| ID | 195198 |
| Title Proper | Delineating Dalit trauma |
| Other Title Information | (re)contextualizing cultural trauma, survivor’s guilt and partial privilege in post millennial Dalit women’s memoirs |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Bhattacharya, Alankrita ; Meenu, B |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | Shilpa Raj’s memoir The Elephant Chaser’s Daughter (2017) and Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as a Dalit: A Memoir (2019) map a specific kind of individual trauma, along with the cultural trauma that is found in other Dalit life writings. Both the narratives begin with the death of another Dalit individual whom the memoirists consider as a sibling/comrade who lacked the partial ‘privilege’ they enjoyed and the narratives can be read as negotiating this survivor’s guilt. Hence, these life writings are part elegies and part literature of protest. They are also part of biographies, for while the writer’s life story is one centre, these writings also have another centre – the real/imagined life of the dead person. As the writers compare and contrast their different destinies, we argue that these narratives (1) lay bare the complexities and limits of Dalit emancipation in modern India where the caste question has been seemingly resolved (2) call for an extension of the intersectional framework to analyse the concept of ‘partial privilege’ in Dalit life-writing. |
| `In' analytical Note | Contemporary South Asia Vol. 32, No.3; Sep 2024: p.316-328 |
| Journal Source | Contemporary South Asia Vol: 32 No 3 |
| Key Words | Dalit ; Cultural Trauma ; Passing ; Dalit life writing ; Survivor's guilt ; Partial privilege |