Intersecting Dalit and cultural studies: De-brahmanising the disciplinary space

The paper begins with the context in which Dalit culture and resistance emerges and the way brahmanical social order tries to maintain their status quo through established cultural inequalities with the dominance of power and knowledge. By invoking different claims of dominant epistemologies re-articulated by Dalit intellectuals and locating the cultural past of Dalit humiliation, this paper examines the anti-caste discourse and the Dalit cultural resistance from the colonial and postcolonial time. With an attempt to bring in the intersections of Dalit and cultural studies, the paper argues that by challenging brahmanical cultural knowledge production, Dalits can reclaim power and knowledge in relation with the 'politics of difference'. The Dalit aesthetic decenters the cultural production and circulation of the hitherto grand narratives. Further, it attempts to de-brahmanize the established disciplinary space by bringing the discourse of Dalit experience of caste and humiliation into mainstream academia. Lastly, drawing from the interdisciplinary context, the paper has elaborated the possibility of the making of a field of Dalit Cultural Studies as a step forward- a newer way for the cultural resistance of the oppressed.