Chanda, Debojoy2024-12-112024-12-112021-06Chanda, D. (2021). In Search of Other Worlds: The Dalit in De Facto Statelessness in Avinash Dolas’s “The Refugee.” Refugee Watch: A South Asian Journal on Forced Migration, 57, 44-61. http://www.mcrg.ac.in/rw%20files/RW57/RW57.pdf2347-405Xhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/42570This article is reproduced here with permission from the author and may be found online at http://www.mcrg.ac.in/rw%20files/RW57/RW57.pdf.In this article, I discuss the position of the dalit citizen of India as one of de facto statelessness. To embark on my discussion, I delineate the dalit body as primally marked by the absence of the materiality of intimate touch from the caste-Hindu. This absence of touch allows me to locate the dalit body within social distance, that is, in empty space as the site facilitating the pure existence of humiliation. The humiliation, I allude to stems from the habitation of the dalit body in a perpetual state of alterity, given the absence of the warm touch of the other encasing it. This framework of humiliation stains the body in corporal lowness— a lowness in which the ruins of the consciousness inhabiting the body are trapped. Such a state of entrapment may lead these ruins of consciousness to go to great lengths to do violence to their bondage in social distance, as I demonstrate through my reading of the suicide letter written by dalit doctoral student and activist Rohith Vemula (1988-2016). Seeming to drift as the dalit body does in the perennial liminality of social distance, Marathi dalit writer and activist Avinash Dolas portrays the figure of the dalit as akin to that of a refugee in the Indian nation-state. Through a reading of Dolas’s short story “The Refugee,” I aver the untenability of this portrayal. Indeed, the dalit can, I suggest, perhaps be said to occupy a position which is closer to that of an internally displaced person— a person disowned by Brahminical touch and recognised in her internal displacement as a figure that the United Nations would term an ‘invisible citizen’ of India. This state of invisible citizenship, I argue, situates the dalit in de facto statelessness within an international juridical regime of human rights. Though the dalit’s claim to these human rights will not ensure that her body is liberated from the humiliation of social distance, her voicing of such a claim will set a tussle against caste privilege in motion. This tussle, as I show in broad strokes, bears the possibility of ending with the dalit being able to articulate her human rights as political rights.DalitStatelessnessSocial distanceCasteIn Search of Other Worlds: The Dalit in De Facto Statelessness in Avinash Dolas’s "The Refugee"Article