Blog 19

For my fourth article I read “Pain, Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives”. This article talked about how Dalits are limited in progressing socially. Since the only means they have to represented officially come through the law, it is hard to understand the concept of a Dalit in the language of the law as an actual person, who is actively suffering in our world. There are laws enforced by the Indian Government that deal with “Dalit” as a term, and there are international laws that use “human” as a term. Both of these leave us with abstract concepts of what we are dealing with. We cannot recognize the personhood behind the object of the law because we do not understand the suffering and persecution experienced by an abstract term. The author proposes that we use one particular form of Dalit literature as a window into the personhood behind the abstract terms.
This literature is labeled “Life Narratives”. It is characterized as narratives told by Dalits and members of the community about the suffering that they have experienced. When we pair life narratives with an understanding of the law, we see that the life narrative turns out to be far more insightful that a line of law can ever be. After reading the article, I researched a few life narratives from Dalit people and they have transformed the way I see the problem. I knew that injustice was done, but I did not know it carried on to the point of murder, rape, and consistent beatings. The more I find out about the caste system’s discrimination, the more disturbed I become.

Matthew