Unearthing the Space of Interpellation and Dalit Identity: Interrogating Power Dynamics in Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan —A Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The detrimental politics of canonical discourse, the paper argues, degrades the existence of certain sections of the communities and excludes them from the equation of power relations by delimiting their access to society’s productive resources. Disciplinary power, in the guise of “morality”, acts as a tool of “colonise”, prescribes acceptable gestures and required behaviour, and through constant surveillance normalises a dominant “top-down” (dis)order. Moreover, it reduces Dalit women’s existence into an amorphous property, readily mutilated and moulded under the whims of a phallocentric order. Discursive practices further constitute body politics, making the female body an object of the active site of political struggle.

The researcher seeks to harbour how notions of injustice, power abuse, and domination are constructed and reflected in dominant narratives/Indian collective consciousness. To apply the analytic and descriptive methods to the present study, the primary source, i.e., the concerned text of the select writer as well as the secondary sources authored by Michel Foucault available in the form of criticism have been used. But, most importantly, several critics’ scholarship studied the terms “Dalit” and “Caste” and found a locus of contention not only between West and East (Colonizer and Colonized) but also between the “colonized” themselves within the complex field of postcolonial studies, and that by no means a stable category. In other words, the concerns of the ‘Dalit’ are not necessarily similar to those of all remaining humans.

Therefore, the select texts I will be discussing may or may not completely ‘fit’ very neatly into the above-mentioned secondary theoretical texts; rather, they also provocatively draw from the following theoretical and disciplinary wells to fully address the “untouchables” and their concerns: Louis Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970), Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Uma Chakravarti’s Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens (2002), Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? (2008), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (1989) by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid.

The present paper, hence, studies Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (2003) as a literary exemplar to demonstrate how “disciplinary” power, as underscored by Foucault’s discourse analysis, intervenes and determines the life of the Dalit community. Additionally, it not only lays bare the covert body politics of patriarchy with the unfiltered depiction of women’s exploitation and atrocities but also represents a paradigm shift by advocating ways of emancipation for marginalised communities in general and Dalit communities in particular.