Caste as Lived Trauma: Pain and Social Reality in B. Kesharshivam’s Autobiography

Abstract

1. Kesharshivam's story, raw and brutally honest Matriculation (2007) along with two other equally intense follow, ups, shows caste not as a mere abstract sociological category but a traumatic caste experience, a pain so deep that it becomes part of the person's body, so deep it happens to every breath, to every meal that is refused, to every insult that hits the soul before the body, thus creating a social reality in which untouchability is not an archaic practice but a new form of everyday violence in the rural fields and gullies of Gujarat. The child of a Mahar family like Kesharshivam is taught from very early on that the mere fact of his having a shadow is polluting, that his being hungry is a crime, that his existence itself is an offence to the upper castes who wield their tradition like a whip. Not a single aspect of the misery has been covered here it's the double of hunger and the misery of the beaten ones, the double of non, entry to wells and temples and the madness of thrown stones of verbal abuse such as "Chokra" and "Bhangi" Kesharshivam converts that wounding into a means for opening himself up and naming, denouncing his tormentors, charting a route from the state of being the village outcast to that of a matriculate thus overcoming the obstacles created by the Brahminical order, his writing is a strange mix of wonder and rage that goes through the stages of a child with no understanding and a revolutionary who will not allow himself to be classified as a victim. Relying only on Dalit studies, trauma theory and autobiography criticism, this article analyses how Kesharshivam records caste pain as a social reality, exhibits the trauma's embodied stare of time, and shows the vulnerable agency of writing back; two tables one listing the trauma types through different stages of life, the other comparing Kesharshivam with Dalit peers like Omprakash Valmiki and Joseph Macwan represent the suffering to speech journey which is not at all straightforward, and the text itself is unsteady with lengthy, breathless sentences, the mood changing from the academic level to the street level rant, slight mistakes mirroring the broken grammar of the caste injured lives, after all, who can speak perfectly when the pain doesn't heal neatly?