The word and the world: Dalit aesthetics as a critique of everyday life

The early phase of Dalit sahitya (literature) drew quite centrally on descriptive and critical practices associated with both anti-caste thought and Marxism to produce an urban literature which foregrounded the Dalit subaltern as an agent of social transformation. This article gives a prehistory of the 1950s and 1960s Dalit sahitya and argues that Dalit writing is a form of immanent critique that addresses the changing relationship of caste, capital and Bombay's distinctive urbanity. Rather than focus on the "literariness" of Dalit sahitya, the article argues that one should bracket the question of the literariness of Dalit literature, and focus instead on those forms of linguistic concreteness, or practices of naming and description that politicized key aspects of subaltern life. Herein lies the prehistory of a recognizable Dalit poetics, one that relates writing to urbanity, and Dalit Bombay to Bombay modern.