WRITING, ANALYSING, TRANSLATING DALIT LITERATURE

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in 2014-16, this research network is co-ordinated by Dr Nicole Thiara, lecturer in English in the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University, and Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak, Associate Professor in English at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France.

Dalit writing and its representation and assertion of marginalised cultures is the most significant development in Indian literature in the last three decades. Dalit literature is often highly innovative in its form, narrative perspective and use of language but it has not yet received the international recognition it deserves partly because there has been very little research which allows non-experts to engage with these unique texts.

Since we were awarded the AHRC Follow-on grant ‘On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’ in 2022, we made our network’s engagement with Adivasi literature more prominent and hope to create shared platforms for Dalit and Adivasi writers and performers as well as promoting the academic study of their works.

We are aware that creating such shared platforms is an unusual move and has its challenges.

We aim at establishing an international dialogue between researchers in the area of Dalit and Adivasi literature and fostering a close collaboration between academics and authors, translators and publishers of Dalit and Adivasi literature.

The network  published a special issue on Dalit literature in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54 (1) in March 2019 and the critical volume Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Re-imagined (Routledge, 2019), edited by Judith Misrahi-Barak, K. Satyanarayana and Nicole Thiara.

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