Translating caste as transgression: Dalit literature, Savarna translation, and the phenomenology of ‘transgressive touch’

This article offers a phenomenological rethinking of the translation of Dalit literature into English by Savarna translators, proposing the concept of “transgressive touch” to frame translation as an embodied ethical encounter. It argues that the shift from “untouchable” to “Dalit” constitutes an act of translational self-naming that reclaims subjectivity from upper-caste regimes of sensory and epistemic exclusion. Drawing on phenomenological theories of the body by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sarukkai, and Guru, and Dalit aesthetics by Ambedkar, Limbale, Valmiki and Bama, the study conceptualizes Dalit writing as a form of transgressive self-translation in which lived experience becomes aesthetic and epistemic agency. Through close readings of select Dalit texts and their translational paratexts, the article demonstrates that “transgressive touch” remains a relational, ethically accountable, yet inherently asymmetrical mode of encounter shaped by enduring caste hierarchies and the persistent possibility of appropriation.