Under My Dark Skin Flows A Red River

Description

‘We too have our Sun’, writes a woman Dalit poet, challenging the established canons of Bangla literature that resist Dalits’ entry. With translations from Bengal only beginning in the twenty-first century, Dalits writings have remained largely unrepresented in the corpus of pan-Indian Dalit literature. Yet Bangla Dalit literature has a long history: the songs of Sufis, Bauls, Fakirs and many other grass root religious sects rebelling against Brahminical domination. Largely unknown in mainstream Bengal, this was a robust and popular body of oral literature from the margins. The challenges and rebellions that characterize modern Dalit literature are not unique to modernity, existing in the living traditions.