Evolution of dalit literary movement
The movement had two phases, the first phase during the 1960s and the second phase during the 1980s. The chief literary weapon of first phase was poetry and that of the second phase was autobiography.
There were two inspiriting sources for the dalit literary movement. The activities of Dr. ambedkar had awakened the depressed classes of India against the tyranny of castism. The spread of school education equipped the neo-literate generation with the vision and the language to react.
The earliest writings of dalit writers were published first in the little magazines that were popular mainly among trade unions activists. Narayan Surve, himself a trade unionist wrote moving poems about youthful workers, and sex worker mothers. The poems used language exactly as it is spoken by unfortunate young men and women. Namdeo Dhashal, on the other hand wrote poetry closer to he modernist sensibility, but with an unmistakable stamp of the anger of the rebel.
A blend of pathos and protest became the defining feature of dalit poetry of this period. It became the voice of rebellion against social injustice blended with dreams of a life of dignity for the oppressed.
The dalit mind and the problem are more prominently and eloquently expressed in the autobiographies. The dalit autobiographies are not conventional autobiographies; they are a direct picture of the plight of the dalits. These autobiographies had a revolutionary effect. They spoke about poverty as social issue a result of caste exclusion.
The autobiographies are a more powerful expression of the dalit social issues than dalit poetry. They not only provided a larger canvas but a more effective canvas to portray the writer’s own experience. These writers are not eminent personalities, but the life they livedand saw around them had the imprint of long ages of oppression, discrimination.
The greatest of these autobiographies is Limbale’s Akkarmakshi is the painful story of the author and his mother which throws a question on human morality, suffering and poverty.