Social Postulation of Dalit Aesthetics

This article formulates the conceptual basis of Dalit aesthetics emerging from the experience and materiality of Dalit life. This article departs from the mainstream idea of aesthetics in Indian and Western philosophical traditions. It contextualizes the concept of peripheral aesthetics, which emerges from cultural production from below the social strata. This article complicates the dominant notion of aesthetics as beauty, taste, and art and locates the idea of aesthetics in moral and ethical domains. Aesthetics is often thought of as one branch of philosophy, sometimes a secondary branch of little significance for the broad reaches of philosophical thought. This is occasionally odd since Kant, who is generally regarded as a founding figure in modern philosophy, sought out the aesthetic in his epistemological foundation and then developed a theory of aesthetics as the systematic unifier of knowledge and morality (Kant, 2000 p. 14). In recent years, aesthetics have revived and are slowly emerging from their philosophical eclipse. At the same time, it has been the subject of serious criticism and fundamental reconsideration.