Mamta Kalia

Discourse
JOOTHAN: A DALIT LITERARY TEXT
Arun Prabha Mukherjee
Experiences like Valmiki’s, his birth and growing up in the untouchable
caste of Chuhra, the heroic struggle that he waged to survive
this preordained life of perpetual physical and mental persecution,
and his transformation into a speaking subject and recorder of
the oppression and exploitation he endured, not only as an individual
but also as a member of a stigmatized and oppressed community,
had never been represented in the annals of Hindi literature. He,
therefore, has broken new ground, mapped a new territory. Besides
a few stray poems and short stories by canonical Hindi writers,
which portray Dalit characters as tragic figures and objects of
pathos, Dalit representations are conspicuously absent from
contemporary Hindi literature.
A literary critic, reared in an educational system that taught
a canon of literature focused solely on the experience of the
privileged sections of society, whether of India or of the West,
must tread cautiously in this new territory, utilizing the benchmarks
provided by Dalit literary theory and being continuously on guard
against those kinds of formalist analyses that privilege form over
content.
How far removed Valmiki’s subject matter is from the dayto-day
experience of an urban middle class reader is evident from
the very title ]oothan. It proves the truth of Dangle’s claim that
Dalit writing demands a new dictionary, for the words it uses
are as new as the objects, situations, and activities they describe
(252). The Hindi word ‘joothan’ literally means food left on an
eater’s plate, usually destined for the garbage pail in a middle
class, urban home. However, such food would only be characterized
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