1

Vernacular Modernity and Dalit Identity: A Study of the Boosa Movement in Karnataka

Abstract

This article discusses Boosa movement literature, coming up in the 1970s in Karnataka,
as addressing a range of concerns—from the indignities of caste-based discrimination to
vernacular reflections on a synthesized modernity. I argue that in their communication of the ills
faced by the dalits, the works carefully craft a distinct vernacular identity in the context of
national literary projects and sublate questions of caste into the hybridization engendered by
translation. The first section looks into how Boosa writers navigate the nationalist literary
projects and assumptions around dalit writings in the Kannada language. Second, it explores the
ideals of literary modernism as standardized within English literary practice and offers ways of
rethinking contrasting representative styles that simultaneously grapple with an incongruous
modernity that overlooks caste-based discriminations and vernacular rhetorical practices. Lastly,
it looks into the ways in which translation reconstructs and validates identities that are otherwise
delegitimized: the housing of the texts in the English language layers meaning that allows for a
branching out of lived identity.

The Boosa movement in Kannada literature, which started during the 1970s, bore a close-
knit connection with the political activism of the Dalit Sangharsh Samiti (DSS), so much so that
the event that marked the inception of the literary movement also proved to be the crowning
moment of the formation of the DSS. Many of the poets and writers who spear-headed the
literary movement also played active roles in upholding and extending the revolutionary fervor
of the DSS.1 Emergence of the Boosa movement is then critically intertwined with the political
necessity for defining a legitimate, modern, vernacular identity—independent of the identity
bestowed by the English language and inspite of the crippling caste identity that had held back
the progress of certain castes.2 The movement enabled the dalits of Karnataka to formulate a
literary identity of their own that did not originate solely for the purpose of writing back to or of
being included in literature produced in the English language. The rapid spread of the radical

1 See Dominic Davidappa’s “Emergence of the DSS in Karnataka: Contesting society, state, and bureaucracy from
below” (2012), submitted as a conference paper to the research group “Caste out of Development”, formed by the
School of Oriental & African Studies.
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ideals of the Boosa movement and the vivid popularity of the poets contributed to what became
one of the defining moments of caste criticism in Indian history.

The term “boosa”, referring to chaff in colloquial Kannada, was evoked by the minister
of town administration, B. Basavalingappa, at a seminar on Progressive Writers Forum at
Mysore in Novermber 19, 1973, to symbolize the uselessness of much of the literature written in
Kannada. K. Satyanarayana and S. Tharu in the edited anthology Steel Nibs are Sprouting (2013)
note that while addressing the demand that all education in Karnataka should be in the regional
language, Basavalingappa is reported to have said, “We should have Kannada pride, speak
Kannada, strive to make it grow; but we get ideas, independent thinking, and patriotic feeling by
reading English” (3). The minister’s statement, and the surge of indignation and protests that it
incited, reveals the violent point of intersection between the claims of an indifferent and
homogenizing idea of modernity that finds expression through English and the undocumented
reality of lives that exist outside of the margins of visible languages and identities. The statement
led to a mobilization of poets and writers whose writings asked uncomfortable questions related
to the practice of “untouchability”: the systemic perpetration of and phenomenological
encounters with the practice being unaddressed by the generic solutions for uplifting poverty. By
narrating the lived consequences of the immobilizing practice and offering literary
documentation of emotions related to rights of belonging, which were otherwise suppressed
through the complicity of law during the early 1970s, the Boosa movement examines the
efficacy of a nation-wide appropriation of a self-same modernity.

D. R. Nagaraj in The Flaming Feet (2010) struggles to offer creative autonomy to the
dalit writers. While discussing Siddalingaiah’s autobiography Ooru Keri
(2006), translated into English as A Word with You, World (2013), Nagaraj concludes, “It is not a
novel in the Western sense of the genre; it is a reincarnation of age-old folk traditions” (195).
Nagaraj’s statement reveals the amorphous quality of Siddalingaiah’s writing, refusing tailoring
into the available genre of the European novel. 3 The apparent stitching together of existing folk

2
Identifying the importance for bringing in discussions on caste in literary criticism, S. Shankar in Flesh and Fish
Blood (2012) argues that the very act of caste-based discriminations determine the extent to which the topic of caste
is emphasized in postcolonial studies (28).
3
Olakunle George in his reading of the works of the African writer D. O. Fagunwa argues for the difference
between the “tale” and the “novel” and for a greater openness towards the structural interpretation of third-world
texts.
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narratives, for Nagaraj, places the autobiography stoutly within the tradition of Indian literature,
and as a result, it becomes unnecessary to formulate a separate category of dalit writing as their
“otherness” sublates into the super-object of “Indian” writing. In a statement that appears too
constrained by its own presumptions, Nagaraj claims: “Dalit creativity is marked by specific
forms of contestation; it challenges the hegemonic modes of segregation. It also celebrates the
capacity of the human mind to uphold the essential spiritual dignity of being” (195). The
challenge that dalit writing poses to “hegemonic modes of segregation” is read by Nagaraj as a
form of cultural assertion: the kind that nestles into categories already on offer to the dalits.
Again, any engagement with the “spiritual dignity of being” invariably points towards an affinity
with Indian (Hindu) religious beliefs and further precludes any dalit necessity for an alternate
and dissident spiritual anchoring of identity.

The Boosa poet, Siddalingaiah, whose verse continuously voices a vigorous non-
acceptance of discrimination against dalits, faces the injustice of criticism gleaned from the
Frankfurt school. Nagaraj writes:

“Theodor Adorno, had warned Europeans about the structures of hidden domination in
the language of the urban working classes. The limited imagery of this collection pointed
to a great problem of Dalit poetry. The language of modern political rage reduced the
capacity of the Dalit poet to strike hard”. (200)

Nagaraj’s criticism is typical of inclusive critical projects produced at the turn of the millennium
in India whose unearthing of original literary imagination in India requires a specifically
European lens. I read Siddalingaiah’s poetry as refracting the genre of the lyric through the
registers of protest songs and slogans: the end product being a cross-investment of both self and
community in a form that historically offers greater leeway to the individual. Nagaraj nominates
Boosa writer, Devanoora Mahadeva’s works as typifying the second objective of dalit writing,
that of “uphold[ing] the essential spiritual dignity of being”. Without going into debates
concerning the “essential” in spirituality, my reading of Mahadeva’s short story “Tar Comes”,
anatomizes the wide range of concerns that the writing discloses—from the corruptions set in
motion in the name of religion to the incongruous experience of modernity for the dalits.
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Boosa movement as a politicization of the sentiments of the underprivileged is at once an

assertion of the alterity of lived experience of those who face caste-based discrimination as well
as a negation of the penchant for locating oneself within the nationalistic centre of literary
production. Baburao Bagul, in his article “Dalit Literature is but Human Literature”, published in
Arjun Dangle’s Poisoned Bread (2009), critiques this submerging of difference under an
apparent portrayal of the interests of the dalits within the tradition of Indian literary history.4 He
states that the marginalized characters within Hindu caste system find representation in literature
only to uphold Hindu principles of life:

Heroes such as Karna and Eklavya are, as a matter of fact, reconciled to the varna
system; they are courageous, but because they have been denied the place they deserved
in the system, they view life only in terms of suffering; these heroes, because they have
been rejected by religion, become simply toys in hands of fate. Such heroes offer a lot of
suffering, high drama, a good deal of conflict and intense aesthetic pleasure; they easily
offer an opportunity to express a fatalistic ideology, which is nothing but a taking refuge
in religion in order to adjust to the demands of a class-society. (289)

For Bagul, this assimilation of the distinctiveness of dalit experience within the larger narrative
of Hindu beliefs offers no creative potential to the dalits. Against this, literature written by the
Boosa writers, with their open flouting of religious norms and values, offers to radically
transform urban elite sensibilities.

Speaking on the distinctiveness of dalit identity in a more recent interview given in 2005,
Bagul states that Indian literature is largely characterized by the prevalence of Hindu beliefs. He
claims, “The whole of Indian literature is deeply rooted in Hindu thought. The development that
has taken place in today’s India is heavily influenced by this Hindu ideology” (“Sh Baburao
Bagul, in Conversation with Anita Bharti, DLS”, 00:08:59-00:09:30). Bagul’s criticism of the
imposition of the ambiguous category of the “national” on the diverse range of literature
produced within a political territory holds true not only for dalit writing but also for regional
literatures produced across different states in India. In fact, it highlights the short-sighted critical
practice that emphasises the “national” identity of literatures produced in non-European
languages in order to build a comprehensive dialogue between the literary centres and their

4
See “Indian Literary Culture as Hindu” (pp 5-6) in Satyanarayana’s article “The political and aesthetic significance
of contemporary Dalit literature” (2017) for detailed discussion on Bagul’s criticism of Nagaraj’s argument.
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peripheries. 5 Bagul’s statement addresses this very tendency of couching up different literary
and, subsequently, political identities between generalized representations of the “national”,
which according to Bagul are deeply entrenched in Hindu ideas and beliefs. Exploring the social,
political and cultural differences that are brought out through the practice of literature identifies
the aporias inherent in any narrative of a nation-state.

The Boosa movement, like the Hungry Generation Movement in Bengal that preceded it,
does not operate within the projected paradigms of national literature. Its open refuting of the
linguistic structures that tacitly suppress political identity of the dalits discloses its motivations
for remaining at the subversive edges of Indian literary production. The Boosa writers discussed
here imaginatively reconstitute dalit identity as opposed to the economically and culturally
privileged literary space of the “Hindu” nation. The canonization of their texts in school
textbooks, for example, the poem “A, AA and” by Govindaiah, then, point towards a conflicted
cultural rehabilitation of dalit identity: a cultural incorporation that in its circulation promotes the
breaking down of margins instituted by Hindu narratives.

Incommensurate national identities

In an interview given in August, 2016, Siddalingaiah emphasies the undying necessity for
characterizing the identity and freedom of the dalits as different from that of the non-dalits.
Nearly four decades after the inception of the DSS and the Boosa Movement, the economic
inequalities and wide-spread discrimination based on caste identity is still very relevant. In the
interview with Anisha Sheth, Siddalingaiah points out the epistemic difference between freedom
understood as “swatantrya” in Hindi and freedom as “bidugade” in Kannada implicit in the
poem, “Yaarige Bantu Yellige Bantu Nalavattera Swatantrya” or “For Whom, and Where did the
Freedom of 47 come?” (Sheth “Freedom, Caste and Ambedkar: An Interview with Kannada
Writer Siddalingaiah”). The poem draws attention to the “freedom” or “swatantrya” gained in
1947 as essentially a nationalist construct that catered to the needs of a select group of people.
Translated as “swantantrya”, freedom signifies the ability to rule over oneself, while freedom

5
Critics like David Damrosch in What is World Literature? (2003) to Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of
Letters (2008) have emphasized the economical factors that determine the circulation and value of literary texts in
literary “centres”. Opposing them, critics like Taylor A. Eggan have pointed out the inadequacies in reading the
motives of all literature as a dream of integration into the literary production of economically subtended cultural
centres. For further discussion, please see Eggan’s “Regionalizing the Planet: Horizons of the Introverted Novel at
World Literature’s End”. PMLA. Volume 131, Number 5, October 2016. pp 1299-1316.
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taken as “bidugade”, a meaning that Siddalingaiah believes to hold greater relevance for the
dalits, designates the condition of being released from bondage. The incommensurability of these
two meanings of freedom projects a disparity between the experience of freedom for the
privileged and the under-privileged, between the isolated hermeneutics of the past and the
humbled hopes for the present.

The non-applicability of “swatantrya” to refer to the experiential world of the dalits

reveals the need for a language that speaks to and expresses the personal anguish and individual
anxieties of the dalits. The development of the Boosa movement served to provide just that by
increasing the currency of specific dalit concerns within the purview of the Kannada language,
which were then held out to the world of the critics and the masses alike. Writing of the
developments and the progress made by the Boosa movement, Satyanarayana and Tharu write,
“If the boosa chaluvali had begun as a reaction, it soon transformed into a proactive movement.
Rather than a bargain for space in the brahminical, Sanskritic and self-consciously national mode
of elite Kannada culture, these activists created their own space. Kannada culture, they said,
belonged to them as much as it did to anyone else” (9). Laying claims to the Kannada language
marked the beginning of a movement that sought to legitimize dalit experiences—such as the
irremediable kinship with poverty, the fortuitous reception of education and the malignant
experience of untouchability—as unwanted but unavoidable every day realities for the lowest
castes in India. Thus, instead of writing with the intention of being included in a largely
connected, predominantly Hindu narrative, produced within a space sanitized through casteist
segregation, the Boosa writers sought to embrace and project a discontinuous modernity in their
writings.

Robert J. C. Young in the article, “That Which is Casually Called a Language”

anatomizes the non-viability of a unitary language as representative of the entire nation. He
writes, “It was not simply that particular languages were engineered, largely for political
purposes, but that in order to represent the nation, the concept of language had to be dreamt up as
well” (Young 1208).6 Young’s statement supports the politics that crafted the identity of regional
languages and their literatures in India: many of whose literary value were decided in relation to

6
Young refers to the works of Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook in Disinventing and Reconstituting
Languages (2007) in order to historicise his statement about the invented nature of languages and their role in
offering nationality to geographical regions.
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the writings produced in the Hindi language. Sharing Young’s insight and extrapolating his
argument further into the question of caste politics in India, I argue that the writings of the Boosa
poets helped validate the experiences of the dalits as legitimate, varying, and politically opposed
to the popularly communicated, nation-friendly regional identities circulated within the Kannada
language, upto the Boosa movement in the 1970s. The model of aesthetic sensibilities expressed
in the English language and the European notion of literary modernity, a vouching for which led
to the resignation of Basavalingappa, had served as the symbol of high culture in Kannada
literature for the past decades. Most prominently, the works of Gopalakrishna Adiga (“The Path
Traversed”, 1952) sought inspiration from those of the high modernists such as T. S. Eliot and
W. H. Auden.

Again, poetry of G. S. Shivarudrappa and K. S. Narasimhaswamy built a close network

with Hindu religious beliefs and symbols. Very few writers writing prior to the Boosa movement
displayed any interest in engaging with the realities of the lives of the lower castes—particularly
the shudras and the atishudras. Krishnappa, one of the major writers of the Boosa movement,
looks into the rare narrativisation of the lives of the shudras in the novels of Kuvempu, who was
a shudra himself. According to Krishnappa, Kuvempu’s eagerness for garnering visibility for the
experience of the shudras within the literary collective of the nation led him to Sanskritise the
language used in novels like Malegalalli Madumagalu (The Bride of the Hills, 1983). Mistrustful
of Kuvempu’s style, Krishnappa states, “in his eagerness to challenge the bases of brahminical
poetics, Kuvempu lost out on the possibilities offered by vernacular forms [….] Kuvempu failed
to include the dalits who are lower in rank to the shudras (or make artistic use of their language)”
(Krishnappa 65). Emerging within such a literary milieu, the work of the Boosa poets spoke of
experiences that were at the margins of forcibly barricaded thought and imagination.
Disenfranchised of artistic liberties within the extant Kannada literary oeuvre, Boosa writers
produced works that re-contoured caste-based distinctions prevalent in Kannada society of the
70s.

The poetry of Siddalingaiah and Govindaiah and the prose of Mahadeva formulate a
tongue of their own: a writing style which through its rhythm and evocation of culturally
sensitive issues is best suited for drawing attention to the deep-run impoverishment and denial of
rights to the dalits. The illusion of a Kannada language that is empirically available for use by
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members across castes was negated through a dalit writing style that was just as radical as its
content. In his autobiography, A Word with You, World, Siddalingaiah demonstrates a poetic
moment that builds dalit identity around excreta. He writes:

Koduvaru namage jola

Kadime haakuvara kaala

Aaguttade rakta bedhi
Aadaroo kodalollaru ragi godhi
They give us corn,
They give us no gram,
There is blood in our shit,

But they won’t give us ragi or wheat. (Siddalingaiah 87)

Siddalingaiah’s poetry, which doubles as protest songs, uses rhyme for disrupting significations
that restrict dalit identities to the very limits of casteist vision. Characterised within European
modernity as asinine, rhyme in dalit verse validates the seeming non-materiality of the dalit
body: the aural stickiness produced by rhyme stringing together the politics of identity-
effacement, albeit through the paradoxical motivation of excreted substance. Responding to
practices that require dalits to obviate traces of their physical existence, 7 language democratically
nominates excreta as essential to the human: meaning becomes conditional on both the symbolic
inclusion of the waste of the dalits in verse and on the rhyme patterns that carry the verse and
waste—each alternating as the obverse of the other. The interchangeable labio-velar sounds at
the beginning of the two words signal the replaceable quality of dalit representations in society.
Translation into English introduces the strong consonant sounds at the ends of “shit” and

7
Writing on the cultural practices that effectively reduced the lower castes to beings less than humans, Arjun Dangle
in the “Introduction” of Poisoned Bread writes:
Their physical contact was said to ‘pollute’ the upper castes—even their shadow was said to have the same
effect. Hindu religious texts forbade them to wear good clothes or ornaments or even footwear, and
prescribed severe and humiliating punishment for violating these orders [….] The most perverted practice
of untouchability was that which at one time compelled the untouchables to tie an earthen pot around their
necks so that their sputum should not fall to the earth and pollute it. Another was the compulsion to tie a
broom behind them so that their footprints would be erased before others set their eyes on them” (xxi)
Dangle’s description lays bare the cultural malice directed towards the dalits and the cannibalism that Indian society
performed upon the dalit bodies in order to preserve the borders around privilege.
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“wheat”, which aurally hammers in the dual concerns of a discriminatory politics: matter as
sustenance and as excrement, the docile, laboring body and the body in a protest procession.

Untranslatable Difference

As Krishnappa’s criticism of Kuvempu’s novels reveals, it is not enough on part of the

writer to represent characters from the lower castes—the author has to deploy literary
mechanisms that are best suited for such a linguistic remodeling of identity and mapping of
alternate geographies. The nature, extent and political sway of such linguistic experimentations
form prime topics of critical contention. Within the poetry of Siddalingaiah, and in the works of
other Boosa writers, the alterity of dalit experience is emphasized through an import of
difference facilitated by the simile and metaphor. Here is an excerpt from Siddalingaiah’s poem,
“The Dalits are Here”, translated by M. Madhava Prasad and published in the edited anthology
Steel Nibs are Sprouting:

Minds burning with countless dreams,

slogans like thunder and lightning,
in the language of earthquakes,
here comes the dalit procession,

writing [history] with their feet. (159)

The poem’s language, through the evocation of similes, “slogans like thunder and lightning”,
underlines an alternate mode of interpreting the world where the poet’s activity is primarily
affective, rather than descriptive. The poem pronounces itself to be in the “language of the
earthquakes”. The language generates its own seismic waves of correlations: an attack against
the closing in of associations around the dalit self. These impassioned interjections—both private
and public—and their direct proclamations pronounce the poem as the antithesis of English
Modernist writing: comparisons with which led to the mobilization of the movement.

The repeated use of verbs denoting movement, such as “here comes the dalit procession”,
“march the dalits in procession”, and “it breaks out of its shell/ the endless dalit procession”
patterns a transgressive movement across spatial and social barriers through its evocation of a
transcendental lyric time. The repetitive structure both remembers the glutinous Sanskrit verses
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and generates the urgency of slogans. The anonymity of the lyric voice, announcing the
marching of the dalits, provides a narrative distance that counters the ligatures instituted by the
numerous similes and metaphors. The interplay of restraint and intimacy complicates the
experience of the poem, moving from private anguish to collective action. The line, “writing
[history] with their feet” designates the particularised inscription of the history of the dalits as
opposed to the top-down, linear organization of facts. Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, while writing on the experimentations with horizontal
and vertical lines in music and painting, identify a similar cross-spatiotemporal lining up of facts
in historical work: “History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert
themselves into it, or even reshape it)” (295). The writing of history with feet ritualistically
punctures the hierarchical organization of facts, disrupting the order of narratives that push the
marginalized identities downstream. The poem, then, inserts itself into the collective narrative of
the Kannada region but through the voicing of a very specific form of dispossession. The
presence of dalit bodies in spaces that had been kept out of their reach becomes a historical
event; rather than being a negotiation with existing structures of power, the mobilization of dalit
bodies writes history and is in itself history.

The poem “Thousands of Rivers” (Sāvirāru Nadigalu), also translated by Prasad, makes
the physical navigation through the socially imposed categories the main thematic concern. The
first line of the poem, broken into parts, offers the first stanza for the poem: “Yesterday / they
came like a mountain, / did my people” (Siddalingaiah 157). The English translation breaks
down the rhythm of the original Kannada that aurally conjoins “yesterday” (nenna dina) and “my
people” (nanna jana).The rhetorical framing of the phrase “did my people” is typical of Prasad’s
2016 translation; an earlier version of the poem by P. Rama Murthy for the collection A String of
Pearls (1990) translating the Kannada phrase “nanna jana” simply as “my people”. The implied
question in the phrase, repeated thrice in Prasad’s translation, serves two functions: it removes
the language of the poem from that of common speech, and it points towards an ironical
awareness of the fault-lines that obstruct the entry of the dalits into public and literary spaces.

Recent developments in world literature, which operate taking into account uneven
development and altering rhythms of modernities, provide clues for discerning the vital view-
point of the dalit writers. For Nagaraj, Siddalingaiah’s poetry “challenges hegemonic modes of
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segregation”, and yet his criticism offers little room for the verse to establish its own dissenting
identity. The bareness of Siddalingaiah’s verse—the frugal imagery, the repetitiveness of line
and rhythm—imaginatively recreate the paucity of resources available to the lives lived in slums.
Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature (2015) by the
Warwick Research Collective looks at Trotsky’s arguments for “combined and uneven
development” brought about by the forced imposition of capitalistic modes of transactions on
societies that were “un- or only sectorally capitalized” (10). The book proposes that such hybrid
societies propagate a coexistence of archaic and contemporary literary forms, which in turn
qualifies modernity as “a specific cultural form” that “differs according to social forms and
practices” (14). Seen against such trends, criticism of dalit writing should be more of an attempt
to locate the perspective of the dalit writer and the choice of literary devices, rather than a
satellite view of the literary works seen in stark contrast with their more established counterparts.
The vigours of movement—conveyed through the lining up of action verbs—is a symbolic
transgression of reality: what appears revolutionary is so only from the point of view of those
wielding power. For those that utter the verses and invite others to interpellate themselves as
lyric speakers of such verses, a call for collective action and pronounced hostility towards the
addressees of the lyric is an essential part of self-constitution.

Brian Massumi’s statements on the revolutionary potential of the body in The Politics of
Affect further clarify the potential of the representative capacity of Boosa verse. Discussing
Spinoza’s theorization of the body, Massumi writes, “What a body is, he says, is what it can do
as it goes along. This is a totally pragmatic definition. A body is defined by what capacities it
carries from step to step. What these are exactly is changing constantly. A body’s ability to affect
or be affected—its charge of affect—isn’t something fixed” (Massumi 4). Affect, according to
Massumi, is intrinsically connected to the movement of the body and, therefore, cannot be
reduced to the experience of emotion. I argue that the poems, parlaying as protest songs and
slogans, employ the movement of the body in protest as layering the meaning of the poem. The
hermeneutics of the poem cannot, then, be limited to the sentiments projected in verse, which are
both revolutionary attacks on power-centres “sparks of revolution in their eyes/ exploding like
balls of fire” as well as a renunciation of the self, “They became the sky that looked down at / the
seven seas that swallowed them” (Siddalingaiah 159). The poems are part of a community that
has been systematically marginalized by the urban elite, and the meaning of the poem is a close
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network of associations between the pronounced rhythms of verse and the movement of the
body.

The poem is sensitive towards the non-coincidence of the nation as experienced by the
dalits and the political entity that caters to the interests of the privileged class. The stanza before
the concluding couplet begins thus:

Under the flag of dalit India

stood the farmers and workers.
Flowers bloom in every forest,
thousands of birds take flight,
the eastern sky turned red
morning broke for the poor. (160)

It is under the shelter offered by the flag of dalit India that the idyll of rural life—briefly
experienced by the poet during his childhood—is revisited by the poet and recreated for the
reader. The dalit poet’s imaginative reproduction of a harmonious rural life can only take place
under the aegis of a community-specific flag that honours and reinstates the distinctiveness of
dalit identity, making the non-convergence of the national and dalit identity starkly apparent.
What is interesting about these last few lines is that they produce an interpenetrative
memoryscape where the seediness of slums and the angst it gives rise to are placed parallel
alongside Siddalingaiah’s own memory of his mother’s village Manchanabele, where he spent
parts of his childhood, briefly content.

The first part of Siddalingaiah’s autobiography Ooru Keri brings to the reader sounds that
are an integral part of the lost land of his childhood. Siddalingaiah uses onomatopoeia to
materially recreate the specific quality of the landscape. He writes, “I was filled with wonder
when I saw my cousins riding buffaloes. In the mornings peacocks came in clusters to dance at
the foot of the hill across from their house. A little way down, the Arkavati flowed with a julu-
julu cadence” (31, emphasis in original). The richness of imagery and the carry-over of a
differing soundscape raises questions about Siddalingaiah’s disuse of the same poetic means in
the poems. I argue that the brief movement towards the pastoral, instigated in the quoted lines of
the poem, is an exercise in communicating to the reader the rural landscape that informs the
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identity of the dalit: the loss of which is reflected in the anger and agony of the preceding lines.
Unlike the general trend in translation literature of including a few words in their indigenous
form as a token of oral practice, onomatopoeia transports sounds from seemingly peripheral
environments into the body of the text and the memory of the reader. What Siddalingaiah
presents as a subtext in his autobiography—through the frequent material insertion of
soundscapes—is explicitly projected in the poem: the unfamiliarity of the urban space which the
dalits have to navigate with force.

Devanoora Mahadeva’s short story “Tar Comes” underscores the different consequences
of modernity for the dalits and for the non-dalits; for the poor, territorially-marginalised dalits,
modernity shatters the natural ecology of the village and brings death to the youth. Mahadeva is
critical of the wholesale purchase of an incongruous model of modernity that is indifferent to the
specific needs of the lives of the villagers. Describing the effect that the installation of a tar road
has on the village, he writes:

To anyone seeing the village from a distance, it will look like the site of some huge
upheaval. But if you come closer, the people and the village are still what they were. If
you talk to them, you will know them to be the same people. But they have changed
beyond recognition—the black tar that is spread on the ground is also smeared all over
them. The way they look! The way they move! (Mahadeva 99)

The modernity that promises ease of transport is also one that dehumanizes the dalits, strips them
of their selfhood, and curbs their ability of self-expression. The spiritual quest for redemption,
which D. R. Nagaraj highlights as one of the key concerns in Mahadeva’s narrative style, is
layered with an ironic resignation in the short story, since all hopes of self and community
development are thwarted by the odious prevalence of a cruel modernity, symbolized through
black tar.

The village patel’s usurping of money from the public funds given for the construction
of the road is used for renovating the temple in the village, disclosing the flawed structures of
religion that work against the interests of the dalits. Mahadeva seamlessly weaves in several
other concerns, such as exploitation of dalit women and the existence of parallel value systems in
the village that find alternate uses for the tar, such as the fixing of broken vessels. The sub-
 14

headings in the story, for example, “A Road is Ordered” (98), “A Letter to the Editor” (100) and
“News from Hosur” (102) introduce qualities of immediacy and urgency connected with the
style of the news report, and the story itself emerges as a documentation of events from an
alternative geography, culturally and phenomenologically different from the rest of the nation-
state.

Siddalingaiah’s use of onomatopoeia to describe the unique landscape of childhood

characterizes an anxiety regarding opposing realities: one that is only partially addressed through
the transports effected by material sound. Mahadeva’s writing in a similar way expresses the
meeting of the rural world of the dalits and that of the urban paraphernalia, which engenders its
own distinctive style of prose. The narrative voice oscillates between that of the bewildered
dalits and that of a detached news narrator. Describing the construction work for the road,
Mahadeva writes:

Measuring and digging, digging and leveling, leveling and sprinkling water, sprinkling
water and bringing the blend of gravel and tar in a barrow and filling it in, filling it in and
spreading it—all this on the other side. A machine that goes backwards and forwards. A
dhug-dhug machine that levels. (Mahadeva 99)

The parallel positioning of phrases on the one hand projects a certain child-like quality and on
the other, resists assimilation into the discourse of urban modernity. The dalit experience—
perceived as both insignificant and diminutive and opposed to that of the non-dalits—is
articulated in a voice that preserves and contests the differences between the opposing lifestyles.
Susan Daniel while writing on the style of Mahadeva muses:

This hauntingly poetic prose, layered with janapada [popular/people’s] traditions, echoes
of world literature and the imaginative space of the everyday in a dalit’s life, leaves us
with the amazing experience of being in the middle of an aesthetic tradition, which in
reality is only now finding its voice. (qtd in Satyanarayana and Tharu 97)

D. R. Nagaraj’s attempts to fit this emerging voice into the existing tradition of Indian writing
are, then, hasty and misguided. For Mahadeva, the alternation between the artless voice of the
dalits and the empirical observations of their haplessness by an omniscient narrator figures the
untranslatability of the dalit experience.
 15

Towards a Vernacular Modern

In this section, I would like to theorise further the use of simile and metaphor by the dalit poets,
touched upon in the previous section, and argue for the rhetorical practice as stressing the
difference between the experience of dalits and that of the privileged through its very act of
insinuating sameness. As stated earlier, the untranslatability of dalit experience is reflected in the
differing translated versions of the poem and through the texts’ very enactment of linguistic
differences in describing the spaces occupied by the dalits and the non-dalits. In Siddalingaiah’s
poem, “The Dalits Are Here”, “slogans” are compared to “thunder and lightning” and “caste and
religion” are likened to “thorn bushes”. In the poem “Thousands of Rivers”, the dalits march
“like ants” and their protests are thunderous like the roar of lions; the physical records of
unreasonable tradition—the Vedas, shastras and puranas—float aimlessly “like dry leaves”
(Siddalingaiah 157). This poetic act of seeing one object as the other is, thus, one of the crucial
ways in which dalit identity communicates itself to and builds familiarity with the world of the
reader.

For the reader trained in the European, more specifically, English, art of appreciating
difference between two unlikely objects, the indiscriminate, non-sceptical bridging of the gap
between two disparate objects is taken as sentimental: a quality that is unequivocally taken as a
regressive literary artifice. Robert Furtak in “The Poetics of Sentimentality” writes,

The most pernicious risk of sentimental emotion is that, by seeing things as they are not,
we lose the basic engagement with reality that emotion depends upon in the first place
[….] if we cultivate tender emotion as a kind of delicacy while disregarding what it is
about, we cut ourselves off from the sensitive experience that was the initial condition of
any emotion at all. (Furtak 212)

The risk of sentimentality, therefore, lies in its encouragement of disconnect between the writing
and the conditions that give rise to the emotions. However, while engaging with poetic works
that respond to and address the fundamental divide between the emotions reflected in verse and
the onerous circumstances that generated such emotions, the trading and exchange of ontological
properties through the medium of simile becomes a critical virtue. Although a sense of nostalgia
and loss is implicit within the representation of such emotions, yet the hostility of the emotions
conveyed occasions a critical examination of the implausible associations instituted by language.
 16

Instead of a cutting off of ties with what Furtak calls the “sensitive experience”—registered here
as a cruel denial of human rights that gives rise to rage and dissatisfaction—the ease of transport
of meaning between the objects of comparison highlights the invisible semantic associations that
perpetuate the practice of untouchability. The language, by materializing the bonds between
unlikely objects, calls into question the apathy that institutes divisions between the dalits and the
rest of the society.

In light of such an argument, the vernacular modern in India is no longer held answerable
to linguistic processes made popular by European literary practice. The emergence of the
vernacular modern further explores the forms of expression that are taken as acceptable within
the paradigm of the “modern”. Here, it is relevant to engage with B. Krishnappa’s statements in
some detail. Defining the expansive referential canvas of dalit expression, and paradoxically
setting down its limits, B. Krishnappa in “Dalit Literature”, published in the edited collection,
writes:

Dalit literature has a different stand on creativity and literary excellence. It is

inappropriate to look for refinement in a movement’s revolutionary literature. That kind
of art can only be found in a literature written in luxury. Refinement cannot be the
mainstay of a literature that has revolution and change as its goals [….] As dalit literature
is addressed more to the labourer, the farm hand toiling in the fields, the unfortunate
living in hell, suppressed by the caste system, it has to be unadorned and fresh.
(Krishnappa 63)

The fallacy within Krishnappa’s argument is its inadvertent introduction of hierarchy within
different styles of literary practices. By advocating for an unconstrained bestowing of value to
dalit writing, Krishnappa reinforces the hierarchy that prevents an appreciation of dalit writing
on its own terms. Eric Hayot in “Against Historicist Fundamentalism” expands approaches to
literary writing and states that culturally different “modes of thought” articulate forms of
expression that are best suited for communicating distinct conditions of existence (1415).
Sharing the politics of Hayot’s statement, I argue that the representative methods adopted by the
writers of the Boosa movement cannot be compared to the aesthetic of those that preceded them
or those that came later. The bareness of the verse, what Krishnappa refers to as “unadorned and
fresh”, is indissociable from the violence experienced by the dalits and the distance that endures
 17

between the linguistically-instated legal reality and the felt reality of lives, existing at the limits
of national, regional and linguistic margins.

Towards the end of the essay, Krishnappa divulges his anxiousness regarding the poetic
value of the verse written by the Boosa poets:

When over 60 per cent of our population live below the poverty line […] anyone who
says that he writes for aesthetic pleasure, or for literary values, can only be called
irresponsible. That we have produced such irresponsible literature for the last fifty years
is indeed surprising. Poetry, instead of being realistic (objective), became simply
imaginative (subjective). With people writing in the subjective mode, having no fixed
positions or commitments, the genre acquired a cynical quality. For some it became
spiritual; it gnawed others who were overwhelmed by a sense of being orphaned.
(Krishnappa 64)

Krishnappa’s aghast statement reveals the non-uniform assimilation of post-Enlightenment ideals

of European modernity in the Indian literary context. While European literary modernity
engineered an escape from subjectivity, modern Indian literary works privileged the self’s voice
as a reliable source of meaning and value in the text. Having faced the indignities and brutalities
of the colonial rule, being modern within the Indian context necessitates an affirmation and
assertion of the self. This reflection on the subjective self is a trend that overcomes ethnic and
regional differences, and is identifiable in literature produced in zones as culturally and
linguistically diverse as Karnataka and Bengal. The Boosa writers are not particularly objective
in their literary anatomization of the harsh realities of dalit life; what separates their writing style
from that of the writers before them is their willingness to drag the vision of the readers into the
very sordid, unbecoming, non-modern realities of caste-based violence.

In order to offer an unbiased reading of dalit writing, it is crucial to not succumb to the
lure of comparing different fields of writing and arguing for an unitary concept of modernity.
The creation of dalit literature, outside or at the edges of the boundaries of the national, and in
consequence, that of the global, prepares the grounds for a renegotiation of the politics of
domination: a crisis that is as much a reality in the world stage as it is within the territorial
bounds of the nation-state. Rather than asking the question, “How modern is dalit literature?”
and conceiving negative retorts, readings of the texts should ask the question, “What does dalit
literature say of Indian modernity?”: the latter opening up a range of conceptual possibilities.
 18

The plural nature of linguistic modernities—reflected in the specific set of meanings that
rhetorical devices across cultures hold—helps establish the self-sustaining, mercurial quality of
vernacular forms. It is ironical, then, that the translatability of such “universal” notions of
linguistic modernity is carried out through the very act of translation: a literary phenomenon
whose politics often are taken as oscillating between the binaries of rescuing creative value from
obscurity and imbuing the original texts with meanings that they did not inherently possess. The
modernity of the dalit literary work has to be read with alertness to the context-specific nature of
concepts of untouchability within the medium of the English language.8 The translated texts of
the Boosa movement, collected variously into anthologies, help to accentuate this very context-
based quality of textual meaning. Translation into the English language, rather than merely
inviting comparisons with modern Anglophone poetry, should focus attention on the voices that
arise from the silence of marginalized spaces. Interpretation of dalit texts should not be an
appraisal of their value within their own particularized contexts of exploitation, as Krishnappa
suggests. Discussions on the juxtaposition of different contexts—the desperate conditions
engendering the vernacular compositions and the collaborative function of translation facilitating
dialogue—are some of the ways in which one can emphasise the concerns of how modernity has
affected literary expression of select differentiated subjectivities.

Govindaiah’s poem “A, AA, AND…” presents a particular case in point, where the
anthologisation of the English version of the text allows for an appropriation into an alternative
canon: the poem being hugely popular in literary circles in Karnataka and dutifully included in
PUC textbooks from 1984 to 1994.9 The poem is a poignant reflection on the politics of
imparting education to the dalits in India: the right to which has only been partially made

8
Writing on the translation/ transcreation of the Marathi play Vādā Cirebandī by Mahesh Elkunchwar into the
Bengali play Uttaradhikar by Sohag Sen, Arti Nirmal and Sayan Dey argue for the merits of
“transcontextualization”, where the act of cross-cultural translation reveals the fragmented, discontinuous and
interpretative appropriation of culturally-specific models of modernity. Nirmal and Dey write,

Contextual translation can be utilized to distort and expropriate indigenous socio-cultural elements and
appropriate one’s own [….] Translation was and is ‘an’-other colonial mode of socio-cultural
appropriation, assimilation and distortion of pluriversal indigeneity. It not only diminishes the primary
author but also recreates the text through the translator […] (Nirmal and Dey 59)

Nirmal and Dey’s argument highlights that the act of translation, through the act of introducing a text into another
language also introduces it to the idiosyncrasies belonging to that of the host language.
9
See H. Govindaiah’s preface to his work in Satyanarayana and Tharu’s edited anthology.
 19

available to the dalits since the time of Independence.10 For the dalit, receiving education is a
unique privilege, since it is obtained in a world where they are otherwise subjected to routine
violence. The poem’s intimate revelations of the otherness of the dalit world and the fragile
presence of alphabets on the “tattered walls of my inheritance” draw attention to the competing
discourses of upper-caste literacy and lower-caste ignorance within the body of the poem
(Govindaiah 119).

Within such a context, the verse becomes a memorialisation of the realities that deter the
imparting and render difficult the absorption of knowledge bestowed by “naama-bearing”
masters (a mark of Vishnu or Shiva that adorn the foreheads of brahmins):

Caught in the alphabets—‘a’, ‘aa’—learnt in the darkness,

the hopes of my mother and father;
caught too the lanes and tombs of my village,
and words caught in the skeletons. (Govindaiah 119)
Learning the alphabets is at once an enforced exit and an unwelcome entry. The alphabets are
learnt in the dark, underlining the inefficacy of the learning practice. The semicolon introduces
the stasis of the “lanes and tombs of my village”, paralleled against the immobility of the
narrator in the previous line. The words are in turn “caught in the skeletons”, which return the
fabric of language to the indistinguishable cadaver: pointing at a homogeneous social order that
is inaccessible to the dalits.

The trope of being caught pervades the poem, since for the narrator—a voice,
consciously present with a child-like identity—education does not allow for a realization of the
self: the voice remains irretrievably child-like until the very end of the poem. However, the
assumption of the child-like voice is an artifice—a façade that tacitly comments on the efficacy
of the education received by the dalits in a country that is still over-run by caste-based politics,
even after eight decades since Ambedkar’s visionary proclamations concerning the uprooting of
the caste system in The Annihilation of Caste (1936). The breaking off of the title in an ellipsis

10
Mohammad Ashfaq Ahmad in the article “Educational Disparities Across Dalits in Karnataka” (2014) writes that
although the state of Karnataka is striving to achieve universal literacy, “35% of the Scheduled Castes population
and 38% of the Scheduled Tribes population [are] still illiterate” (Ahmad 48). The reason behind such low rates of
literacy amongst the scheduled castes and tribes can be traced to the politics of discrimination practiced against them
by the upper castes.
 20

“A, AA AND…” hints towards the dalit community’s collective inability in voicing the perils of
one’s everyday existence: an inability brought about through phenomenological encounters with
hostile members of the society and immobilizing poverty. The darkness within which the
narrator first gains consciousness at the beginning of the poem is built into the structure of the
poem—from the references to the father’s “dark limbs”, and “black cheek”. In the last but third
stanza of the poem, the narrator recollects, “I melted into the dark” as a consequence of having
acquired the skill of writing (Govindaiah 120). The poem ends with a sentimental segue into
recalling the kisses of the mother and gift of a holed coin by the father given in appreciation of
his acquired skill. However, the use of the English voice tempers the sentimentality with an
ironic quality: the ephemeral kisses and the broken coin are not ideal objects just as the education
received by the dalit child in the school is less than ideal. It is the act of translating the poem into
English that allows one to read the irony present in the concluding tone of the poem: a meaning
that would have, otherwise, remained muted in its original form in the Kannada language.

Insertion into the English language occasions a transcendence as well as a remodeling of

identity that is discriminated against on the basis of caste. When the categories of the modern in
aesthetic practice are opened up, literature comes to be populated by multiple modernities and
expressivities. The absence of caste as memory within the English language gives rise to styles
of reading that abandon teleological readings of sentimentality. Translation of dalit literature into
English not only allows for increased access into the dalit worlds, but as I have discussed, also
brings about a layering of identity:11 English works on the dalit sentiments even as the translators
present the texts on an international platform. The integrative perspective engendered by the
reading of translated texts recognizes that the texts possess their own locality despite being
arranged around a more visible literary “centre”.

Works Cited

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11
Rita Kothari in her article, “Caste in a Casteless Language: English as a Language of Dalit Expression” (2013)
notes that writing in English allows the dalit writers to address audiences and concerns outside of the incriminating
local surrounds.
 21

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