Struggle for Emancipation and Dalit Consciousness in the Autobiography My Father Baliah

Dalit life narratives as a genre from the Telugu states are of recent origin. Unlike life narratives in Marathi, Hindi, and Tamil languages, few from the Telugu states caught the attention of scholars. Despite this, Y.B. Satyanarayana, a teacher and writer from Telangana wrote an auto/biography, My Father Baliah, in 2011 making it a valuable addition to the stream of Dalit life writings. It narrates an inspiring story of three generations spanning across two centuries. Originally written in English, this life narrative serves as an important intervention in the social history of India because it is a product of a Dalit agency where the story is written from the point of view of Dalits, a perspective often marginalized by mainstream narratives. Using this life narrative, this article attempts to deal with the cultural politics of Dalit literature, the dynamic between the Dalit life narrator and the Dalit community, the implications of writing Dalit literature in English, and more importantly the need to recognize Dalit agency in colonial modernity with the ultimate objective of making a case for Dalit emancipation.