Proceedings of the National Seminar on English in the Dalit Context organised by the UGC-DSA Programme, Department of English, University of Hyderabad in 2011.

In fulfilling the long-awaited need for a constructive and critical rethinking of Dalit theology this book offers and explores the synoptic healing stories as a relevant biblical paradigm for Dalit theology in order to help redress the lacuna between Dalit theology and the social practice of the Indian Church. Peniel Rajkumar's starting point is that the growing influence of Dalit theology in academic circles is incompatible with the praxis of the Indian Church which continues to be passive in its attitude towards the oppression of the Dalits both within and outside the Church. The theological reasons for this lacuna between Dalit theology and the Church's praxis, Rajkumar suggests, lie in the content of Dalit theology, especially the biblical paradigms explored, which do not offer adequate scope for engagement in praxis.

This book, companion to the much-acclaimed Dalit Literatures in India, examines questions of aesthetics and literary representation in a wide range of Dalit literary texts. It looks at how Dalit literature, born from the struggle against social and political injustice, invokes the rich and complex legacy of oral, folk and performative traditions of marginalised voices. The essays and interviews systematically explore a range of literary forms, from autobiographies, memoirs and other testimonial narratives, to poems, novels or short stories, foregrounding the diversity of Dalit creation. Showcasing the interplay between the aesthetic and political for a genre of writing that has ‘change’ as its goal, the volume aims to make Dalit writing more accessible to a wider public, for the Dalit voices to be heard and understood. The volume also shows how the genre has revolutionised the concept of what literature is supposed to mean and define. Effervescent first-person accounts, socially militant activism and sharp critiques of a little-explored literary terrain make this essential reading for scholars and researchers of social exclusion and discrimination studies, literature (especially comparative literature), translation studies, politics, human rights and culture studies.

The contributors to this major intervention into Indian historiography trace the strategies through which Dalits have been marginalized as well as the ways Dalit intellectuals and leaders have shaped emancipatory politics in modern India. Moving beyond the anticolonialism/nationalism binary that dominates the study of India, the contributors assess the benefits of colonial modernity and place humiliation, dignity, and spatial exclusion at the center of Indian historiography. Several essays discuss the ways Dalits used the colonial courts and legislature to gain minority rights in the early twentieth century, while others highlight Dalit activism in social and religious spheres. The contributors also examine the struggle of contemporary middle-class Dalits to reconcile their caste and class, intercaste tensions among Sikhs, and the efforts by Dalit writers to challenge dominant constructions of secular and class-based citizenship while emphasizing the ongoing destructiveness of caste identity. In recovering the long history of Dalit struggles against caste violence, exclusion, and discrimination, Dalit Studies outlines a new agenda for the study of India, enabling a significant reconsideration of many of the Indian academy's core assumptions. Contributors: D. Shyam Babu, Laura Brueck, Sambaiah Gundimeda, Gopal Guru, Rajkumar Hans, Chinnaiah Jangam, Surinder Jodhka, P. Sanal Mohan, Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana

'The women tell it like it is... So riveting is the narration that it is difficult to put down the book until their stories are finished. For a non-fiction academic work this is no small feat.’ — The Hindu Sharmila Rege’s path breaking study of Dalit women’s writings and lives offers a powerful counter-narrative to the mainstream assumptions about the development of feminism in India in the 20th century. Extensive extracts from eight Dalit women’s writings cover issues such as food and hunger, community, caste, labour, education, violence, resistance and collective struggle. The voices that resound throughout the book, reveal that Dalit feminism, far from being ‘silent’ as so often presumed, is rich, powerful, layered – and highly articulate. Published by Zubaan.

The Otherness of English offers a unique interpretation of the content and useage of the English language in India, specifically commenting on the mode of its presence. The author presents an interdisciplinary account of the role English plays in the general process of modernization. Starting with the sociolinguistic notion of diglossia and the geo-linguistic notion of a southern and eastern Asian linguistic area, the author clearly demonstrates how English occupies a functional slot in India's linguistic development. This impressive volume will be of special interest to scholars in the fields of sociolinguistics, education, sociology, political science, and English literature. "... a brilliant intellectual tour de force. It analyses the role, functioning, and nature of English in India, and is a provocative challenge to any scholar concerned with English in 'development', diglossia, 'World Englishes', and processes of indigenization, or at a more theoretical level with the role of language in traditional, modernizing, and post-modern societies.... Dasgupta's argument draws on a daunting range of theoretical approaches, and his language rivals Isaiah Berlin's in complexity and lexical richness. The book is coherent, well-signposted, and lucid." --Applied Linguistics "An eminently readable, engaging and engaged book that wittily reformulates current nationalistic cliches of a Leftist rather than a Hindutva bent....The sensitivity to style and language in the presentation of the argument, is so rich in digression and detail and an entirely pleasant, superior irony." --Contributions to Indian Sociology "Professor P. Dasgupta's The Otherness of English emphatically dispels doubts and dogmas that bedevil English language and literature studies in India, and effectively interprets the real function and role of English in the post-independent, post-modern, and pan-Indian context . . . The book will be of immense relevance for researchers in socio-linguistics, language development and planning." -The Journal of Indian Writing in English "Dasgupta's inter-disciplinary analysis of English in the context shaped by recent work in diverse domains is interesting and though-provoking." -South Asian Language Review "A bold book. . . . He explores a number of fascinating themes, on each of which he has something illuminating to say." --The Statesman "Dasgupta's book is a brilliant intellectural tour de force. It analyses the role, functioning, and nature of English in India, and is a provocative challenge to any scholar concerned with English in 'development', diglossia, 'World Englishes', and processes of indigenization, or at a more theoretical level with the role of language in traditional, modernizing, and post-modern societies. Dasgupta's argument draws on a daunting range of theoretical approaches, and his language rivals Isaiah Berlin's in complexity and lexical richness. The book is cerebally demanding, but coherent, well-signposted, and lucid. The final summare is eminently accessible, and might with profit be read initially." --Robert Phillipson in Applied Linguistics

This collection engages with translation and interpreting from a diverse but complementary range of perspectives, in dialogue with the seminal work of Theo Hermans. A foundational figure in the field, Hermans’s scholarly engagement with translation spans several key areas, including history of translation, metaphor, norms, ethics, ideology, methodology, and the critical reconceptualization of the positioning of the translator and of translation itself as a social and hermeneutic practice. Those he has mentored or inspired through his lectures and pioneering publications over the years are now household names in the field, with many represented in this volume. They come together here both to critically re-examine translation as a social, political and conceptual site of negotiation and to celebrate his contributions to the field. The volume opens with an extended introduction and personal tribute by the editor, which situates Hermans’s work within the broader development of critical thinking about translation from the 1970s onward. This is followed by five parts, each addressing a theme that has been broadly taken up by Theo Hermans in his own work: translational epistemologies; historicizing translation; performing translation; centres and peripheries; and digital encounters. This is important reading for translation scholars, researchers and advanced students on courses covering key trends and theories in translation studies, and those engaging with the history of the discipline. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book breaks new ground in the study of Dalit Literature, including in its corpus, a range of genres such as novels, autobiographies, pamphlets, poetry, short stories as well as graphic novels. With contributions from major scholars in the field, it critically examines Dalit literary theory and initiates a dialogue between Dalit writing and Western literary theory.

A classic work in postcolonial studies, Masks of Conquest describes the introduction of English studies in India under British rule and illuminates the discipline's transcontinental movements and derivations, showing that the origins of English studies are as diverse and diffuse as its future shape. In her new preface, Gauri Viswanathan argues forcefully that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or inattentively to the imperial contexts in which the discipline first articulated its mission.

This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations that expand the assumptions that have typically framed literary histories, and creatively re-draws their boundaries, both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities, and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. The accompanying translations—from Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Urdu—not only round out these scholarly explorations and comparisons, but invite readers to recognise the assiduous, intimate, and critical labour of expanding access to the vernacular archive, while also engaging with the challenges—linguistic, cultural, and political—of rendering vernacular articulations of gendered experience and embodiment in English. Collectively, the essays and translations foreground complex and politicised expressions of gender and genre in fictional and non-fictional print materials and thus draw meaningful connections between the vernacular and literature, the everyday and the marginals, and gender and sentiment. They expand vernacular literary archives, canons and genealogies, and push us to theorise the nature of writing in South Asia. Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular is a significant new contribution to South Asian literary history and gender studies, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of History, Literature, Cultural Studies, Politics, and Sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.