RESISTING TOGETHER SEPARATELY: Representations of the Dalit-Muslim question in literature

This chapter elucidates the aporias of the Dalit–Muslim question within the context of communal politics in contemporary India. It demonstrates how Dalit literature has entered a new phase of ethical responsibility by exploring the possible overlap between registers of difference and marginalization beyond an exclusionary Dalit identity. The chapter looks at the construction of Dalit–Muslim relations in the poetry of a Dalit writer, Mohandas Naimishraya, to show how Dalit writers are employing the space of literature to articulate a politics of solidarity between different marginalized, disempowered communities. Laced with utopian as well as dystopian visions of intercommunal relations, Naimishraya’s trans-subjective explorations constitute an important discursive intervention for the formation a new ethical subject in Dalit literature. In fact, the shared experience of political disenfranchisement further problematizes the hyphen in the Dalit–Muslim question. In addition to articulating the experience of a Dalit self, Naimishraya struggles to present an ethical position on the subject of intercommunal relations.