William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article published in
PMLA
"Some Time between Revisionist and Revolutionary: Unreading History in
Dalit Literature"
May 2011 issue of PMLA
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 writings 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 centuries.
This book, grounded in the fields of postcolonial theory, South Asian
literatures, and cultural studies, makes a crucial intervention into
studies of literary realism and will be important for all readers
interested in the problematic relations between aesthetics and politics
and between social movements and cultural production.
