Manju Bala’s “The Housemaid Special”: A Study in Dalit Consciousness and Resistance

Abstract

Aims: Dalit literature in Bangla, more often than not, has been written by Dalit men. However, there is a body of Dalit literature in Bangla written by Dalit women, where gender and caste identities intersect and manifest themselves. This paper seeks to address how this complex identity politics plays out in Bangla Dalit woman writer Manju Bala’s short story “The Housemaid Special”.       

Methodology and Approaches: The methodology of my research has been a close reading of the short story in question as well as a parallel reading of other Dalit literary works such as Manohar Mouli Biswas’s Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal and other theoretical and critical texts on Dalit literary history and aesthetics (as cited at the end of the paper) to drive home the challenges confronting Dalit literature in bringing about material changes in Brahminical socio-political structures.    

Outcome: Bala’s story in question deftly weaves in concerns of the three axes of class, caste and gender, and exposes with a typical Dalit consciousness the muted existence of casteism in Bengal, thereby unravelling the Savarna politics of epistemic violence in silencing the Dalit voice as part of a centuries-old process of ‘othering’.

Conclusion and Suggestions: Dalit literature has developed into a body that is ontologically and epistemologically productive for understanding and transforming the social and political contours of contemporary India. In order to dismantle the long-entrenched caste structure, the Dalit has to combat the ideological state apparatuses of upper-caste canonical literature that propagates Brahminical values and aesthetics and pass them off as the universal and ahistorical Hindu/Indian experience.