Precarious Self and/in the Dalit Everyday Social

‘Passing’, Affect, and Alienation in Ajay Navaria’s Select Stories

Abstract

The paper attempts to analyse the precarity of the Dalit self in the everyday social encounters with caste and its affective state of humiliation. With reference to selected stories from Ajay Navaria’s 2013 anthology, Unclaimed Terrain, the paper examines the notions of alienation in the urban, the techniques of ‘passing’ or caste concealment, and the affect of shame within the framework of everyday existence of Dalits. In studying these elements, the paper elaborates on how the self enters an unstable position in its formation and re-formation. In the modern urban space that is marked by alienation, anonymity allows an escape from caste based humiliation and discrimination. To escape humiliation, the Dalit self indulges in its preservation through the strategy of caste concealment and ‘passing’ as a non-Dalit in the everyday. However, the pervasiveness of caste uses new techniques of humiliation as seen in language, behaviour, and practices, to keep its hegemonic dominance intact. Thus, there exists an impossibility of escape from and in humiliation that further creates a psychological fissure. The Dalit subject is caught in the dilemma of identity assertion and identity concealment in its escape ‘from’ humiliation, and of inhabiting and escaping the self ‘in’ humiliation. The paper, with its study of Ajay Navaria’s stories that explore the everyday spaces of the urban, where Dalits, caught in the angst of city life learn to negotiate their identity; would further help analyse their psychological burden and how caste marks its control over the everyday and also, through the everyday.