"FIRE" AND THE POETICS OF DALIT RESISTANCE: MARGINALIZATION, STATE INDIFFERENCE, AND THE SUBALTERN VOICE A CRITICAL STUDY IN DALIT LITERARY
Keywords:
Caste, Dalit Literature, Fire Imagery, Marginalization, Meena Kandasamy, Postcolonialism, Protest Poetry, Social Justice, State Violence, SubalternAbstract
The aim of this article is to examine the close literary and socio-political context of the poem "Fire" by Meena Kandasamy, as a significant text within the Dalit literary tradition. Based upon the theoretical frameworks of Dalit aesthetics (Limbale, 2004), postcolonial criticism (Spivak, 1988), and Subaltern Studies (Guha & Spivak, 1988), the article argues that the poem functions simultaneously as documentary testimony, a political indictment, and an act of collective mourning. The study focuses on the poem's formal strategies, its fragmented syntax, onomatopoeia, repetition, and spatial metaphors, as deliberate aesthetic choices that mirror the fractured reality of Dalit existence. The article further situates the poem within the broader tradition of Dalit protest literature in South Asia, connecting it to the legacies of Ambedkar's social philosophy (Ambedkar, 1936) and the emergent protest poetry that has sought to give voice to the historically silenced.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Quratulan, Asad Hussain (Author)
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