Indian Dalit Literature and Black African-American Literature: Reclamation of Identity and Human Dignity

Indian Dalit literature and Black African-American literature have emerged as powerful, socially transformative traditions that face institutionalized coercion, structural sadism, and imposed marginalization. Both literatures arise from communities whose identities were historically shaped by slavery, casteism, segregation, and the denunciation of human solemnity. Through different forms of literature, i.e., autobiographies, novels, poetry, protest writing, and oral traditions, these literatures articulate the trauma of systemic discrimination while concurrently asserting agency, identity, and dignity. This article explores the thematic, stylistic, and political continuities between Indian Dalit and African-American literature, analyzing how both traditions retrieve undeveloped voices, challenge hegemonic structures, and reconstruct selfhood. Drawing on texts such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan, and Bama’s Karukku on the Dalit side, along with Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from African-American literature, this article demonstrates how literature becomes a site of confrontation, therapy, and empowerment. Through comparative analysis, the paper argues that both of these literary movements serve as counter-narratives to prevailing historiographies and ascertain a shared global dissertation on human dignity.