Concealing Caste: Narratives of Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature

Kusuma Satyanarayanan · Joel Lee

Jän. 2023 · Oxford University Press

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The caste system is supposed to be inescapable-you cannot change the caste into which you are born. But are there ways to elude the system? Concealing Caste tells the stories of women and men in India who, though born into communities stigmatized as 'untouchable,' are perceived by others as 'high caste.' Like the literature on racial passing in the American context, the short stories and autobiographical essays in this volume reveal the inner workings of a vicious social order, illuminating the contradictions of caste hierarchy through the experience of those who clandestinely transgress its boundaries. Concealing Caste is the first collection of Dalit writings focused on this public secret. Bringing together Dalit literature from Marathi, Telugu, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, English and Malayalam-including stories and essays never before translated-this landmark anthology illustrates the agonizing choices and at times devastating consequences faced by Dalits who experiment with identity in a society shot through with the principle of birth-based inequality.

Autoren-Profil

K. Satyanarayana is a professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Language University, Hyderabad, India. He co-edited two volumes of new Dalit writing: No Alphabet in Sight (2011), Steel Nibs Are Sprouting (2013), Dalit Studies (2016) and, most recently, Dalit Text (2020). His research interests are in the fields of Dalit studies, literary history, and cultural theory. Joel Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College, Massachusetts, USA. He is the author of Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion (2021), and his research interests lie in the critical analysis of caste, sensory studies, popular religion, and Hindi and Urdu literature.