Language, Caste, And Resistance: A Sociolinguistic Reading of Selected Dalit Autobiographies

Abstract

Dalit autobiographical writing in India has emerged as a powerful mode of self-representation and social critique, challenging caste hierarchies through an insistence on lived experience and embodied memory. This paper offers a sociolinguistic reading of three key Dalit autobiographies – Laxman Gaikwad’s The Branded (translated from the Marathi Uchalya), SharankumarLimbale’sThe Outcaste (Akkarmashi), and Baby Kamble’sThe Prisons We Broke. It explores how these texts mobilise regional dialects, caste-marked lexis, narrative orality, and gendered voices to undermine the symbolic authority of standard, Brahminical language. Drawing on sociolinguistic theories of language and power, especially the work of Pierre Bourdieu and William Labov, and on Dalit literary criticism by scholars such as SharankumarLimbale, SharmilaRege and Eleanor Zelliot, the paper argues that linguistic strategies are central to the texts’ political project. In each narrative, language functions simultaneously as evidence of oppression and as a tool of resistance: it registers the violence of caste, but also constructs a collective Dalit subject capable of naming and contesting that violence. The analysis shows that Dalit autobiographies do not merely describe marginality; they perform it linguistically, insisting that “polluted” speech, low dialects and women’s voices belong at the centre of literary discourse.