Looking through the continents: Parallel narratives of oppression in Valmiki’s Joothan: A Dalit’s Life and Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

Cultural and religious oppression has tainted the history of human progression since antiquity. While Dalit literature highlights the narratives of untouchables, interrogating the unheard narratives of religious oppression and violence, African American literature proceeds to encounter a similar kind of oppression in terms of race and colour, the trauma of which however is the same. Marked primarily as the ‘voiceless’, ‘marginalised’ or ‘ostracized’ social groups, it is only with the advent of modern interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches that these alternative literature is brought into the surface along with the mainstream literature. While these new attempts bring forward certain authorial voices echoing from the past, a few new generation writers are also focused on who successfully bring forth the issues related to the world not acknowledged by the majority of mankind even today. This paper attempts to analyse two separate texts by Valmiki and Toni Morrison and lay threadbare their similarities and dissimilarities in their attempts of being recognized beyond their marginal existences.