Author: Dr Suresh G D

Abstract: Dalit autobiography has emerged as one of the most powerful forms of Indian life writing because it transforms personal experience into a narrative of collective history, social injustice and resistance. Unlike conventional autobiographies that frequently concentrate on individual achievement, Dalit autobiographies locate the individual within the structures of caste, poverty, labour, social exclusion and community life. Childhood occupies a particularly important place in this tradition because caste consciousness is often formed through experiences encountered during the earliest stages of life. Sharankumar Limbale’s The Outcaste: Akkarmashi, Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke, and Laxman Gaikwad’s The Branded: Uchalya are significant Marathi Dalit autobiographies that remember childhood and community life through the experience of caste oppression. Although the three narratives differ in gender, social background, narrative structure and individual experience, they collectively reveal how caste penetrates everyday life through poverty, untouchability, education, occupation, hunger, social exclusion and humiliation. Limbale’s The Outcaste explores the painful identity of a child born to a Dalit mother and a dominant-caste father, making questions of legitimacy, belonging and caste central to the narrative. Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke extends the autobiographical perspective from the individual to the collective life of Dalit women and the Mahar community, exposing poverty, gender oppression, caste discrimination and the struggle for dignity. Gaikwad’s The Branded: Uchalya represents the experience of a nomadic community historically stigmatised and treated as criminal, demonstrating how social prejudice can become attached to an entire community and continue across generations. Through memory, these writers recover experiences excluded from dominant histories. Their narratives transform humiliation into testimony and memory into resistance. This article argues that the three autobiographies reclaim Dalit identity by challenging caste-based representations and asserting the right of marginalised communities to narrate their own histories.

Keywords: Dalit autobiography, Marathi Dalit literature, childhood, caste, humiliation, identity, memory, resistance, Sharankumar Limbale, Baby Kamble, Laxman Gaikwad.

Article Info: Received: 18 Aug 2026; Received in revised form: 11 Sep 2026; Accepted: 15 Sep 2026; Available online: 20 Sep 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.115.15