From Margins to Meaning: Dignity and Resistance in Contemporary Anti-Caste Discourse

This article examines the representation of caste, labour, and marginality in Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land: Dignity of Labour in Our Times and Disaibon Hul: The Call of the Bending Sky through the theoretical lenses of Subaltern Studies and Dalit Aesthetics. While caste has often been studied in adult autobiographical and protest literature, its articulation in texts that foreground labouring communities within accessible narrative frameworks remains underexplored. The selected works foreground agrarian and tribal worlds not as passive spaces of suffering but as sites of cultural assertion, ecological belonging, and political resistance. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s interrogation of subaltern voice and Sharankumar Limbale’s formulation of Dalit aesthetics as literature of lived experience and social transformation, this study argues that these texts disrupt hegemonic representations of caste by centring dignity, collective memory, and embodied labour. Through qualitative textual analysis, this article demonstrates how narrative voice, imagery of land and labour, and community memory function as counter-discursive strategies. The findings suggest that such works reshape the discourse of marginality by transforming labour from a marker of oppression into a sign of epistemic authority and ethical centrality. The study contributes to contemporary debates on caste representation, subaltern agency, and the aesthetics of resistance in Indian literary production.