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.
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