Harnessing Counter-Culture to Construct Identity: Mapping Dalit Cultural Heritage in Contemporary India

Cultural heritage is fast emerging as a politically contested site where the hitherto marginalised and socially excluded Dalit communities are learning to deploy it as a viable agency in their identity formation process. This workshop will focus on the various dimensions of the Dalit cultural heritage and the ways it impacts the identity formation process among the Dalits in contemporary India.

Date: 7-8 December 2012
Convenor: Prof. Ronki Ram, ICCR Professor of Contemporary India Studies, Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) & International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)
 

Dalits in contemporary India are closely engaged in a herculean task of building their exclusive centres of Dalit cultural heritage at the local as well as national levels. Through this engaging but challenging process of constructing Dalit cultural heritage they are in fact exhibiting their dormant and long cherished will to build a separate Dalit identity which could help them gain dignity and visibility in the hitherto dominated public sphere in the mainstream Indian society. Dalits hardly figure anywhere in the most sought after popular centers of cultural heritage in India. They often attribute their conspicuous absence in the mainstream cultural heritage centers to their historic exclusion from the civil society as well as to the dominant discriminatory social structures that relegated them to the periphery in the name of low caste birth based as it was on Varnashramdhrama (four-fold Hindu social order). They also allege that their rich indigenous cultural heritage was deliberately made oblivious simply to keep them away from the corridors of power.

The nascent ongoing diverse Dalit cultural heritage project seems to coalesce tradition and modernity. In their (Dalits) concerted efforts of constructing Dalit cultural heritage, the tradition ceases to be a value of the past and the modernity loses its aura in the fast acclimatising present in the images of yesterdays. It is in this critical context that tradition and modernity are acquiring new meanings and nuances to the advantage of the socially excluded sections of the society. Consequently, this has led to a sort of perennial conflict between the hitherto dominant communities and the ex-untouchables who find in their resurfacing cultural heritage a hope of reclaiming their long-overdue share in the local/national structures of power.

Programme and Abstracts
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Particpants
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