Tucked away in the shadow of Pune’s rising multi-storey buildings housing info-tech companies are a few colonies which fly the blue flag. A board outside prominently declares it as a haunt of the Dalit Panthers and inside some residents remember days when they worked alongside BSP supremo Kanshi Ram when he was still an employee at the ammunition factory, Khadki. Much has happened since, and yet the colony continues to exist, in a sense, outside the growing metropolis that is Pune today. The Dalit identity, forged years ago by Babasaheb Ambedkar, who was born into the Mahar community that has spearheaded the Dalit movement, has always had a special relation with the rugged terrain of Maharashtra. It was here that the little magazine movement in the mid-1960s gave rise to poets rebelling against the established literary order of the day. The little magazines went into uncharted territory as they sustained a crop of Dalit poets speaking in a language that could find great similarity across the seas when Allen Ginsberg spoke up for his generation in his seminal open-verse ‘Howl’. In Maharashtra poets like Narayan Surve and Daya Pawar were adding new and powerful verse to Marathi poetry, expressing Dalit angst and establishing a new literary tradition. By the late 1970s as another generation of Dalits grew up, forcing its way into formal and informal schools across rural Maharashtra, the movement was ready to send up a new voice — the voice of the oppressed. Pawar led the way with his Baluta (Social Claim, 1978), followed by Laxman Mane’s Upara (The Outsider, 1980) which finally established the autobiography as the defining narrative in the emerging Dalit literary scene. The Outsider found a bigger audience when the Sahitya Akademi picked up the book for translation 10 years after its publication in Marathi. Similarly Laxman Gaikwad’s Upara (The Branded, 1987) was also published by Sahitya Akademi. By 1985 Marathi readers were familiar with another work which echoed Mane’s experiences but went several steps further. Limbale was more than a Dalit — he was an outcaste, meticulously recording his untouchability and attendant discrimination in Akkarmashi (The Outcaste). From birth to marriage, Akkarmashi is the story of a boy born of a low-caste Mahar woman and a high-caste Maratha, the Patil of the village. Despite the passage of time, in its English translation, it finds relevance more as a voice for those deemed outcaste, be it the illegitimate child of the commercial sex worker, or the ‘Akkarmashi’, as Limbale records. The Outcaste has no structure or chronological direction and instead is a rumble-jumble of Limbale’s experiences, at times violently yoked together by two recurring experiences — rape and hunger. Limbale is an untouchable without a surname and unaccepted by all. (‘‘My first breath must have threatened the morality of the world.’’) Time has little meaning as he flits through birth, childhood and youth in less than a page, leaving the reader gasping for breath. Limbale grows up at the bus-stand, ‘‘perpetually worried about food’’, confused by the ironies that surround his everyday life. ‘‘The Hindus see the cows as their mother,’’ notes Limbale. ‘‘A human mother is cremated, but when a cow dies they need a Mahar to dispose it off.’’ The upper-caste Marathas come home for the liquor his mother sells to eke out a living, and some even have an affair with her, but refuse to accept food touched by mother or son. The Outcaste also serves glimpses of recent history, the Dalit Panther movement and the troubles during the renaming of the Marathwada University as Babasaheb Ambedkar University. In its exploration of the reservation policy, of men masquerading as members of higher castes, the book raises a series of questions for which there are no ready answers.
