Dalit Women’s Autobiographies : a Critical Appraisal

Dalit Women’s AutobiographiesA Critical Appraisal is a collection of twentyone eruditely written articles that articulate the plight of Dalit women buffeted by tripartite marginalization of class, caste and gender. Lack of education and dearth of agencies to register as well as retrieve their complaints compel the Dalit women to lead a subjugated and claustrophobic existence. Unlike Dalit men, Dalit women have to undergo multiple bouts of humiliation and domination. Dalit women’s autobiographies express Dalit women’s protest against such injustices and cruelties in their own ways and carve out a space for the mselves. Each autobiographical narrative is a poignant and agonising saga of resistance and thus, proclaims caste as an obliterable disease of the society. Dalit women, by taking recourse to the act of writing about their quotidian struggles, have foregrounded the complex bond between caste and gender as well as paved the way for the emergence of, what Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak calls, ‘strategic essentialism.’ Contributors, to this anthology, have tried their level best to analyse and explore such variegated issues welling out of the autobiographical Dalit tex ts. The intellectually gifted contributors for this anthology are Prof. D. Amalraj, Dr. Irum Alvi, Dr. Archana Bhattacharjee, Dr. Sigma G.R., Dr. Himanginee Kaushik, Dr. Deepika Rani, Guni Vats, Suruchi Sharma, Kusum Kanger, Ramanuj Mahato, Saikat Guha, Dwaipayan Mitra, Mohd. Anwar Husain Khan , Himanshu Sharma , Pradip Sarikhada, Dr. Namita Panda, Dr. Sumitra Singh, Dr. M. B. Gaijan, Dr. Aparna Lanjewar Bose and Dr. Narendra Kumar.