The Consciousness of Dalit Selfhood: Narration of History in Dalit Autobiographies

Abstract

The proposed study analyses the construction of the dalit selfhood in two dalit autobi-
ographies, Aravind Malagatti’s Government Brahmana and Baby Kamble’s The Prisons
We Broke by using history as a dominant metaphor. Both the texts contest the construc-
tion of the Indian elitist history and involve an intense engagement with history itself.
The self narratives which have brought to the centre-stage a gendered marginalised
self through a gendered genre create a new literary space where the registers of aes-
thetic and literary are formulated. The writing of the self by the marginalised results in
writing of resistance and the texts emerge as a site for reclaiming the lost histories.