Subaltern scripts: Mapping the origin, development and reception of Bengali Dalit literature in West Bengal

“Is there a Bengali Dalit literature?” was a question that numerous renowned writers and critics from West Bengal had often encountered in literary circles, conferences, and seminars. Though this thought-provoking question had often put the mainstream writers and literary critics into an embarrassing silence, the condition has now changed considerably. Bengali Dalit literature that can be traced back to Matua Movement is marching towards having a full-fledged socio-cultural and literary space buzzing with numerous voices of pain and suffering, agony and betrayal, humiliation, and trauma, interrogating the caste stratified Hindu society, its ideologies and working culture and has made its place in academia, literary studies and research. With this backdrop, the present paper attempts to examine how this oppositional narrative was gradually subjected to cultural silencing of trace the origin and development of Bengali Dalit literature, the cultural silencing of it post 1971 partition. In this essay, I would also like to assess how Dalit literature has been continuously rejected by the normative mainstream literary stream with special focus on the literary output of Raju Das, a well-known Dalit dramatist and Kalyani Thakur Charal, a reputed Bengali Dalit feminist; how their writings were shaped and charged by the ideologies of Harichand Thakur and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and reflect their own struggles as Dalits in a caste stratified Brahmanical society. Eventually the paper also aims to evaluate the reception of Bengali Dalit literature in the already established traditional elite literary circle of Bhodrolok babus.