The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement in India is a collection of English essays written by the eminent Dalit literary theorist and social critic, D.R. Nagaraj. Expanded from its original compass to include unpublished lectures and writings completed between the book’s initial publication in 1993 and the author’s death in 1998, The Flaming Feet is organized around three themes central to Nagaraj’s thought: the conflict between Gandhi and Ambedkar, the tensions within the Dalit movement around cultural memory, and Dalit literature as a political force. While these themes are loosely arranged into three separate sections, each weaves around the others throughout the collection, offering a more unified exploration of Nagaraj’s thought than might appear at first glance.
In his writing Nagaraj spends a great deal of time considering the Dalit movement from the interstice between what he calls Gandhi’s “mode of self-purification” and Ambedkar’s “mode of self-respect.” Gandhi had long striven for a spiritual awakening among high-caste Hindu communities through which they would come to recognize the historic wrongs committed against Dalits and seek to redress them. Ambedkar argued instead for the complete destruction of caste-society and its treatment of marginal peoples. Where Ambedkar sought to make Dalits the agent of their own histories, the unfortunate implications of Gandhi’s mode of self-purification was that Dalits and other marginal groups remained the object of high-caste desires: the only way to remake society through Gandhian precepts was through the actions of high-caste Hindus. Rather than choosing sides, Nagaraj’s interest is in showing that the encounter between Gandhi and Ambedkar was transformative for both, though neither admitted the influence. It was through Ambedkar, he argues, that Gandhiji came to recognize the importance of economic rights; it was through Gandhi that Ambedkar internalized the significance of religion to the uplift of oppressed castes.
These tensions come to a head midway through the volume in an essay entitled “Two Imaginary Soliloquies,” in which Nagaraj imagines them looking upon India from heaven on the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence. Ambedkar voices his antipathy to the still prevalent superstition and myth-making but notes here unexpected agreement with “my intimate enemy, that Gujurati Bania, Mr. Gandhi, [who] also does not like these things” (82). In having Ambedkar call Gandhi his “intimate enemy,” Nagaraj recalls the notion of “intimate enmity” discussed earlier in chapter 2, which he defines as the manifestation of an existential bond between communities through “feelings of intense dislike towards each other, which are also translated into theoretical and intellectual positions” (61). Though these communities are often bounded by physical closeness, they inhabit “insulated and isolated universes” that only serve to underscore the tensions between “the ethics of caring and physical proximity” (62). Back in the context of the imagined soliloquies, Nagaraj shows his characteristic humor by allowing Gandhi his own jibe against Ambedkar, imagining that had he written Hind Swaraj instead of Gandhi, “he would have given ten statistics for every sentence” (87).
The other two sections of the book are equally rich, if somewhat overlapping, in their exploration of the role of literature and cultural memory in the Dalit struggle. Nagaraj is critical of Ambedkarite strategies to explode and remake the cultural memory of oppressed peoples. For these radicals, any attempt to use Hindu folk culture in Dalit artistic endeavor merely reinforces the unjust society it has sustained: artistic forms associated with Dalit communities are inextricably linked to the humiliating tasks to which they have traditionally been assigned. Drawing from Devanuru Mahadeva’s novel Kusumabale, Nagaraj defines another kind of radicalism, one that has the capacity to disassociate folk forms from their humiliating contexts. For Nagaraj the strategic break from traditional forms—e.g., the move toward realism—was a disservice to the Dalit struggle, because realism and modernist Western forms in general bring with them structures that are intolerant of the legitimacy of other worldviews. Instead, Nagaraj argues that Dalit authors necessarily must break with realism to allow for the entry of the “gods, goddesses, spirits, myths and dreams of these communities” (233).
As the only book written by D.R. Nagaraj in English, The Flaming Feet and Other Essays does present challenges to the casual reader. Sentence structure is heavily influenced by the author’s native Kannada, in which the subject appears near the end of a sentence, often couched in obtuse clauses that obscure clarity and continuity of idea. The editor has addressed this issue to a degree by rewriting some of Nagaraj’s passages to improve intelligibility without compromising his distinctive style. This is an ironic choice, given the author’s views on narrative transparency and accessibility. For Nagaraj, to demand such was to privilege English speakers above others. “We must do violence to the English language,” he once reportedly told Ramachandra Guha. “We must expand its structure and idiom much as the postmodern novelists have.” Unfortunately, clarity was further obscured in my copy of the book through the mis-ordering of a number of pages in the last third of the book. Notwithstanding these admittedly minor obstacles to clarity, The Flaming Feet is not only an important but also an excellent addition to the corpus of Dalit writing, well worth the effort of parsing Nagaraj’s prose.
WORKS CITED
Guha, Ramachandra. 2001. An Anthropologist Among the Marxists and Other Essays. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
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[Review length: 880 words • Review posted on September 14, 2011]