
device, this lack of speciicity suggests a continuum of sufering, almost
as though the Dalits’ clock has stopped registering a passage of time
except as a continuation of oppression.
“Durational time” also demonstrates a resistance to forgetting, an
acknowledgment of the history of an event that has never stopped
being an event. “Durational time” in the Dalit memoir is about trans-
generational trauma, in which an entire family, over generations, is
subject to sufering, atrocity, and violence.2 he sufering cannot be
forgotten, not only because it is a feature of everyday life, but because
it alicts an entire community or family for generations. Jadhav’s
memoir about his father maps such trans-generational sufering. At
the conclusion of his text, Jadhav describes how he took his son to
visit his former home in order to refresh his own memory of past suf-

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ferings (258–59). Bama opens her narrative by describing how her

grandmother and other elders had sufered but endured, grateful for
“favours” from the upper-castes (Karukku 14–15). Valmiki, through-
out Joothan, describes how his mother sufered abuse and exploita-
tion at the hands of the village landlords and other men. Signiicantly,
trans-generational trauma extends the event(s) of the past into the
present and the future. hus, Mane concludes his narrative with a self-
discovery that is as traumatic as his discovery of caste: “Once again, I
had acquired all the rights of my caste” (211). Here Mane is referring
to his re-entry into the community (he had been excommunicated),
but the re-entry only cements his Dalit identity. Valmiki wonders, in
the very last lines of his memoir: “Why is caste my only identity?”
(134). Valmiki’s question introduces the discovery, common in Dalit
life writing, that one cannot ever abandon one’s caste; consequently,
as caste is both the source of trauma and foundational to identity, past
trauma remains a never-ending event.
Claiming cultural trauma requires transforming a narrative of per-
sonal pain into a narrative of larger, collective sufering for the world
to recognize and acknowledge. In Dalit life writing, this transformation
takes place through two particular representational strategies: perform-
ance and witnessing. Dalit life writing that embodies individual and
collective trauma can be productively read as performance in the way
that Brooks reads testimonio as a poetics. his is not to argue that this
performance within the narrative is “artiice” or unreal. Rather, it fore-
grounds the literary-aesthetic and representational component of Dalit
life writing while proposing that such “performances” enable the narra-
tive to acquire a political purchase.
One performative technique common in Dalit texts is the act of
staging the scene before the curtain opens on the Dalit narrator’s life.
Staging involves editorial prefaces, translators’ notes, and the protago-
nist’s own comments preparing readers for the “action” to follow, and
is marked by three key elements. First, staging includes the “setting” of
the narrative and its protagonist vis-à-vis the publication process and
editorial collaboration. Often, Dalit memoirs include prefatory com-
ments from the author, editor, translator, and Dalit protagonist through

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which the textual performance is initiated. Staging may also include a

description of the setting in which the editor or translator met the Dalit
protagonist, the motive for the ensuing testimonio, and, frequently, an
emotional description of the relations between the protagonist and the
editor/translator.
his “staging” is also a feature of oral accounts that recollect with
strong emotion the abuse, pain, and sufering experienced by the nar-
rator/protagonist. Such an emotional staging highlights the tension
within the human rights narrative itself: how is the messy, emotional,
and personal narrative to be codiied or standardized into the concept
of rights, the language of law, and the presentational formats of an “in-
quiry” (Schafer and Smith 37)? Is there a narrative form available to
the Dalit narrator to express these concepts? And does human rights
discourse recognize these articulations as demands for restitution or
recognition?
When Limbale describes, in deeply emotional terms, how Mini
Krishnan, the editor at Oxford University Press, “struggled” with his
writing, he refers to the process of “translat[ing]” his personal narrative
into another kind of discourse (Outcaste x). As Limbale employs the
term, translation indicates not only a linguistic process, but also a trans-
fer between contexts: personal atrocity and a global readership; Dalit
life and the world at large. Santosh Bhoomkar, the translator of the
text, thanks Limbale for responding to his (Bhoomkar’s) letters which
“provided . . . [him] . . . with meanings of words and phrases which
were otherwise not available in any dictionary nor known to anybody
. . . except him” (xi). Valmiki, pointing to the contexts of his writing
and publishing, stresses that well-wishers persuaded him to write down
and publish his memoirs (vii). P.A. Kolharkar describes how Gaikwad
“elucidated the meanings of certain obscure passages and unfamiliar
words” and how Gaikwad’s “explanations” helped him “catch the spirit
of the book” (Gaikwad vi). Notes from translators and editors are ex-
ergues: they frame the work to follow by suggesting a social context
and a collaboration between both Dalit and non-Dalit “agents,” and
they authenticate the text by informing readers that the translation of
both language and context has been approved by the Dalit protagonist.3

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Staging is the site of a dialogue, of intercultural exchange where the

possibilities of a programme of emancipation can emerge in the nexus
between the Dalit protagonist and the non-Dalit editor/translator/
activist. It emphasizes the progressive re-alignment of social relations
between sympathetic non-Dalits and Dalit victims/protagonists. his
alignment is highlighted when Kolharkar thanks the Academy of Letters
and Gaikwad himself for facilitating the work (vi). Gaikwad, in turn,
acknowledges the role played by various intellectuals and activists in his
work (x-xi). Valmiki thanks his manuscript readers and those who sup-
ported him during the writing (viii). In his preface to the 1983 edition
of Upara, Mane expands the setting of his text and readership: “While
we understand the suferings of these nomads, let us actively cooperate
with each other, in lessening their suferings. For this is a struggle of
human liberation” (15).
Such statements work to authenticate the narrative by highlighting
the narrator-protagonist’s background and character. hey verify that
what follows is not the story of a ictional character but that of a real
human being. “Performance,” then, consists of the staging of authentic-
ity, where references to personal settings, personalities, and characters
lend an air of reality to a context that may otherwise feel alien. Mane
writes: “Whatever I lived, experienced and saw, I poured into my writ-
ing. . . . If this book proves useful in initiating a social debate . . . I shall
feel satisied” (6). In order to emphasize that the writing proceeds from
an experiential condition rather than from any particular writing ability,
Kolharkar notes that “Sri Laxman Gaikwad has not had much formal
education” (Gaikwad vi). Gaikwad foregrounds his community loca-
tions: “I have been experiencing from my childhood the poverty and
miserable exploitation of the people of this community in which I was
born, lived and struggled” (vii). Limbale also documents his position
in order to underscore the authenticity of his narrative. Limbale draws
attention to the fact that he is the “illegitimate” progeny of the liaison
between an upper-caste landlord and a Dalit woman: “here is a Patil in
every village who is also a landowner. He invariably has a whore. I have
written this so that readers will learn the woes of the son of a whore”
(Outcaste ix).

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Finally, staging invites readers to participate in the narrative’s social

agenda, thereby making Dalit life writing a collaboration between
reader and Dalit protagonist. Gaikwad writes: “he book it is hoped,
will help the movement for emancipation” (ix). Mane asks, “Can the
enlightened people of our society, who have appreciated Upara and its
author come out in the open, breaking social barriers, and join hands
with the hundreds of Uparas”? (12). Arun Prabha Mukherjee categorizes
Joothan as a “testimony,” a rewriting of the village pastoral, and a mani-
festo for “revolutionary transformation of society and human conscious-
ness” (Valmiki xxxiii, xxxv, xxxix).
Staging grapples with matters of form: should Dalit texts be read
merely as political propaganda in autobiographical form? or as revolu-
tionary/resistance writing? or as literature? While most editors and trans-
lators prefer to focus on the political edge of Dalit writing, Mukherjee’s
preface to Joothan explores the literary-aesthetic merits of a Dalit text.
Staging asks readers to consider texts in political ways, while paying
attention to the intensely personal experiences of the protagonists. It
frames the Dalit at the center of the narrative as a kind of hero/ine
and, inally, it prepares readers for the “performance” of the Dalit that
follows.
“Performance” is here taken to mean a fuller representation of a situ-
ation (in fact etymologically “performance” originally meant “bringing
to completion”) (Turner). Dalit “performance” underscores the human
nature of the “actors” (Dalit protagonists) and their contexts so that
viewers/readers become fully aware of the complete set of horriic con-
ditions in which the narrator lives/lived. Dalit narrators perform the
conscious physical acts or emotional moments with full awareness of
the audiences they address or face. he “embodied subjectivity” noted
above is performance par excellence because the Dalit does not narrate a
story as evidence: instead, he ofers himself, as Jacques Derrida has said
of testimony (38). he representation of his brutalized body is in itself
the act of testimony. A corporeal act of testimony and the representation
of corporeal pain is an integral part of the Dalit narrative’s performance
because it emphasizes the human—a being who sufers pain because of
an unjust social structure.

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In addition to this “embodied subjectivity,” the Dalit text, like a

trauma narrative, forges a connection between politics and emotions.
he Dalit protagonist-narrator selects elements in her/his story and
projects or emphasizes an emotional component for the sake of the
audience. his is not false representation or pretension, but rather
a fuller representation of the nature of the oppressive incident that
the audience is cued to register. Performance here is the display, via
narrative, of emotions when recalling the past. For instance, Limbale
describes his constant hunger: “We had just pieces of dry bhakari
which were hardly enough to satisfy the cave of hunger” and “I was
ashamed of my food and felt guilty eating it.” Limbale underscores
the signiicance of food when he describes how the upper-caste chil-
dren gave the Dalit students their leftovers. Later, his mother asks him
angrily, “Why didn’t you get at least a small portion of it for me?
Leftover food is nectar.” Limbale reproduces his extreme emotion at
his mother’s anger: “her words made . . . [the feast] . . . quiver in my
stomach” (2–3). Gaikwad opens with a description of policemen beat-
ing his grandfather and molesting his grandmother (1–2) and then
records his own reactions: “Whenever the police visited our hut, I
panicked. . . . As the police entered and began to search the hut and
thrash and kick the inmates, I often pissed and shat in my shorts” (3).
When he speaks at school programmes, he is threatened by the other
students: “I was terribly afraid of them. Frightened that anyone of
them might beat me” (81).
he recording of emotional responses—afect—is the narrative’s
“traumatic realism” that demonstrates how bodily injury folds into emo-
tional trauma. As in the case of autobiographical narratives, emotional
content is central to Dalit life writing’s staging of past events (Bauer et
al). A dramatic performance of personal trauma serves the important
public-political purpose of reiterating the human nature of the body
that sufers.4 he Dalit narrator’s performance is the interplay of aes-
thetic and social drama: Limbale’s or Mane’s emotionally charged de-
scription (the aesthetic drama of the narrative) of their very individual
hunger is linked with the processes that produce hunger in particular
castes (the socio-political drama of the narrative). his element of Dalit

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performance—which I argue is coded into the corporeal trauma and the

afective component of the narrative—emphasizes the humanity of the
protagonist.
he emotional “performance” by the Dalit testimonio moves to an-
other level when the individual enmeshes his/her story (the “perform-
ance”) with that of the caste or community. he Dalit narrative’s role
as a document about human rights demands that the protagonist of
the narrative functions as a witness rather than an individual “hero”
or “heroine.” Personal testimony functions doubly as the historical and
socio-political witnessing of national structures of oppression. Indeed,
the term “witness” derives its force from a performative: the capacity to
provide evidence because of a irst-hand experience. he autobiography,
while foregrounding individual pain, sufering, and trauma, always ges-
tures at something beyond. he testimonios of Bama, Mane, Gaikwad
and Limbale give voice not only to their own sufering but also to that
of other victims who might otherwise remain voiceless. Dalit life writ-
ing has two components in its role as testimonio: its character as a col-
lective biography (Nayar, “Bama’s Karukku”) and the very structure of
witnessing.
Bama has stated that “he story told in Karukku was not my story
alone. It was the depiction of a collective trauma—of my commu-
nity. . . . I just tried to freeze it forever in one book so that there will be
something physical to remind people of the atrocities committed on a
section of the society for ages” (Bama, “Recognition”). Her testimonio
acts as a collective biography rather than simply her own life story. Like
Bama, Mane declares in his preface: “Upara is not alone. . . .Upara’s suc-
cess is not the success of one man, it’s the success of a social movement”
(14). Similarly, Limbale asserts that his work represents “the pain of
millions in India” (Outcaste x). In Dalit life writing, unlike in a conven-
tional autobiography, the focus is not on the individual. And, unlike
novels, which contain “problematic hero[s],” testimonios contain what
Beverley terms “problematic collective situation[s]” (95)– in this case of
caste, community and class.
Dalit life writing places the individual life in the public domain. It
takes highly personal experiences and makes them public, blurring the

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line between what can and cannot be said. hus, life inside the home—
generally regarded as a safe haven for children or as a private space—is
revealed as brutal, unjust and oppressive. he narrator moves the pain
outward from the individual body to the community body, revealing the
dangers, injustices, and cruelties of the “private” space of home or the
“secure” space of the democratic state.
Limbale, for instance, locates his lawed family life, parentage and up-
bringing within the social system. He reveals what ought to be a shame-
ful secret (his problematic individual situation as an illegitimate son)
by using it as a critique of the social structure. He notes that his father
belongs to the upper caste Lingayat community but that his mother’s
side of the family is Mahar. He admits that he is illegitimate before
concluding: “Half of me belongs to the village, whereas the other half
is excommunicated. Who am I? To whom is my umbilical cord con-
nected?” (Outcaste 38–9).
Limbale discovers that he is a border-crosser through no fault of his
own. his personal secret becomes a public document of atrocity, ex-
ploitation, and caste-linked gender oppression. Limbale converts the
story of his shame into statements that sound like aphorisms. He de-
clares that “to be born beautiful among Dalits is a curse,” and states
that his mother “was beautiful and sufered for it” (Outcaste 37–8).
Limbale converts personal experiences of sufering into truisms that
capture the condition of an entire community’s shame. he revela-
tion of such secrets deines Dalit life writing as collective biography. By
breaking down the barrier between private and public, the Dalit pro-
tagonist serves as a witness.
hus, the Dalit autobiographical narrative works as a testimonio
through a process of narrating a collective biography, by rendering
public what is private, and by locating the private within the public.
he Dalit narrator is, like the narrator of a trauma memoir, a witness
who recounts his/her personal trauma as well as that of the community.
Contextually, such narratives must be located as witnesses within the
dynamics of rights discourses and atrocity inquiries. Karukku or he
Outcaste must be seen within the context of social movements against
caste oppression and media reportage of atrocities.

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II. Dalit Life Writing and the Ethics of Witnessing

Two crucial elements make up what I call “the ethics of witnessing” in
Dalit life writing. One is the narrator-author’s own “performance” of
the drama of personal and communal aesthetic and social sufering. he
second is the injunction upon the reader to bear witness to whatever is
recorded. Dalit testimonio is akin to the genre of legal testimony in that
it is evidence that asks readers and listeners to bear witness.5 he testi-
monio is structured around the witnessing by the Dalit survivor-narrator
(primary witnessing) and by the reader who bears witness to the Dalit’s
witnessing document (secondary witnessing). he primary witness is the
victim who is, in the process of writing the memoir, engaged in a “ret-
rospective testimonial act” (Hesford 106). Primary witnessing involves
two overlapping components: narration of personal battles and survival,
and speaking for the Other.
In the irst component, the Dalit’s narrative approximates a heroic
narrative. he Dalit narrator points to the individual victim’s rise to
success, the trials, and traumas the individual overcomes, and the pro-
tagonist’s recognition of his or her selfhood. Dalit life writing charts the
protagonist’s trials and strategies of survival. Bama’s narrative, for exam-
ple, highlights her individual achievements and thus enacts a particular
kind of self: heroic, successful, and determined (Karukku 18, 64, 71,
75). Similarly, Gaikwad describes how he contested elections, opened a
bicycle repair store, iled police and court cases about atrocities, acquired
a motorcycle, took loans, started a general store and worked at creating
a movement about the Nomadic and Denotiied Tribes (Gaikwad 166,
187, 196, 231–3). he last line of Mane’s Upara reads: “I . . . was to
recover from this terrible aliction of caste and stand upright again on
my feet” (212). Mane demonstrates his overcoming of diicult circum-
stances through individual efort. Bhoomkar suggests that Upara em-
bodies “the growth of a political consciousness” (Mane xxi). he Dalit
text is aligned with the Bildungsroman, in which the individual’s growth,
battles with society, and ultimate triumph constitute the main narrative
(Slaughter 2006).
In the second component of primary witnessing, the narrator moves
from the absolute singularity of her or his sufering to the sufering of

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others. It is in the recognition of the (Dalit, traumatized) Other—that

is, by bearing witness to another Dalit—that the protagonist of the Dalit
narrative discovers her or his own humanity. he primary witness moves
from seeing the Other’s sufering to voicing a demand. Witnessing is
the reconstruction of seen events in verbal narrative elsewhere. Voicing
is advocacy wherein the primary witness proposes a programme for the
community, nation, or even humanity. his is the ethics of primary wit-
nessing: to narrate from memory the atrocities of the self and Others,
for it is the survivor’s duty to remember (Agamben 26).
Advocacy occurs when a testimonio moves from the individual to the
collective. In the latter part of her Preface, Bama writes that “In order
to change this state of afairs, all Dalits who have been deprived of their
basic rights must function as God’s word. . . . Instead of being more and
more beaten down and blunted, they unite, think about their rights,
and battle for them” (Karukku xiii). Valmiki makes the issue of voicing a
key part of his own Preface: “he Dalit readers had seen their own pain
in those pages of mine. hey all desired that I write about my own expe-
riences in greater detail” (vii). His readers, having seen their own pain in
Valmiki’s Joothan, want him to elaborate his sufering, almost as though
it is their pain that he is describing.
If, as the primary witness, the Dalit narrator moves from a narration of
her or his heroic survival towards a voicing or advocacy of the sufering
of another, he also seeks to build a common platform with sympathetic
others by making a demand on his readers. hus, Mane asks his readers
to understand and work towards the alleviation of the sufering of the
nomadic tribes (13–14). Secondary witnessing suggests the “possibilities
for solidarity and ailiations among critics, interviewers, translators and
the subject who ‘speaks’” (Caplan). he Dalit text places an imperative
upon its readers to respond in certain ways to the text.
Mini Krishnan’s editorial comments, discussed earlier, highlight the
signiicance of Bama’s text and position readers as secondary witnesses
by drawing them into the process of evidentiary testimony. Lakshmi
Holström, Bama’s translator, suggests, “What is demanded of the reader
is, in Gayatri Spivak’s term ‘a surrender to the special call of the text’. . . .
And as readers of her [Bama’s] work, we are asked for nothing less than

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an imaginative entry into that diferent world of experience and its po-
litical struggle” (Karukku vii). he suggestion of an “imaginative entry”
is actually a demand that readers respond sympathetically, as humans,
to the narrative’s trauma. In her introduction to Joothan, Mukherjee
also insists that Joothan “demands a radical shift from the upper caste
and upper class reader by insisting that such a reader not forget his/her
caste or class privilege” (xxxvii). What is underlined here, as Holström’s
introduction emphasizes, is the diference to which readers must respond
compassionately as humans; that is, readers must situate themselves
imaginatively in the contexts described within the texts. It is in this
response that the listeners deine their humanity—this is the ethics of
listening to Dalit life testimony. But it is also in this dimension of listen-
ing that the crisis of witnessing arises: how are listeners to respond to the
sheer singularity of the sufering in the Dalit text?
he Dalit text, to adopt Shoshana Felman’s description of testimonial
narrative, must be treated as a “point of conlation between text and life,
a textual testimony which can penetrate us like an actual life” (Felman
2). It must, that is, possess the power of something greater than a mere
text. One way of experiencing this textual power would be to relate to
the text with what Dominick LaCapra has termed “empathetic unsettle-
ment” (699). he listener respects the sheer otherness of the victim; one
cannot, under any circumstances, incorporate the Other into ourselves,
or stand in for the victim. In LaCapra’s terms, one cannot identify with
the victim but can register and relect upon, for oneself as well as others,
the trauma and the unsettlement. he contract between the Dalit text
and its readers, then, presents an ethics of witnessing. “Secondary wit-
nessing,” as LaCapra terms the process, means paying attention to the
irreducible heterogeneity of Dalit space, empathizing with it, never
standing in for the Dalit, but seeing the narrative’s performance as an
aesthetic and social drama that entails particular forms of reading (699).
Or, to borrow Wendy Hesford’s phrase, the text calls for a process of
“rhetorical listening.”
“Rhetorical listening” demands that readers hear voices such as
Limbale’s or Bama’s alongside those of the other, silent Dalits.6 Narrators
of Dalit gesture towards both witnessing and “rhetorical listening.”

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Bama has admitted that “here were many signiicant things that [she]
chose not to recall in Karukku” (Bama, “Recognition”). Similarly,
Valmiki states, “In the process of writing these words, a lot has remained
unsaid. I did not manage to put it all down. It was beyond my power”
(viii). Both statements implicitly argue that trauma exists beyond what
is represented in the text. his absence at the heart of testimonio may
in fact constitute its true value (Agamben 34, 145, 158). Testimony’s
“truth,” argues Anne Cubilié, is an interplay of consciousness, memory
and community, of the narrator’s physical experiences, the sights she or
he saw, and the actions she or he took as part of a larger group (242–43).
he reiteration by the survivor of her or his inability to speak and bear
witness to all that has happened emphasizes the traumatic valence of the
narrative. he silences that Bama and Valmiki discuss gesture toward the
many Dalits whose pain can only be staged through their particular sur-
vivor’s narratives and to whose sufering the readers must somehow bear
witness. “Rhetorical listening” asks readers to imagine, through their
consumption of the narrative, a trauma beyond textual representation.
Bama engages with this aspect of witnessing when she asks: “Are Dalits
not human beings? Do they not have common sense? Do they not have
such attributes as a sense of honour and self respect? Are they without
wisdom, beauty, dignity? What do we lack?” (Karukku 24). Bama tran-
sitions from describing Dalits to a broader description of humanity in
which Dalits share the attributes inventoried. She asks readers to be at-
tentive to the conditions in which some members of the human species
are denied human attributes; it is this traumatic context that readers
must consciously witness.
Secondary witnessing thus complicates the process of reading Dalit
texts. On the one hand, secondary witnessing asks that readers pay at-
tention to it as a singular event of trauma. On the other, it asks that
readers move beyond it, to see the text as a metonym for something that
is—and can only be—presented through this particular text. In other
words, an act of ethical listening would be to understand that Bama
constitutes only one voice in the midst of many Dalit silences.
Testimony of trauma always includes the hearer (Laub). he bodily
“distress” of the Dalit would mean nothing without our commitment

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as hearers and secondary witnesses, to keep the event “open,” to adapt

Lauren Berlant’s argument about trauma narratives (Berlant). Keeping
the event open means that it must be transmitted outward in order
to gather more secondary witnesses of the event. hus Arun Prabha
Mukherjee hopes that her translation of Joothan will arouse the reader’s
“empathy” (Valmiki xl). What she calls for, I suggest, is a process of
engagement with both textual and extra-textual contexts of a Dalit nar-
rative in which the reader functions as a secondary witness.

Conclusion: Dalit Life Writing as Human Rights Narratives

Dalit life writing generates evidentiary documents and narratives
about human rights in postcolonial India. Life writing occupies a key
role in the demand for human rights and is located within what Hugh
Gorringe has called a “repertoire of protest” of Dalit campaigns, agita-
tions, and even violence (Gorringe). Dalit life writing belies dominant
triumphalist narratives of economic prosperity and the achievement of
democracy in India and provides a parallel narrative tradition revealing
the violated human rights of individuals and entire communities. Dalit
authors point out that the trauma of Dalits is at least partly the conse-
quence of a lawed religious and historical narrative tradition, inasmuch
as Hindu law, colonial discourses and practices, colonialism, and post-
independent Indian politics rely upon narratives that construct the Dalit
as a lesser human being within the Indian nation. Valmiki contends,
“here would be speeches on Republic Day when narratives of devo-
tion to the country were repeatedly told, but they never included the
name of the maker of the Constitution [Dr. Ambedkar]” (71). Building
on his critique of India’s dominant narratives, Valmiki writes that “the
lie that the textbooks had been injecting in my veins in the name of
cultural heritage had been shattered” (121); his experiences ran counter
to the textbook narratives of equality and rights. he textbooks con-
struct “mythologies” of “chivalry, of ideals,” while what actually exists is
a “defeated social order” (134). Referring to the myths that enable and
justify upper caste oppression of the Dalits, Limbale says, “My tongue
is circumscribed by Manu’s innumerable laws” (Outcaste 90). Kancha
Ilaiah rejects cultural texts that have deined the human or “Indian” in

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exclusionary ways. Ilaiah writes: “We knew nothing of Brahma, Vishnu

or Eswara until we entered school. When we irst heard about these
igures they were as strange to us as Allah or Jehova or Jesus were” (7).
“We had been excluded from history,” notes Ilaiah about textbooks
and history writings that excluded Dalit beliefs and practices (54).
With this exclusion theme, Dalit life writings expose the duplicity of
dominant discourses within India, generating a diferent history of
India because, with their narrative recovery of trauma, they point to the
faultlines, conlicts, and repression within dominant historical narra-
tives. Gaikwad describes how, as a school boy, he wrote a letter to Indira
Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, in which he asked her: “when is
Gandhiji’s dream going to be fulilled?” (79). Gaikwad’s narrative coun-
teracts the historical narrative of Indira Gandhi’s “Garibi hatao” [remove
poverty] movement. Other Dalit narratives, in the same fashion, reveal
that, decades after political independence, social justice is still a dream
for Dalits. hey reveal, to use Nancy Miller and Jason Tougaw’s apposite
phrase, “the shame of modernity” (5).
Dalit testimonio narratives such as the ones explored in this essay are
narratives of loss and survival. hey also generate what Kay Schafer and
Sidonie Smith identify as the key efects of life narratives: afect, activ-
ism, and awareness (225). hey build solidarities through the charged
content of their life narratives, build awareness of the hidden history of
India, and enable the making of activist intervention by those who are
afected by what they read. his is a dual process of “translation”—a
process that translates Dalit life and contexts for the world to recog-
nize, and translates an emotionally charged “performance” or narrative
into a larger discourse of rights. When, in 2002, the United Nations
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination declared
caste to be a form of racism, it mapped a global structure of oppres-
sion (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination 2002).
It is upon this map that Dalit life narratives insert themselves. If
human rights narratives are linked, as Schafer and Smith suggest, to
global agendas of justice, Dalit testimonio narratives it directly into this
twentieth-century mediascape of testimony, truth-telling, and advocacy
(Schafer and Smith 20). Readings of Dalit life writing must forever

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move beyond the immediate textual representation of trauma or sufer-

ing to the unspoken exergues: the voiceless and the disempowered who
are available to readers only through the “presence” of Bama or Limbale.
he link between Dalit testimonio and human rights discourses is also
future-directed at two levels: (i) there is always a temporal gap between
the moment of witnessing and the moment of bearing witness, and (ii)
the bearing witness is directed at a future program of emancipation and
justice through the recognition of Dalits as humans. he testimonios
constitute the preliminary moments, the evidence and the demand for
emancipation and rights.
Dalit life writing creates a space where two key “rights” narratives
are played out. First, the narratives serve as what I term “claims narra-
tives,” texts that open spaces of deliberation with their claims of cultural
trauma and demands for justice. Michael Ignatief argues that, when
victims speak, “rights language applies” because “it is the claim of abuse
that sets a human rights process moving” (56). he emphasis is on the
narrative—claims—that sets the process and politics of rights on its
course. Rights discourses, Ignatief points out, are built on the founda-
tions of human history and the “testimony of fear,” both of which, inci-
dentally, rely upon narratives (80). Such “claims narratives” need not be
articulated as rational discourse or demands for rights. I propose (aware
of the risk of reinstating the old binary of rational West versus emotional
East) that “claims narratives” are often cast in the language of emotion
and trauma—but this cannot be a reason for excluding them from the
public sphere or the realm of human rights debates. he “testimony of
fear” that Ignatief refers to relies, I suggest, precisely on such emotional
narratives of brutalization, sufering, and injustice. It is the presence and
acknowledgement of these narratives that provoke what Ignatief terms
“deliberation,” because the “minimum condition” for deliberation is a
“willingness to remain in the same room, listening to claims one doesn’t
like to hear” (84). he “claims narrative” irst its itself into a main-
stream and universal discourse of rights because it maps their violations
for individuals and communities. Here the appeal is to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, international agencies and tribunals—in
short, to the global community. Scholars writing on Dalit rights have

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invariably situated this discourse in relation to global discourses and

castigated the Indian government for refusing to see caste-based oppres-
sion as another form of racist discrimination (Pal 9–16; horat 67–80;
Shinde). Others have argued that a transnational Dalit politics and
movement seems to be emerging (Smith).
Dalit claims narratives move from the local to the global when taken
up in forums such as the 2002 World Conference Against Racism. his
move enables the making of what homas Laqueur has termed a “moral
imagination” to expand the capacity to feel the “exigency of wrongs suf-
fered by strangers at a distance” (Laqueur 134). Once more I return to
the question of imagination: to be able, when called upon, to imagine
distant sufering when we consume the narrative we hold in our hands.
It is in the global circulation of local wrongs via narrative that I ind
Dalit life writing’s insertion into universal discourses of rights.
Dalit life narratives also carve out a space for themselves within Indian
public space—what sociologists following Nancy Fraser’s inluential for-
mulation have termed “counter-publics”—and discourses of rights. In
some cases, this aspect of Dalit writing can be traced back to the nine-
teenth century (Fraser; Rege 32; Constable; Beth). Gopal Guru points
out that Dalits need to retain their unique cultural identity and pleads
for Dalit collective and cultural rights as diferent but equal “citizens”
within Indian rights discourses. Dalits claim justice from Indian society
because they envisage, rightly, their oppression as a collective condition
within Indian society.
But how do Dalit communities form a counter-public? hey do so
by presenting afective narratives of sufering, thereby generating what I
have called “claims narratives.” Human rights claims are implicit within
narratives of atrocity in which the atrocity proceeds from an unjust
social order. My reading of these texts as trauma narratives suggests a
narrative form that seeks to capture and convey a horriic social system.
he trauma narrative and the related strategies of performance, staging,
and witnessing enable the narrator to move beyond herself to a larger
community, and therefore to stake a (rights) claim on behalf of that
community. he body of Dalit life writing constitutes a tradition of
such trauma-afect-claims narratives of human rights violations. As I

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have argued elsewhere in the case of women’s writing from India, these
texts represent an “archive of trauma”.7
Further, this archive of trauma in Dalit life writing invites readers to
map a comparative history of trauma, inasmuch as it embodies “afect”
that can reach across geographical and political barriers. here is consid-
erable risk, of course, in calling for such a history, because oppression is
not the same in either form or impact across the world. Such a homog-
enization erases the speciicities of the local in favour of over-arching
connections on the global level. Occasionally, the interaction of the local
and global is conlictual, and so to subsume the local (Dalits in India,
blacks in the United States, Aboriginals in Canada and Australia) under
the global may perpetuate the very structural inequalities that produce
the trauma. Nevertheless, it may be possible to think of a solidarity of
sufering through which victims can constitute a new political order that
restrains, in however minimal a fashion, the march of global oppression.
Ashis Nandy proposes a system in which territories and expressions
of sufering can be linked, a schema that can be productively applied to
demonstrate how a comparative history of trauma can be developed.
Nandy, arguing a case for treating the hird World’s sufering as repre-
sentative of global sufering, writes:
he only way the hird World can transcend the sloganeering of its
well-wishers

is, irst, by becoming a collective representation of the victims

of man-made sufering everywhere in the world and in all past
times; second, by internalizing or owning up to the outside
forces of oppression and, then, coping with them as inner vec-
tors; and third by recognizing the oppressed or marginalized
selves of the First and Second Worlds as civilizational allies in
the battle against institutionalized sufering. (Nandy, “hird
World Utopia” 441)

R. Radhakrishnan proposes that Nandy suggests an entirely diferent

“content” for hird World utopias based on sufering (97) and makes
a case for seeing sufering as a “universal and omni-locational phenom-
enon” (98–99). On the contrary, I have elsewhere argued that Nandy

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proposes nothing short of an “afective cosmopolitanism that “builds

on afect, empathy and an ethics of recognition of the Other’s sufering”
(Nayar, “Afective Cosmopolitanism” 8).
Nandy’s “afective cosmopolitanism” constitutes a comparative his-
tory of trauma, mapping sufering across places and thereby generating a
new geography of the world, which provides a record of absent, abused,
and rejected human rights. Comparative histories of trauma therefore
are not only about Rwanda or Abu Ghraib or India, about blacks or
Pathans or Dalits. hey expand the notion of “human rights” to include
all peoples whose rights have been eroded and who have sufered as a
result. Nandy’s call to respond to the sufering of the Other is answered
by treating Dalit life writing in a global literary context (thereby also of-
fering a new vision of “world literatures”). his literary context, in turn,
allows human rights to live up to their potential universality.
While this might seem a homogenizing move that erases the histori-
cal speciicity of sufering (surely the genocides of Rwanda, the torture
in Abu Ghraib, and the intergenerational trauma of Indian Dalits are
diferent), I view such a homogenizing as essential if human rights dis-
courses have to be relevant to all parts of the world. Drawing upon
Nandy’s work, I propose a cosmopolitanism of afect and sufering in
order to facilitate a cosmopolitanism of human rights and emancipa-
tory movements. If such a cosmopolitanism demands a certain (admit-
tedly problematic) homogenizing, then I advocate it as a cost in the
cause of a global discourse of sufering and human rights. he sufering
Dalit within life writing narratives develops a certain subject-position.
his subject position can be aligned with similar sufering subject-posi-
tions worldwide, even if their sufering emerges from diferent contexts.
Such a literature of sufering generates what I call abject-types (in line
with “archetypes” and, in the context of cyberculture, what Nakamura
terms “cybertypes”). Abject-types are igures of abjection occurring in
literatures of trauma across the world that are remarkably similar to
each other and that possess qualities that are iterable out of context (for
instance, in terms of “staging” and “performance,” afect and corporeal-
ity). Abject-types, I propose, are tropes in the discourse of sufering and
are universal.

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I must stress that I view Dalit life writing texts as developing the
theme of human rights only implicitly via discourses of trauma, testi-
mony, and the representation of abject-types. I am more concerned with
the appropriation of these texts in global contexts. How best can we
incorporate these texts into a global discourse of trauma? I have outlined
the answer in the preceding two paragraphs: we should treat these texts
as demonstrating human rights violations and locate them within inter-
textual networks of similar discourses and literary texts. We should see
them as embodying sufering from varied locations and political forma-
tions but uniied in their emphasis on sufering and injustice. hey may
not explicitly address human rights philosophies, politics, or conven-
tions—that task is left to us when we “consume” these texts and respond
ethically to them.
Life writing texts across continents and cultures help to deine the
locations where human rights are absent or insuicient. If, as Brooks
argues, testimonios serve “intercultural exchange” (187), Dalit life writ-
ing is a genre that simultaneously foregrounds the uniqueness of the
caste-based oppression in Indian society and aligns itself with trauma
narratives from around the world. It inds its place beside trauma nar-
ratives from Guatemala, Sudan, Rwanda, Serbia, and any location in
which the “human” is called into question and redeined as the abject.

Notes
1 here is, of course, a paradox in that the Dalit narrative seeks to deconstruct
“caste” as part of its political agenda yet also grounds caste oppression as “em-
bodied subjectivity” that reinstates the Dalit body as “abject-type.” While ac-
knowledging the risks involved in such an essentialism as “abject-type,” I also see
it as necessary to the Dalit narrative’s focus on corporeal and emotional trauma.
Trauma cannot be explained merely as an abstract condition. In the Dalit case
it requires a body, even if in the process of essentialising the Dalit’s abject-body
trauma reinstates caste diference and stereotypes. I see abject-types as an ante-
rior moment to deconstructing caste where the Dalit narrative shows the trau-
matized body to foreground afect, trauma, and injustice.
2 I adapt here Hirsch’s work on the “transgenerational transmission of trauma.”
3 he problematics of authenticating atrocity narratives is beyond the scope of this
essay. However, I acknowledge the signiicance of questions such as what kind of
“internal” authentication—ethnographic details, historical facts, or experiential

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accounts—is possible in texts documenting social or historical atrocities (for

instance, in African American slave narratives; contemporary domestic abuse
narratives; or war survivor memoirs)? And what constitutes external authentica-
tion? Who is “qualiied” to authenticate the narrative? And what role does doubt
on the part of witnesses play in authenticity (see Goldberg)?
4 here is, of course, considerable risk involved in representing poverty and sufer-
ing. Such narratives have been accused on a regular basis in mainstream Indian
newspapers of using Indian/Asian/African poverty as a saleable commodity, as an
exotic form of pornography (commonly referred to as “poverty porn”) catering
to elite (Western) audiences. How does one distinguish the Dalit’s self-repre-
sentation of authentic sufering from the sensationalized “poverty porn” of, say,
Danny Boyle (whose ilm Slumdog Millionaire, much reviled in India, won eight
Oscars)? Whose politics and what politics (emancipation? commodiication for
proit?) are served by the representations?
5 See Nayar, “Bama’s Karukku.”
6 See Nayar, “Bama’s Karukku.”
7 See Nayar, “Trauma, Testimony and Human Rights.”

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