Lingua Franca of the Voiceless: English and the Literature of the Marginalized

Abstract

The English Language has been proved as a language which gave expression to many colonized and oppressed communities worldwide, like the natives of North America, Australia, New Zealand, etc. The basic premise of this paper is to highlight the seminal role played by the English language in trans-nationalizing the tribulations and mortifications of the marginalized community, which had been hitherto unnoticed and uncared for, in our country. In India, the widespread awakening caused by the iconoclast, Dr Ambedkar, the education promoted by the British Rule and the reservation policy of the government is some of the causative factors which resulted in the evolution of a new literary movement called Dalit Literature. Though many literary attempts have been made by this marginalized community in their vernacular languages since the 1970s, the emergence of their English translation is hardly two decades old, starting in 1992, with the publication of Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot’s ‘An Anthology of Dalit Literature’. This paper endeavours to analyze the impacts of this literature in translation on the marginalized community as well as the ‘others’. The English language has widened the scope for realizing the injustice and inequalities existing in the social system and for making inroads into the creation of a new egalitarian society.