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Datta Bhagat’s Routes and Escape Routes and Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan : Critiquing the Dalit

This article seeks to understand Indian theatre’s take on Dalit politics of our time through a critical reading of two post-independence plays—Datta Bhagat’s Routes and Escape Routes and Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan. Politically, ‘Dalit’ becomes important only after 1947 in post-independence and post-colonial India or more specifically from the 1970s. In the post-Ambedkar phase of Dalit re/configuration, they begin to self-assert through politics, art, and literature, most effectively and convincingly, only with the rise of Dalit Panthers and in the aftermath of the implementation of Mandal Commission’s recommendation for Other Backward Classes (OBC) reservation. The article tries to examine the fresh critique of the Dalit vis-à-vis the upper caste-centric society, undertaken in this crucial context of reconfiguration and from beyond any traditional parameter of understanding, and map, through the plays, the plurality hidden within the perceived monolith of Dalit consciousness. Consequently, Dalit experiences against the backdrop of their struggle are laid bare, and unfamiliar realities come out to upset our comfortable knowledge about this large segment of Indian society.