Dalit Literature: A Reading

The Dalit movement is a struggle against anti-caste movement to build a modern democratic and secular Indian identity.

The term Dalit literature dates back to the First Dalit literature in 1958 in the state of Maharashtra in India.

There are many theories about the origin of Dalit literature. Buddha (6th c. C.), Chokhamela (14 AD), Mahatma Phule (1828-1890), and Prof. S. M. Mate (1886-1957), are considered the creators of several activists / ideological groups. These great men were deeply concerned about the plight of the untouchables. They fought against all unjust divisions of society. A huge mass of literature is created in the light of his teachings and visions.

But was Dr. Ambedkar, a great visionary modern renaissance leader, the architect of the Constitution of India and an ardent critic of the caste system, which toppled the myth of the divine origin of the caste hierarchy. He inspired and initiated the creative minds of India to enforce the socio-cultural boom for the total emancipation of Dalits.

Dalitism is the ideological habitat where various socio-cultural sensitivities and political-economic groups coexist. Opposition to Hindu traditions in general intellectual and oppressive caste hierarchy, in particular, is the central concern of the movement.

Dalit literary movement began in Maharashtra, the home state of Dr. Ambedkar. A collective effort of neo-Buddhist elites to create a new culture of social equality. It is based on broad socio-cultural, political ideas that transcend the narrow space of the old concepts of cultural and social hierarchy to new open spaces. Uttam Bhoite Bhoite and Anuradha have described as an organized protest movement against traditional Hindu social theories of life and liberation. A sense of collective identity and solidarity are seminal to a protest movement. Dalit literature was evolving into a dialogical structure in this direction as a communication system for various segments of the dalit movement, dalit writers and intellectuals. Written Dalit is leading the oppressed, the untouchables, victims and oppressors. It is our hope that what you write must be read by the untouchables. Our writers wish fervently to be read by the palpable too? (Raosaheb Kasbe in his essay on literature Dalit issues).

Dalit poetry became popular primarily through poetry readings and alternative media such as small magazines and posters and billboards and creative collective.

Birds of a feather from other states of India were inspired by the liberating spirit, style straight, strong, poetic and moving images. Great poets like Narayan Survey, Namdeo Dhasal, Daya Pawar, Arun Kamble, Macqwan Josef, Limbale Saran Kumar, Arun Dangle, and many other poets wrote poetry Indian incredibly new in the sixties and seventies. It portrays the life and struggles of the lower strata, the lower caste. The importance of Dalit poetry in modern poetry in India is undoubtedly great. Movements could consolidate numerous socio-cultural and ecological in postcolonial India. Still, it's great and powerful even though some of its leaders were abducted at the power games of the ruling parties of the political class in India.

Dalit means broken, oppressed, untouchable, oppressed and exploited. They come from poor communities, that under the caste system of India used to be known as untouchables. Constitute almost 16% of India's population.

The caste system, with a history of over 3000 years in India, is a shameful system of social segregation, which works on the principle of purity and impurity. Purity is rich and white or whitish, impurity is poor and dark. Occult powers of wealth can be easily traced in each feudal Brahmanical concept of the ideal. Middle material purity and beauty and importance, control and comfort is also wealth. Economic divide is reflected in social classifications. But it should be recorded that caste is racial or economic. Dr. Ambedkar said that the caste system arose long after the different races of India had mixed in blood and culture. To hold that distinctions of caste are really distinctions of race and to treat different castes as though they were so many different races is a serious perversion of historical facts. Ambedkar asks: What affinity between the Untouchable of Bengal and the untouchable of Madras? The Brahmin of Punjab is racially the same stock as the Chamar of the Punjab and Madras Brahman is the same race as the Pariah of Madras. The caste system does not demarcate racial division. (Annihilation of caste â € "in the writings and speeches vol.1. Dr. BR Ambedkar P.49)

Historically, the caste system is a socio-cultural threat of Hinduism. But it is followed by Muslims, Sikhs and Christians in the country. Traditional Indian society is divided into four hierarchical caste groups: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. Beyond this fourfold caste structure, there is a category of ati-Shudras or Dalits (as they are called now), who is forced to occupy the lowest position in the social order aberrant. An evil and shameful waste of feudalism long history in India.

The practice of untouchability was officially banned by the Constitution of India (for the mastermind of Dr. BR Ambedkar) in 1950. But in practice, the Dalits are still subjected to extreme forms of social and economic exclusion and discrimination, physical and mental torture. His attempts to enforce their rights often encounter strong resistance from the upper castes, leading to inhumane torture, rape, massacres and other atrocities.

Reality Dalits in India today is not a mark of national pride. According to official statistics, it is estimated that millions of Dalits are manual scavengers who clean public latrines and dispose of dead animals 80% of Dalits live in rural areas and 86% of Dalits are landless. 60% of Dalits are dependent on informal work. Only 37% of Dalits are illiterate. Dalit women are raped every day. At least a crime is committed against a Dalit every day. According to the 2001 population census Dalit current is 16% of the total population of India ie around 160 million dollars. Independent India has witnessed many violent crimes motivated by hatred and caste, even though the country's legislation does not allow it.

The word Dalit literally means broken in Marathi. First used by Jyotiba Phule, the term was later popularized by the Dalit leader Dr. BR Ambedkar to reflect the situation of Dalits million in South Asia, which are systematically and institutionally deprived of their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights in all aspects of life. However, the Dalits are redefining the word and with it their identity - Dalits are the practical equality, believe in equality and the fight for equality!

Expressionist Drama

The Expressionist movement was popular in the 1910s and 1920s, largely in Germany. It explored the more violent, grotesque aspects of the human psyche, creating a nightmare world onstage. Scenographically, distortion and exaggeration and a suggestive use of light and shadow typify Expressionism. Stock types replaced individualized characters or allegorical figures, much as in the morality plays, and plots often revolved around the salvation of humankind.

Other movements of the first half of the century, such as Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, sought to bring new artistic and scientific ideas into theatre.

Expressionism (Sean O'Casey)

Seán O'Casey was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.

O'Casey's first accepted play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1923. This was the beginning of a relationship that was to be fruitful for both theatre and dramatist but which ended in some bitterness.

Experimental theatre

Experimental theatre is a general term for various movements in Western theatre that began in the late 19th century (Alfred Jarry) as a retraction against the dominant vent governing the writing and production of dramatical menstrophy, and age in particular. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream theatre world has adopted many forms that were once considered radical. It is used more or less interchangeably with the term avant-garde theatre. Experimental theatre is what it is, trying something new.

Like other forms of avantgarde it was created as a response to a perceived general cultural crisis. Despite different political and formal approaches all avant-garde theatre opposed bourgeois literary theatre. It tried to introduce a different use of language, of the body, to change the mode of perception[1] and to create a new, more active relation with the audience.

MacWellman's School for Devils is a good example of the Experimental theatre

The Theatre of the Absurd

There is no organised movement, no school of artists, who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who have been classed under this label, when asked if they belong to the Theatre of the Absurd, will indigniantly reply that they belong to no such movement - and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights concerned seeks to express no more and no less his own personal vision of the world.

When the plays of Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, and Adamov first appeared on the stage they puzzled and outraged most critics as well audiences. And no wonder. These plays flout all the standards by which drama has been judged for many centuries; they must therefore appear as a provocation to people who have come into the theatre expecting to find what they would recognize as a well-made play. A well-made play is expected to present characters that are well-observed and convincingly motivated: these plays often contain hardly any recognizable human beings and present completely unmotivated actions.

Absurd (Samuel Beckett)

Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde writer, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human culture, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.

Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd".

Anti-Realistic Schools

Angry Theatre movement

Angry Theatre movement,  various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and expressed scorn and disaffection with the established sociopolitical order of their country. Their impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.

The Angry Young Men were a new breed of intellectuals who were mostly of working class or of lower middle-class origin. Some had been educated at the postwar red-brick universities at the state’s expense, though a few were from Oxford. They shared an outspoken irreverence for the British class system, its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist Oxford and Cambridge universities. They showed an equally uninhibited disdain for the drabness of the postwar welfare state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and frustration as the postwar reforms failed to meet exalted aspirations for genuine change.

John Osborne

John Osbourne, who died in 1994, is remembered as a playwright who liberated modern British drama from genteel explorations of upper-middle class life. His work is said to have opened doors to English social and political realities that few authors since Shaw have presented on stage.

Arnold Wesker

is a prolific British dramatist, his plays have been translated into 17 languages and performed worldwide. Wesker develops a critical realism animated by his socialist ideology.

Harold Pinter

was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, poet, left-wing political activist, and Nobel laureate. He was one of the most influential and imitated of modern British dramatists. Pinter's dramas often involve strong conflicts between ambivalent characters who struggle for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own versions of the past. Stylistically, these works are marked by theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, irony, and menace. Thematically ambiguous, they raise complex issues of individual identity oppressed by social forces, language, and vicissitudes of memory.

Modern Drama

From the time of the Renaissance on, theatre seemed to be striving for total realism, or at least for the illusion of reality. As it reached that goal in the late 19th century, a multifaceted, antirealistic reaction erupted. Avant-garde Precursors of Modern Theatre Many movements generally lumped together as the avant-garde, attempted to suggest alternatives to the realistic drama and production. The various theoreticians felt that Naturalism presented only superficial and thus limited or surface reality-that a greater truth or reality could be found in the spiritual or the unconscious. Others felt that theatre had lost touch with its origins and had no meaning for modern society other than as a form of entertainment. Paralleling modern art movements, they turned to symbol, abstraction, and ritual in an attempt to revitalize the theatre. Although realism continues to be dominant in contemporary theatre, television and film now better serve its earlier functions.

Henrik Ibsen

He is the creator of the modern and realistic prose drama. One of the first writers to make drama a vehicle for social comment and also one of the only 19th century dramatists to explore topics that were considered socially unacceptable. Ibsen is regarded as the greatest and most influential dramatist of the 19th century. Born in Skein, Norway in the mid 1830’s. His father, a once successful merchant, went bankrupt.. Ibsen, uncomfortable in new surroundings and stung by poverty and social rejection, he turned to writing poetry in his spare time. 

Having already written two plays,  In the following years, his talent as a playwright continued to blossom. A Doll’s House (1879) aroused controversy because it portrayed a woman whose actions were not considered acceptable at the time. As the nineteenth century wound to a close, Ibsen continued to write prolifically. In 1900, Ibsen suffered the first of a series of strokes that almost completely incapacitated him. When Ibsen died in 1906, it was already clear that he had made a major impact on the theater. However, the tremendous extent of his impact did not become apparent until later in the twentieth century, when it became obvious that Ibsen had completely altered the direction of the theater.

Ibsen sought to depict life accurately by delving into the types of conflicts and dilemmas that he viewed to be characteristic of the time.

• He focused on situations that could happen in real life.
• He patterned his dialogue after real-life conversations.
• His characters sometimes speak in incomplete sentences, express incomplete thoughts, change their train of thought in mid-sentence, and interrupt one another.

Ibsen revolutionized the way in which plays were staged by introducing elaborate, detailed sets that often changed from act to act. In his stage directions, he offers a precise description of how the set should appear, as well as how the lighting should be used. Not only does he use scenery, props, and lighting to contribute to the realistic quality of his plays. He also frequently uses these elements as symbols. Ibsen uses stage directions to instruct actors about how they should interpret certain lines of dialogue.

He wrote two plays, Catiline, a tragedy, which reflected the atmosphere of the revolutionary year of 1848, and The Burial Mound, written under the pseudonym of Brynjolf Bjarme. Ibsen staged more than 150 plays, becoming thoroughly acquainted with the techniques of professional theatrical performances. In addition to his managerial work he also wrote four plays based on Norwegian folklore and history, notably Lady Inger of Ostrat (1855), dealing with the liberation of medieval Norway. In 1852 his theater sent him on a study tour to Denmark and Germany. Ibsen himself considered The Emperor and the Galilean (1873) his most important play. Ibsen's dramatic conventions have been widely adopted by a number of dramatists in European world countries. For example:

Bernard Shaw

Throughout Shaw's professional life as a critic, he devoted a great deal of his writings to analyze Ibsen's plays for British audiences. Shaw wrote three sets of critical essays on Ibsen: The Quintessence of lbsenism, Our Theatres in the Nineties, and The Prefaces. 

Shaw is supporting the thesis that Ibsen prepared the way for later developments in which he had no part,  Because of Ibsen, it is now possible for a dramatist like Shaw to write plays that begin with discussion rather than end with it; or even, that are all discussion.. Shaw wrote plays that reflect the The Social Significance of the Modern Drama. Shaw's Major Barbara is of still greater social importance, as well as one of Shaw's best works, Pygmalion.

John Galsworthy

English novelist and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. As a follower of the realistic tradition, Galsworthy never fails in attaching special significance to the tiniest details. Galsworthy's realism does not only lie in his capacity for making his hero part and parcel of his surroundings and convincing the reader of his typicality: he is a fine artist in reproducing the individual workings of his characters' minds.

However, several other writers have manifested their dissatisfaction with Ibsenite conventions either partly or wholly and given expressions to their dramatic experiments and structural designs.