Untouchable Fictions

Untouchable Fictions dissects the aesthetic and political crises of realism in order to chart the development of Dalit or “untouchable caste” writing. Arguing that Dalit literature responds to a failure of older literary movement to properly accommodate caste, the book situates the aesthetic maneuvers of the Dalit text in dialectical relationship with older progressive literary movements.

Gajarawala Toral Jatin :

Toral Jatin Gajarawala is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University.

—Simon Gikandi:
Untouchable Fictions goes beyond a mere recognition of the centrality of realism in the postcolonial imagination. Focusing on Dalit writing in India, Gajarawala shows how realism, like other terms, came up against the force of locality and the limits presented by a literature of protest. Gajarawala's work thus recuperates a Dalit literature that was driven by the need to go beyond a politics of identity to provide a critique of the formal logic of realism as it confronted the crisis of caste. Untouchable Fictions is outstanding in its recognition of the interplay of realism (as a formal structure), the literary canon (as the condition of possibility of nationalism), and the crisis of caste as the social force that could redirect or question all the narrative accounts on which a literary history of India was premised. The book's brilliant engagement with both the cultural politics of Dalit writing and the aesthetic ideology of Dalit literature makes it a model of the work that awaits to be done in our field.

—Parama Roy:
“Gajarawala is among the most intellectually ambitious of the contemporary Anglophone literary critics of Dalit writing, and she nicely manages to retain a stereoscopic focus on Dalit literary production and Dalit aesthetic theory.”

—Simona Sawhney:
Dalit writing has posed extremely serious and challenging questions to literary studies in India. This book presents a sustained, insightful, and original engagement with these questions as it maps the project of modern Dalit (primarily Hindi) fiction.