This article is a lightly edited version of the introduction to Touchable/Untouchable: Dalit Literature from India in Translation, edited by K. Satyanarayana and S. Shankar. Touchable/Untouchable is a special issue of the journal Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, and also a standalone volume published by University of Hawai`i Press. The volume can be accessed on Project Muse here and ordered here. The journal can be subscribed to here.Why should readers across the world care about Dalit literature? For one thing, contemporary Dalit literature is among the most interesting, the most vibrant, of literary enterprises currently underway in India. Contemporary Dalit literature has borne gripping witness to the centuries-old atrocious institution of exclusion and oppression known as caste – at the bottom of which Dalits are located as the most excluded – and broken invigorating new literary ground. For these reasons alone, the value of reading Dalit literature should be evident. Dalit literature deserves a global audience, which it has begun to receive in recent years.What does it mean to say Dalit works constitute a literature of witnessing? Not surprisingly – and here one might draw comparisons to slave narratives in the African American tradition – many early works of the contemporary boom in Dalit literature are testimonies, autobiographies and memoirs. These works can certainly be read as testifying to the oppressive conditions under which Dalits and other “lower castes” live. As Omprakash Valmiki, celebrated Dalit author of the Hindi-language Joothan, declared in the preface to his autobiography: “After a long period of procrastination, I started to write. Once again, I had to relive all those miseries, torments, neglects, admonitions. I suffered a deep mental anguish while writing this book. How terribly painful was this unraveling of my self, layer upon layer”. Excerpts from Tulsiram’s Hindi autobiography Murdaihya as well as Pradnya Daya Pawar’s poem, a kind of biography-in-verse of a famous Dalit folk singer, both of which appear in Touchable/Untouchable, provide fine examples of this kind of witnessing. On the other hand, literary critics have wondered whether the view of Dalit works as a literature of witnessing diminishes their aesthetic value. These critics have called their colleagues to account for having a unidimensional approach to Dalit literature – for essentially shoehorning Dalit works into a “witnessing” function. Because of the dangers of such shoehorning, it is important to recognise the many ways in which the literature produced by Dalits in the last 50 years challenges established literary conventions. For example, many Dalit writers eschew a high literary style, deliberately adopting in its place a vernacular/spoken one. The veteran Tamil writer Bama, an influence on the poet Sukirtharani, included in Touchable/Untouchable, is a case in point. Translator Lakshmi Holmstrom notes of her: “Bama is doing something completely new in using the demotic and the colloquial regularly…. She uses a Dalit style of language which overturns the decorum and aesthetics of received upper-class, upper-caste Tamil”. Linguistically as well as formally, Dalit writers challenge contemporary Indian literature, as Baburao Bagul’s essay in Touchable/Untouchable ruminating on the aesthetics of Dalit literature suggests.In the end, both when it bears witness and when it innovates, Dalit literature presents a human story of struggle as well as triumph in startlingly powerful ways. This struggle is vividly brought out in the excerpts included in Touchable/Untouchable from Bojja Tharakam’s Telugu novel narrating the lives of a family of Dalit bonded labourers across generations. Of course, the same human story of struggle is found in different ways in all the pieces included. These human stories are also deeply Indian, as much Indian as the more celebrated Indian writing in English, largely “upper caste,” well known to global readers. The picture of India in Dalit literature may very well be familiar to readers in some respects. In others, to readers not familiar with Dalit literature, it will certainly be startling, evocative, shocking, moving, and more.Also read: Three Years of Slavery, Two Dead Children: The Cost of a Relative’s Rs 15,000 DebtOrigins of the termThe term “Dalit literature” was coined in the first Dalit Literary Conference held in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1958. Marathi Dalit writers created history by publishing several collections of poetry, short stories and autobiographical narratives and critical essays in the 1960s and 1970s. Poisoned Bread, a classic anthology of these writings in English translation, was published in 1992. Marathi Dalit literature was widely translated into several Indian languages and served as an inspiration to Dalit writers in other Indian languages. Contemporary Dalit literature emerged as a powerful literary movement in Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam from the 1970s to the 1990s (see No Alphabet in Sight and Steel Nibs, co-edited by K. Satyanarayana). It became a pan Indian phenomenon with the rise of Dalit literatures in Hindi, Bengali and other Indian languages after the 1990s. Dalit literature in English translation acquired national and global visibility with the publication of autobiographies, novels, poetry and essays by mainstream publishers. Dalit literature is not simply a literary trend but a literary movement for social change. It describes and analyses Dalit life worlds and struggles based on first-hand lived experience. The distinctive term “Dalit” (literally “crushed down” or “broken”) is both identity and perspective. The Dalit Panthers, a group of insurgent intellectuals, popularized “Dalit” as a term to claim a dignified identity for “untouchables,” while rejecting demeaning caste/jati names. They used the term to broadly refer to “untouchable” caste groups, Adivasis (aka “tribals”), and other minorities. In the course of history, “Dalit” became synonymous with the “untouchable” (also known as “scheduled caste”) groups. Dalit critics theorised “Dalit” as a collective identity based on self-respect and human dignity. Dalit is a revolutionary term born out of anti-caste struggles and has shaped a Dalit perspective. In this sense, Dalit literature invents a canon and a normative Dalit character, and inaugurates a shift from the old understanding of caste as a feudal relic to a contemporary form of power. It contests the view that untouchability is a cultural practice based on religious notions of “purity” and “impurity” and suggests that untouchability is a practice of social exclusion of Dalits from the public sphere. Ambedkar as a pioneer of Dalit literatureDr. B. R. Ambedkar is a crucial pioneer of Dalit literature. Ambedkar was trained in the West and experienced caste discrimination. He developed critical concepts, such as the view of caste as “graded inequality,” to analyse how inequality and discrimination were institutionalised by the sacred tradition. Ambedkar criticised the varna order (the idea of a social order of four varnas based on classical texts) because it is founded on inherited social status. Bagul and other Dalit critics were inspired by Ambedkar’s language of equality and human worth and declared “we too are human.” Contemporary Dalit literature documents and examines descriptions of Dalit life in all its complexity and interprets caste as an undemocratic system based on graded inequality, divine retribution and violence. It shares Ambedkar’s view that caste is sanctified by Hindu feudalism.Ambedkar is a critical figure for Dalit writers as he formulated a critique of Indian literary history. He marked anti-colonial nationalism as Gandhian nationalism, which set up a binary opposition of the coloniser and the colonised. He shared the strategic view of colonialism as a structural break in Indian history that offered certain normative values to the oppressed.An alternative approachCanonical Indian literary texts portrayed an abstract Indian and excluded a vast section of Indians in order to obscure internal divisions based on caste, class, gender and religion. This exclusion of Dalit and “lower” caste life from Indian literature cannot be viewed separately from the historical process of the formation of the canon of Indian/Gandhian literature. The Gandhian ideological hold is clear in the early Indian novels where we find pitiable and submissive “lower” caste characters. For the first time, Dalit writers depicted autonomous and assertive Dalit characters in the 1960s. The Ambedkarite hero, to use Bagul’s phrase, is a product of Ambedkarite thinking and the normative principles of equality and colonial modernity.Touchable/Untouchable emerges out of this complex literary history. It takes a different approach to the presentation of Dalit literature to English-reading audiences than other recent efforts. Since anthologies presenting one or two works by a large number of writers already exist, we have chosen to present substantial work in translation from five celebrated contemporary Dalit writers: 25 poems in Tamil by Sukirtharani, translated by Anushiya Ramaswamy; two excerpts capable of standing by themselves from Panchatantram, a novel in Telugu by Bojja Tharakam, translated by Shirisha Amme; a creative/critical address on Dalit literature by the legendary writer Bagul, translated from Marathi by Maya Pandit; a long Marathi poem by Pradnya Daya Pawar, also translated by Maya Pandit; and an excerpt from Murdahiya, an autobiography in Hindi by Tulsiram, translated by Joel Lee. Our intention is to allow readers to dwell for a prolonged period of time in the imaginative spaces conjured up by these writers and their translators. This intention is ably aided by the introductions to writers/works written by the translators. Hopefully, when readers listen in a sustained way to these literary voices with the help of the translator’s introductions, they will begin to get a sense of the nuances of Dalit literature—its powerful witnessing, the freshness and boldness of its literary reimagining, and the productive ways in which the witnessing and the reimagining can be in tension with each other.K.Satyanarayana is Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at EFL University, Hyderabad. He has coedited No Alphabet in Sight, Steel Nibs Are Sprouting, Dalit Studies, Dalit Text, and Concealing Caste.S. Shankar is the author of the forthcoming book The Price of Living: The Stories We Tell About the Poor (Duke University Press, February 2027). He is Professor of English at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa and editor of the journal Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing.