Rethinking Crip Caste through Disability, Embodiment, and Form in Contemporary Dalit Women’s Writing

In this article, I have argued that reading Dalit women’s writing requires the ongoing dialogue with Dalit feminist standpoint, crip theory and debility studies, and that the latter is an ongoing, formally innovative means of engaging with crip caste, or the production of debilitated body minds within caste structures. There are three implications: CR is not the alternative to the existing interpretation(s) of Dalit literary studies but instead is a complement and expansion of them. It is true that the political and the formal are not two distinct questions, but one question at two different levels, as I’ve attempted to show. These are not only literary techniques: the episodic form is a political thesis, as is the collective voice, as is the sensory-affective archive. Second, disability studies: crip caste challenges the anglophone hegemony and raises the question of caste, colonialism and the specific institutional structures and discourses of postcolonial employment that produce disability. Caste must be a key and not an ancillary category of transnational disability humanities as scholars such as Clare Barker and Stuart Murray have called for (Barker and Murray). Thirdly, in terms of postcolonial studies, this embodied turn, which has been a feature of the discipline over the last decade (as seen in the work of Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, etc.) has been present in Dalit women’s writing for decades but has not yet been labelled as such— ‘theoretical’. Crip caste calls this tradition by name, and introduces it into the discussion as a theory, rather than just a testimony. However, as regards method, this research suggests that it is crucial to remember the formal innovation of marginalized literatures when conducting empirical studies of them. Readings in sociology are required but not enough to ‘work through’ the texts. The forms are episodic, distributed, sensory propositions to a telling of debilitated lives. In the future this framework could be applied to Dalit men’s writing, Adivasi crip narratives and comparative studies with African American disability writing.  

1. Addlakha, Renu, editor. Disability Studies in India: Global Discourses, Local Realities. Routledge, 2013. 2. Anand, Shilpa. "Historicising Disability: Productive Recapitulations and Hierarchies of the Disabled in Caste-Society." Disability and Society, vol. 34, no. 4, 2019, pp. 547–67. 3. Bama. Karukku. Translated by Lakshmi Holmström, Macmillan India, 2000. ———. Sangati: Events. Translated by Lakshmi Holmström, Oxford UP, 2005. 4. Bansode, Hira. Selected Poems of Hira Bansode. Translated by Vijaya Pawar, Ambedkar Memorial, 2018. 5. Barker, Clare, and Stuart Murray, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability. Cambridge UP, 2018. 6. Berlant, Lauren. "Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)." Critical Inquiry, vol. 33, no. 4, 2007, pp. 754–80. 7. Bose, Arunabha. "Dalit Textuality and Sexuality: Narrative and Gender in Tamil Women’s Writing." Studies in Indian Place Names, vol. 8, no. 2, 2023, pp. 23–42. 8. Dutt, Yashica. Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir. Aleph Book Company, 2019. 9. Gajarawala, Toral Jatin. Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste. Fordham UP, 2013. 10. Ghai, Anita. Rethinking Disability in India. Routledge, 2015.