The Anthological Canon of Dalit Novels and the Exclusion of Tulu

Dalit literature in India is often critiqued for being overwhelmingly dominated by poetry, with other genres such as autobiographies, short stories, plays and novels comparatively underrepresented. Dalit novel, a literary genre that emerged alongside the Indian novelistic tradition following the rise of Dalit literature in the 1970s, has been a particularly late and under-experimented form within this literary tradition. The post-2000 Dalit literary anthologies and critical works trace the growth and development of Dalit novels in most of the scheduled languages of India, but fail to incorporate the presence of Dalit novels in non-scheduled languages such as Tulu. There are two Dalit novels that have been published in the Tulu language. Madhava Peraje’s Nile , published in 1997, lays the foundation for the Tulu Dalit novel. However, it took 22 years for another Dalit novel in Tulu to be published. Shwetha Kaje’s Satyoda Maime , published in 2019, is the second Tulu Dalit novel, marking a renewed engagement with the form after a long literary gap. This commentary attempts to critique the history of Dalit literary anthologies in terms of their canon of Dalit novels, examine the constitutive features that distinguish the Dalit novel from the mainstream novel in language and structure, and foreground the reasons for the absence and marginalization of Tulu Dalit novels in their literary historiography and study the need for their inclusion. It argues that the exclusion of Tulu Dalit novels is structural, resulting from hegemonic language frameworks that work against regionally specific Dalit narration in India.