Debating Community, Print and Dalit in Kerala, India

Abstract

The emergence of print within Dalit publics, which acts as the modern cultural site of individuatedand communitarian political articulations, rekindles the cultural tensions in the community‘sencounter with modernity and also within the evolution of the Dalit political subject. The differingsignifying practices of the modern articulations of the Dalits are represented in the discursive printspace of Malayalam Dalit magazines.This paper looks into the Dalit debates in the Malayalam
speaking regions of Kerala, by locating it at the narrative praxis of print culture as represented insome of the literary spaces and in the little journalistic space of Dalit magazines. The attempt is tounderstand the latent socio-cultural process which shapes the community formation among Dalits inthe sub-national space of a post-colonial region known as Kerala in India. The assumption is thatsuch an inquiry into Dalit discourses of the region would reflect upon the nuances of socio-culturaltransformation taking place in the society, the locus point being the structural power relationscentred and based primarily on the institution of castes.