Humor and Dalit trauma: life narratives from Hindi literature and stand-up comedy

Abstract Dalits’ cultural production has received significant attention for its role in shaping the Indian cultural landscape (Browarczyk, Monika. 2013. The double curse–a Dalit woman autobiography in Hindi by Kausalya Baisantri. Cracow Indological Studies 15(2). 169–187, Browarczyk, Monika. 2021. WE are Dalit history: Hindi Dalit autobiographies and their engagements with India’s past and present. Cracow Indological Studies 23(2). 1–39; Brueck, Laura. 2014. Writing resistance. The rhetorical imagination of Hindi Dalit literature . New York, NY: Columbia University Press (ebook edition); Wessler, Heinz W. 2019. From marginalisation to rediscovery of identity: Dalit and Adivasi voices in Hindi literature. Studia Neophilologica 92(2). 159–174). However, the function of humor and satire in articulating social assertions by Dalit authors when emphasizing the idea of individual and collective trauma remains underexplored. While some contributions investigated the role of comedy in the shows of a new generation of Dalit stand-up comedians (Shivaprasad, Madhavi. 2020. Humour and the margins: Stand-up comedy and caste in India. IAFOR. Journal of Media, Communication & Film 7(1). 23–42, 2022), little attention has been paid to the connections between stand-up comedy and other cultural areas that previously articulated claims of Dalit consciousness ( Dalit chetna ) in the Indian public sphere. This study investigates life narratives produced in Hindi autobiography and stand-up comedy, examining the extent to which humor and satire have been used by Dalit authors as empowering instruments to process trauma (Garrick, Jacqueline. 2006. The humor of trauma survivors: Its application in a therapeutic milie. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 12 (1, 2): 171–172). It also traces key sociocultural shifts occurring in the narratives produced by Dalit authors in Hindi or Hinglish. The first section offers a critical analysis of Murdahiya (2010), a Hindi autobiography by Tulsi Ram, a prominent author and activist of Hindi Dalit literature. The second reflects on narratives by contemporary stand-up comedians with a focus on Manjeet Sarkar, a rising figure in alternative stand-up comedy.