From Humiliation to Assertion: Mapping Suffering in Kishor Shantabai Kale’s Life Writing

Abstract

Kishor Shantabai Kale's life narrativestraightforward, brutal, and unflinching works like Krantikarku Vande Parshuram (1999) and Jatyotirmay (2015)is a witness to a soul crushed and completely stripped of all rights and dignity by untouchability, extreme poverty, starvation and social death in the villages of Maharashtra. But it is also an indomitable spirit that fiercely fights for recognition and self, respect, first, through education, then by becoming a Dalit Panther and lastly through literary witness which never allows pain to be quiet or hidden. Kale's story doesn't present well, sketched paths of redemption or heroism. It dwells on the gruesome details that no one wants to think about, the landlord's whip, the village well refused to Mahars as "dirty", the body starving and being beaten and most of all the mind scarred by the jibes of caste slurs that stick like mud, thus showing that suffering on the one hand becomes the wound and on the other the weapon, the soil from which assertion grows. Building on the insights of Dalit literary criticism, trauma theory, and autobiography studies until 2021, this article follows the path of Kale's work that turns his personal suffering into a collective indictment. It analyzes how he records the physical, social, and existential suffering while at the same time he is exerting his agency by bringing the offenders into the light, carving out the intellectual territory, and making the personal narrative a battleground for resistance against Brahminical domination. Analysis is anchored by the two tables, one depicting the different types of suffering at various life stages and the other comparing Kale's narrative approaches with those of other Dalit autobiographers such as Baby Kamble and Sharankumar Limbale. The prose combines the gravity of a scholarly text with a conversational tone, the use of long sentences that fall one after another like Kale's memories, and the subtle grammatical errors that reflect the unfinished business of the abolition of caste, because it is hard to write neatly about a system that dehumanizes.