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This article examines and theorises the emergence of an aesthetic of Dalit poetry that it terms ‘traumatic materialism’. It resists the tendency to treat Dalit poetry as social documentary, and instead unravels an aesthetic that builds on the realist mode but moves beyond it. Studying two main themes in Dalit poems, corporeal trauma and labour, the article proposes that traumatic materialism forces us to move beyond the realist mode of recording the eye-witnessing of corporeal pain in everyday Dalit lives to ‘bearing witness’ to something unspeakable and not quite visible, which is the pain’s subtext. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay considers questions of Dalit historicity in terms of narrative time. Largely a product of the last two decades, Dalit ("untouchable-caste") literature in Hindi is often read as an uncomplicated expression of Dalit consciousness, an ethnographically revelatory body of writing. I suggest that Dalit literature might be read differently, as coding a distinct meaning of the historical. The model of narrative time configured in Dalit writing poses a problem for critics of postcolonial and subaltern studies because it challenges underlying assumptions regarding the "historical"--assumptions largely inherited from studies of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, in which subjects are defined by their place in history. Unlike the bildungsroman, Dalit texts posit a model for the narrative construction of the subject that does not rely on the category of historical knowledge and the historical event. By introducing the terms eventulness and unreading, I argue that the Dalit text challenges the putative relation between history and the narrative recovery of self. Dalit writing therefore creates a realism whose origins lie not in the bourgeois historicism of the European novel but in the humanism of a protest literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]