Subalterns can speak: a study of select young Indian dalit poets

Simone de Beauvoir, the great feminist, says in her seminal book The Second Sex (1949) that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, if we alter it a bit and say, a subaltern is not born but rather becomes, would not be wrong. When the world literature abounds with numberless examples of discriminations related with colour ,class and race, and their critical analyses in different Discourses that probe binary positions of the Man and the Woman, the White and the Black,the Colonized and the Colonizers ,the Orientals and the Occidentals and so on so forth. If we take a cultural look at India’ s history of more than 5000 years, right from Vedas to the present, it is a history of assimilation and adaptation in general. But ,it is also true that discriminations and injustices on the basis of caste have ripped apart the organicity of the society over the years, and there seems a cultural divide on the basis of one’s caste.The present paper attempts to examine how some of the young Dalit poets in English have responded to it ,their anguish inked in literature transforms or rather revolutionizes the form and content of the present day literature.