Vernacular Modernity and Dalit Identity: A Study of the Boosa Movement in Karnataka

Abstract

This article discusses Boosa movement literature, coming up in the 1970s in Karnataka, as addressing a range of concerns – from the indignities of caste-based discrimination to vernacular reflections on a synthesized modernity. I argue that in their communication of the ills faced by the dalits, the works carefully craft a distinct vernacular identity in the context of national literary projects and sublate questions of caste into the hybridization engendered by translation. The first section looks into how Boosa writers navigate the nationalist literary projects and assumptions around dalit writings in the Kannada language. Second, it explores the ideals of literary modernism as standardized within English literary practice and offers ways of rethinking contrasting representative styles that simultaneously grapple with an incongruous modernity that overlooks caste-based discriminations and vernacular rhetorical practices. Lastly, it looks into the ways in which translation reconstructs and validates identities that are otherwise delegitimized: the housing of the texts in the English language layers meaning that allows for a branching out of lived identity.

Keywords:

• Boosa literary movement
• Kannada literature
• Dalit identity
• translation studies
• caste studies

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Identifying the importance for bringing in discussions on caste in literary criticism, S. Shankar in Flesh and Fish Blood (2012) argues that the very act of caste-based discriminations determine the extent to which the topic of caste is emphasized in postcolonial studies (28).

2 Sundar Sarukkai writing on Gopal Guru’s particular mode of criticism in “Experience and Theory: From Habermas to Gopal Guru” in The Cracked Mirror states that Guru advocates for a theorizing of dalit experience which makes theorizing itself a “felt” experience – a way to “embody suffering and pain” (45).

3 Rita Kothari in her article, “Caste in a Casteless Language: English as a Language of Dalit Expression” (2013) notes that writing in English allows the dalit writers to address audiences and concerns outside of the incriminating local surrounds.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rupsa Banerjee

Rupsa Banerjee, MA, MPhil, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of English, St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata, India. She has co-edited the collection Rethinking Place Through Literary Form (Palgrave-Macmillan 2022), and her academic articles have appeared in Sanglap and The Apollonian. She is presently translating the poetry of J. H. Prynne into Bengali.