| Abstract: |
This article seeks to examine Dalit self-representation in the context of Suraj Yengde's Caste Matters, using a qualitative analytical approach to text. It questions the stereotyping of the Dalit speaker voice through autobiographical memory, conceptual naming, internal critique, Ambedkarite politics and transnational comparison. Five interwoven strategies are identified: experiential authority, reversal of objectifying discourse, differentiation within Dalit publics, transformation of stigma into political selfhood, and extending solidarity beyond India. Yengde's hybridity not only merely illustrates lived experience but makes it an epistemic claim. Its typologies of Dalit elites and middle classes, however, at times condense the various histories into moral ones. The article proposes that the strongest power of Caste Matters lies in relational self-representation, in which self-representation is answerable to collective emancipation, but not to the mediation of the Savarna. It consists of the ability to combine testimony, polemic, and social analysis in an anti-caste counter-public vocabulary. |
