REREADING DENIED CITIZENSHIP: A COMPARISON OF DALIT AND AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LITERATURES

Abstract

The present study attempts to understand how the dalit autobiographers, Baby Kamble and Aravind Malagatti in their respective works, The Prisons we Broke and Government Brahmana, and the aboriginal autobiographers, Alice Nannup and Gordon Briscoe in their respective works, When the Pelican Laughed and Racial Folly, imagine the manner in which full citizenship had been and continues to be denied to the dalits and aboriginals. Using the time frame of the discursive grant of citizenship as a point of reference, the study looks into the discursive denial of citizenship which implies a lack of discourses pertaining to or granting of equal citizenship status, and the performative denial which talks of the denial of participative citizenship even when the discursive rights have been granted to the dalits. While doing so, the study attempts a comparative study of the literatures of the two communities in their projection of the state of a continuous denial of citizenship that the dalits and aboriginals have to face. The study uses the dominant tropes of the individual autobiographies as a background to unfurl the denial of citizenship, both in the discursive and the performative form, using the parameters of equal citizenship as laid down by Marshall. In doing so, the study in no way deviates from the individualistic struggle of either the dalits or aboriginals, and does not conflate the boundaries of their struggle. The comparison then opens up unexpected avenues of political thought and praxis, which the chapters of the thesis elucidate upon and illuminate. The study then depicts citizenship as a centre of political activities, whose very existence becomes distraught when it has to be extended to the dalits in India and aboriginals in Australia. The narratives of equal citizenship, followed by the frequent assertions of homogeneous treatment to all irrespective of internal differences by the state machinery goes on to reveal how the caste-based differences in India and racial differences in Australia have destabilised the category of citizenship. The narrative frame of citizenship is then used to underlay the idea of the political subjectivity of citizenship, and using it to understand about the membership of a citizenry or the extent to which this political subjectivity is realized by the dalits and the aboriginals through the literary counterpublic sphere. However, the study while talking about the changing forms of denial of citizenship would refrain from forming a genealogy of the denial of citizenship meted to the dalits and the aboriginals, but would instead look at the way the dalit and aboriginal literary studies have reformulated the debates of dalit and aboriginal citizenship at critical historical moments. ii The study then questions the liberal legacy of political, civil and social citizenship while raising some important issues: How is the performativity of citizenship foregrounded by the dalits and aboriginals in the literary counterpublic? How does this foregrounding evoke violent retribution from the dominant sections? And does the continued violation of performative citizenship point to the dysfunctionality of the performative citizenship status accorded to the dalits and the aboriginals?