Thiruppaanazhwar (circa 800 CE), one of the twelve Azhwars or Vaishnavite saints of South India, hailed from the “paanar” community in a village named Alagapuri near Srirangam, Tamil Nadu. The paanars were a community of musicians who could transport the listeners to an ethereal realm with their divine music. However, they occupied in the then highly hierarchized Hinduism the lowest position: they were “untouchables,” social outcastes, who existed outside the fourfold classification of castes or varnas and hence relegated to the fringes of the society, literally and figuratively.

Thiruppaanazhwar, a staunch devotee of the presiding deity of Srirangam, Lord Sri Ranganatha, was one morning standing on the bank of river Cauvery singing, as was his wont, praises to the Lord, facing the temple he was not allowed to enter because of his caste. Saranga Muni, the priest of the temple, who came then to the river to fetch water for the celestial bathing (thirumanjanam) of the idol, was furious on seeing the “untouchable” paanar on his way and picked up a stone and threw it at Thiruppaanazhwar, causing a bloody injury on Thiruppaanazhwar’s face. When Saranga Muni returned to the temple with the river water, he was shocked to see blood oozing from the face of Lord Ranganatha’s image. Legend has it that the Lord appeared in the troubled Saranga Muni’s dream that night and berated him for his despicable behavior toward his dearest devotee Thiruppaanazhwar. The Lord commanded Saranga Muni to carry the “untouchable” Thiruppaanazhwar on his shoulders and bring him to the temple the next morning, which a chastised Saranga Muni did. Standing before the idol of the Lord inside the temple, Thiruppaanazhwar sang ten verses (pasurams) in praise of the Lord, at the end of which he merged with the Lord. The ten verses (called Amalanathipiran) composed by Thiruppaanazhwar are given a pride of place in Nalayira Divya Prabandham—a collection of four thousand verses composed in Tamil by Vaishnavite saints—and recited in all Vishnu temples in South India.

Nandanar, also known as Thirunaalaippovar (circa 700 CE), one of the sixty-three Nayanmars or Saivite saints of South India, was born in Adanur in Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu, in the paraiyar community, regarded then as untouchables. Since his community was not allowed to enter the Hindu temples then, Nandanar, a steadfast devotee of Lord Shiva, would stand outside the temples and pray. Once he stood outside the Sivalokanatha Temple in Tirupunkur, but could not see the image of the deity because his view was blocked by the stone image of Nandi (the bull mount of Shiva) placed in front of the sanctum sanctorum. While a distraught Nandanar lamented his bad luck, an ever-obliging Lord, the story goes, told the stone Nandi to move a bit so that his devotee could see him (interestingly, the Nandi image in the said temple could still be seen in the moved position). Nandanar, who had avoided visiting the Nataraja temple in Chidambaram many a time in the past for fear that he would not be allowed to enter the holy town, finally visited the town on the Lord’s encouragement in a dream, and entered the temple through a holy fire and became one with the Lord. Nandanar is worshipped along with other Nayanmars in all Shiva temples in South India.

Thiruppaanazhwar and Nandanar were, in today’s parlance, Dalits. Besides, they were also products of the inclusive Bhakti Movement, which began in Tamil Nadu in 600-700 CE led by the Azhwars and the Nayanmars and later spread to other parts of India over the centuries. The Bhakti Movement of Hinduism, a religious reform movement, was largely a long-overdue correction of its insupportable caste disparities and excesses. And Hinduism could hope to stop the rot—a result of discontent and disconnect from within and exodus and poaching of its adherents from without—only by ensuring religious equality and social equity and empowering those who had been discriminated against and left to languish on the bottom rung of the caste hierarchy for centuries.

While the Bhakti Movement did succeed to a limited extent in giving voice to the voiceless—though few and far between—especially through the impetus it generated for the evolution of Indian vernacular literature, it sadly failed in its wished-for aim of ensuring social transformation, thwarted as it was by the vested interests.

And such tales as the ones mentioned above, which seek to punctuate that in god’s scheme of things there is no place for manmade caste differences, are a poor consolation for the historically oppressed sections of the society in India—the Dalits—especially when such sanctimonious talks of emancipation have not been supplemented with substantial action on the ground. The history of humiliation and hurt that Dalits have suffered at the hands of the so-called upper castes needed a different narrative, a subaltern narrative. After all, Dalit stories are best told by Dalit writers. Dalit literature, a body of protest literature against all forms of oppression and exploitation, refers to the literary works by writers hailing from the castes formerly treated as untouchables. Though there have been literary outputs from Dalits, like the one from Thiruppaanazhwar, at least since the Bhakti Movement of the medieval times, they are generally not recognized as Dalit literature, for neither do they spring from Dalit consciousness, nor are they texts of resistance or Dalit self-assertion. Importantly, Dalit literature is informed by B R Ambedkar’s threefold exhortation to Dalits: educate, unite, and agitate.

“Dalit literature,” as a genre of literary studies, took a definite shape in the early decades of the postcolonial India, and the term itself was first used in 1958 at the first Conference of the Maharashtra Dalit Sahitya Sangha in Bombay. The formation of Dalit Panthers, a social organization, in 1972 and the Ambedkar centenary in 1994 gave a major boost to Dalit literature. Dalit literature, over the decades, has emerged as a distinct and significant category of literature in many Indian languages such as Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, and Bengali, besides English.

The first two papers of this issue focus on Dalit literature. Yeddu Vijaya Babu examines the essence of Dalit poetry in the light of the Dalit protest movements in the Telugu and other states of India. K Narasimha Rao highlights, with reference to Dalit women’s poetry in Telugu and Marathi, the need for Dalit women to talk differently in the face of attempts at homogenization of the Dalit issue by non-Dalits and patriarchal domination within the Dalit community. Raghavi Ravi Kasthuri and Sathyaraj Venkatesan explore the influence of feminist movements on breast cancer activism and discourse and how they have provided various ways to deal creatively with the disease. Ignatius Chukwumah traces, using Balaev’s trauma theory, the evolution of the postcolonial African woman in Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer.

C V Padmaja avers that Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s fiction, while showcasing the Indian diasporic women’s attempts to come to terms with their immigrant status, also promotes a neo-imperialist agenda. V Rajasekaran and Jasmine Jose analyze how Benyamin’s Goat Days unveils the unspeakable horrors that might await the unsuspecting Indian migrants to gulf countries. Sowmya Srinivasan delineates the relationship between power and resistance and the power of transformative resistance in her postcolonial perspective of Fadia Faqir’s Nisanit. G R K Murty shows, in his comparative evaluation of Achilles and Rama, how Rama’s exemplary standards of virtue make him peerless among men. Shanina Maria explains with examples how online newspapers can be used as a source of cultural information in the classroom to inculcate cultural awareness in the students. Yunisrina Qsimullah Yusuf, Dian Fajrina, and Riski Aida Fitri contend that self-assessment by the EFL students can help the teachers understand the students’ reading problems and design remedial teaching strategies.

R Venkatesan Iyengar
Consulting Editor