In Sharankumar Limbale’s ‘Sanatan’, Caste is the only ‘eternal’ truth

At its core, Sanatan traces the lives of several generations of the Mahar community, beginning with families whose daily existence is shaped by hunger, humiliation, and exclusion. Through figures like Bhimnak Mahar and Sidnak Mahar, the novel moves across historical moments: the British recruitment of Mahars into colonial armies, their marginal presence in the 1857 revolt, and their politicisation under Ambedkar.

Yet each generation inherits not progress but the same entrenched stigma. Attempts at religious conversion—to Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism—offer temporary hope but fail to dissolve caste, which follows them into every institution and ritual. The village’s geography—the well they cannot touch, the temple they cannot enter—remains constant. As the story circles back to the opening image of the cow carcass, the novel lays bare the unchanging nature of caste oppression, exposing what is truly “eternal” in Indian society.

When I spoke with Limbale about the impulse behind such scenes, he returned repeatedly to experience—to what he called “reference,” the ground on which Dalit writing stands.

“We are nothing but references of lived experience,” he tells me. “We write against slavery and for liberation.”

That phrase—“we are nothing but references”—could serve as the novel’s hidden epigraph. Sanatan is structured through recurring images: the carcass, the public well, the temple threshold that bars entry. These are not symbols in a literary sense; they are references to a social reality that repeats across generations, dissolving the distinction between historical time and present life.

Permanence of oppression

The title, Sanatan, performs an ironic reversal .  In Limbale’s novel it is not used in the sense of divine truth, but to refer to the permanence of hierarchy. Across the lives of Bhimnak Mahar, Sidnak Mahar, and many unnamed figures, caste persists like a geological formation.

This is not merely a thematic choice. It is a structural one. The novel’s loosely episodic form resists closure, echoing the very idea of an unbroken, oppressive duration. Limbale’s style is spare, almost documentary. The refusal of embellishment is an ethical stance: beauty cannot be allowed to soften the blow of truth.

When asked about method, Limbale dismissed the idea of a predetermined literary strategy.

“My writing emerged as the voice of representation for the Dalit community,” he said. “There is no sense of personal grandeur… my writing has always been a movement.”

Movement, by its very nature, eschews time and has a sense of timelessness to it. Talking to Limbale, one gets the sense that his self-fashioning depends upon the annihilation of the self in order to bring the voice of the community forward. No wonder, then, that in Sanatan, the timeline stretches across centuries: the Mahars’ service in colonial armies, their marginal presence in the events of 1857, their encounters with Christian and Muslim conversion movements, and their gradual politicisation under B R Ambedkar.

Yet despite these transformations, the characters inherit not freedom but a continuity of exclusion. The novel constructs what might be called a temporal loop—history advances, but caste remains immovable.

This immobility mirrors Limbale’s own reflections on the Dalit movement. “The caste system is based on hierarchy,” he says. “Our goal is to resist this hierarchy… One village is really two villages: one upper-caste village, the other untouchable village.”

His comment clarifies why Sanatan reads less like a family saga and more like a social anatomy. The geography of the village itself—the segregated settlement, the tank of “clean water,” the temple doors—becomes the novel’s true protagonist. Limbale’s characters survive within structures they did not create and cannot reshape.

Conversion and its disappointments

In the figure of Sidnak Mahar, who becomes Philip Bush after converting to Christianity, Limbale also interrogates the idea of religious escape. Philip discovers that caste shadows him even in faith: the church replicates the discrimination he hoped to leave behind. Similar disappointments follow those who turn to Islam or Buddhism.

As Limbale so distinctly puts it, the upper castes possess a “different ecology.” “It is different from the ecology of the Dalit. Our stories, our language, our culture, our pain, even our gods are different. This separateness itself is a challenge to power,” he tells me.

This notion of “Dalit ecology”—the particular arrangement of space, suffering, and survival—is visible everywhere in Sanatan. The novel insists that even air, water, and sound are distributed along caste lines, that the most basic elements of life are regulated through exclusion. Pollution, here, is not a metaphor but a condition of being, a fate imposed from birth to death.

From this ecology of constraint emerges the novel’s distinctive tone. If Akkarmashi was a voice of defiance, Sanatan is the voice of endurance. Its characters inhabit a philosophical weariness, not resignation, but the long understanding that revolt alone cannot dismantle a structure sanctified as eternal.

“What is the job of a Mahar?” asks one character. “Keep waiting for food for all the twelve months.”

In Sharankumar Limbale’s theoretical work in Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, he argues that Dalit writing emerges from a collective “we,” not an individual “I.” (Photo: Orient Black Swan)

This weariness is also formal. One of the most striking choices in Sanatan that Limbale makes is to not endow the novel with any central protagonist, a decision that aligns with Limbale’s theoretical work in Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, where he argues that Dalit writing emerges from a collective “we,” not an individual “I.” The novel’s very structure becomes an extension of this ethic. It is less a novel in the conventional sense and more a collective chronicle—an attempt to narrate a community that has historically been denied the right to narrate itself.

Sanatan, in its pages, does not offer uplift. It does not promise emancipation. It does something more demanding: it compels recognition. It holds up the idea of the sanatan—the eternal—only to reveal what Indian society has chosen to make eternal.

Limbale’s final words to me lingered long after the interview ended, “Even now, caste persists in its brutal form… Society may build new spaces, but caste has developed into even more terrifying forms.”

In that sense, the book ecomes the very opposite of what its title claims. It is not a tribute to permanence but an indictment of it—a narrative of refusal to let cruelty pass as tradition.

(The writer is an Assistant Professor, Department of English, School of Humanities, MIT ADT University)