| Summary/Abstract |
Dalit autobiographies narrate the journey of protagonists from the ‘untouchable’ communities of India towards self-realisation and their struggle for human rights. A vigilant reading recognises the representation of animals as tropes in Dalit autobiographies that trace the reconstitution of the non-human limit of the Dalit as narrative subject. This paper reads Dalit autobiographies by Narendra Jadhav, Bama and Namdeo Nimgade to reveal the importance of animals as an analogy in Dalit literature, but then, following the work of Spivak and Derrida, it deconstructs the circulation of the hegemonic logic of the rational humanist subject in the radical gesture of Dalit subject constitution.
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