https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.020
Visualizing Hierarchies, Voicing the Subaltern: Caste, Testimony, and Dalit Representation across History and Media in Srividya Natarajan’s A Gardener in the Wasteland, Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand’s Bhimayana, and Ambedkar’s Waiting for a Visa
SOURADIPA DATTA
M.A. 2025
Department of English
Presidency University
KOUSIKI PATRA
M.A. 2025
Department of English
Presidency University
Abstract: The persistence of caste politics as a foundational structure of Indian society continues to shape lived realities despite constitutional guarantees of equality and modern claims of social progress. As certain sections of society are excluded from basic resources and rights, caste functions as an entrenched system of social stratification in South Asia. This paper examines the representation of caste across Srividya Natarajan’s A Gardener in the Wasteland, Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand’s Bhimayana, and B. R. Ambedkar’s Waiting for a Visa through a thematic framework that foregrounds lived experience, visuality, testimony, and media circulation. The study argues that these texts collectively render caste as a structural condition shaping the totality of Dalit life, manifested through everyday humiliation, spatial segregation, and systemic denial of social participation.
While the graphic narratives mobilize visual strategies to disrupt dominant caste discourses, producing affective immediacy and compelling confrontation, the autobiographical form foregrounds voice and testimony as modes of resistance. This enables a cross-media understanding of Dalit representation and resistance. In Waiting for a Visa, Ambedkar’s narrative moves from individual experience to collective articulation, transforming personal suffering into a broader platform for subaltern expression, resonating with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s interrogation of subaltern speech. The paper further situates caste within an intersectional framework, drawing attention to gendered caste violence through the figure of Savitribai Phule, and examines how these texts function as alternative archives that bridge historical and contemporary realities. By incorporating media elements such as visual documentation and news reportage, they operate as sites of counter-memory, preserving and circulating marginalized histories. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that these works do not merely represent caste oppression but actively reshape its visibility and discourse across evolving representational forms.
Keywords: Caste, Graphic Narrative, Testimony, Subalternity, Intersectionality
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