Dalit Consciousness in Meena Kandasamy’s Touch
Abstract
Meena Kandasamy fights against the atrocities done to the Dalits. Her works focus on issues of caste and gender oppression. Her poems and writings are predominantly centred around feminism and caste reform in the modern-day India. Hailing from a caste-conscious background, her poems reflect a society that grants inhuman sanction to caste discrimination and violence on Dalits. Kandasamy uses her poetry as a weapon of resistance against the system of caste which makes superior people to subjugate the non-dominant castes. This is exemplified in the title of her first collection Touch, which reiterates the inhuman stigmas attached to Dalits especially their very ‘touch’ being considered as contaminating. Kandasamy’s poem Touch expresses her feelings towards the predicament of Dalits by the biased and hypocritical Hindu customs and laughs at the ancient Brahmanical caste hierarchies that points out the binaries of the Dalits. Through the poem, Meena Kandasamy overthrows the world of Indian women’s writing by setting a confrontational standard in the world of Dalit literature.
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References
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