In 'A Note from the Author' that precedes his short story collection An Ocean in a Well, author, activist and politician D. Ravikumar makes an audacious claim. He writes that “The stereotypes created about a race on social, political and cultural levels play an important role in keeping that race enslaved. The stereotypes presented about them – on how they live, how they talk, how they behave – destroy the autonomy of those people. They deny them their own voices and create a situation where others have to speak for them.”
To begin with, Dalits are not a race, and it is not clear who is peddling these stereotypes and in what form, as Dalit writers have spoken in their own voices for a long time now in forms of their own choosing. We learn that he is talking about autobiographies when he adds, “The reductionist idea that Dalits could not create complex creative works, that they only had their life stories to tell was reinforced by the translations that came out at that time.”
It is not clear from what he says whether he is talking of the autobiographies themselves (all of which are certainly complex, creative works) or of the translations, presumably in English (his observations would be truer of the latter and how they have framed Dalit autobiographical narratives, largely because of the upper caste, liberal nature of the English publishing world in India) but it is certainly not true of the former.
Ravikumar goes on to say “Dalit writers also accepted this and started writing autobiographical narratives.” This is chronologically confusing as he had just indicated that they were already writing them and they were being translated. Perhaps he is speaking of newer autobiographical narratives following a formula. He offers no names, which does not help.
All we know is that he was disgruntled with these Dalit autobiographies because they were misery lit, banal narratives that peddled stereotypes, were not theoretically informed, formally interesting, experimental or exciting, and he wanted to change that. He adds: “This irked me. I wrote theoretical articles explaining how autobiographies work. I tried to provide models for Dalit literature by translating stories and poems written by oppressed people from other countries across the world and publishing them in the magazines I edited.” He also wrote his own stories that sought to “break the Dalit literary stereotypes.”
These claims border on the arrogant. If he knows how autobiographies work, why not just read Dalit writers carefully and their location outside the bourgeois, upper caste conventions of what constitutes the ‘literary’ rather than write theoretical articles about how autobiographies work in general or should work? Why not offer them the kind of attention and a set of skills most often missing from the bourgeois translators and commentators instead of offering models from all over the world?
Ravikumar is educated, well-versed in theory and has, apparently, and unfortunately, adopted bourgeois, upper caste ‘literary’ values in his assessment of Dalit literature. But the proof is in the pudding, so we must turn to his stories to see whether his experimental, theoretically informed stories are better than the autobiographies he excoriates, see if they are truly exciting. Unfortunately, the report is that they are not.
The ten stories in the collection are mostly utterly underwhelming. The opening ‘Thambi’ which seems to just be that Dalits can be thieves, is banal. The love stories like ‘Un-timely’ and ‘The Moon Pond’ take recourse to the fabulous but rehearse sexist and tired stereotypes. The eponymous story does not really do much with the overdetermined trope of the relationship between Tamil mothers and their sons.
It is particularly disappointing that the stories that deal with atrocities on Dalits, like ‘Fact Finding’ and ‘A Death and Some More,’ resort to precisely a banal misery-lit account rather than exploring the contradictions inherent in middle-class, reactive practices like the fact finding or figures like the deracinated Dalit activist. There is no real engagement with the sensibility of the victim engaging with the fact finder or that of the villager engaging with the activist who has left the village and is an activist elsewhere. Instead, the victim in both cases is reduced to a two-dimensional non-character, as are the fact finder and the activist, precisely what Ravikumar says he is against.
The satirical and, once again, fabulist stories on Tamil language and culture and creative writing, ‘Zha, the Unique Letter’ and The Word’ and ‘A Theory Concerning Theft’ are clever and rightly mock figures like the Tamil chauvinist and the revolutionary writer, but they do not work as fiction.
Ravikumar’s short stories show that fiction with an agenda is a bad idea. Letting stories speak through the microcosmic world they build (that actually contains the whole world), developing a sense of character through the briefest brushstrokes that a short story affords, letting the story do its work through epiphany or the smallest, seemingly inconsequential gesture or moment that flickers at the corner of a narrative – these are what make short fiction endure in the mind of the reader and transform the reader in the subtlest but most powerful ways.
Ravikumar’s stories prefer the sledgehammer. They smash the delicate aesthetics and politics of the short story as a form and leave us feeling terribly cleverer but no wiser than we were before.