Overview

This collection of twelve essays foregrounds the conjunction of a social phenomenon called “caste” with a genre of representation called “life narratives” in diverse modes and languages. Life narratives have long been a constitutive archive and a performative mode for testifying to the breadth and ferocity of caste oppression and for articulating a language of caste dissent. This book covers a variety of modes of representing “actual lives” in whole or in fragments -- in autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, ethnographic interviews, nonfictional references within fiction, biopics, legal testimonies, art work, memoirs, Facebook posts, blogs, confessional poetry, and most tragically, a suicide note. The book uses the notion of “Critical Caste Studies”, which is vitally animated by Dalit Studies, but is not coterminous with it. While acknowledging the unique status of Dalit and Dalibahujan perspectives, it takes to heart that caste is not the lived reality of Dalits alone and, accordingly, a critical study of caste cannot be their burden alone. The collection is interdisciplinary, interlinguistic, intercultural, international, and comparative. It represents a range of disciplines, including art criticism, education, film studies, history, law, literary criticism, management studies, and sociology. It coversa diversity of languages, archives, regions, cultural traditions, genres, themes, identities and personae. Drawing from postcolonial, Dalit and Critical Caste Studies, it offers unique theoretical and methodological perspectives, provoking new ways of entering into the burgeoning study of caste.