A well-intentioned anthology of literary pieces from different genres and across several Indian languages by Dalit writers, excerpted and made available in English translation, this latest offering from the Oxford University Press adds a new creation: a text-book to the growing corpus of Dalit Writings.
The note from the editors Tapan Basu, Indranil Acharya and A. Mangai that acts as a preface to this book attempts to trace the social and political trajectory which brought writings by Dalits into various disciplines in universities in India and abroad. Identifying the far-reaching effects of developments in the 1990s and the interdisciplinary paradigms of study that opened up the disciplines of social sciences and the humanities, the editors assert that these factors together with the availability of Dalit texts in good English translations contributed to their inclusion in university curricula. Listen to the Flames is an anthology which hopes to address the requirements of the curriculum of Human Rights Studies at the undergraduate level, enabling the study of caste ‘under an academic rubric’ and the exploration of the histories of Dalit literature.