Dalit literature is but human literature: a reading of selected poems of Aparna Lanjewar Bose

Refusal to be pigeonholed in categories forms one of the distinct features of Aparna Lanjewar Bose’s poetry. The annoyance and fury which is prevalent in many of her poems bear the imprint of her frustration at the extremely divided way of thinking in India. Still, she is definitely a poet of the world; she defamiliarizes her subjects rather consciously, withholding personal even in her most intimate poems, she projects a worldview that breaks free from the parochial, localized- casteist identities of India. This paper focuses on selected poems of Aparna Lanjewar Bose where she finds her voice not just in Anglophone poetic space but in the broader field of Dalit poetry also. I will also look into her delicate handling of ‘Dalit’ as a category that is neither reductive nor merely rhetoric. Caste oppression is no longer limited to the Indian context, it is a humanitarian crisis that has been and needs to be continuously addressed at the international level. Hence, Aparna’s subject suffers not particular Indian suffering, instability, and slippages; but an entirely humane quandary that needs to be addressed at all levels.