The Weight of the Unspoken: Caste, Symbolic Violence and the Struggle for Selfhood in Joothan: A Dalit’s Life and Sanatan: A Novel

This article offers a comparative reading of Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (2003) and Sharankumar Limbale’s novel Sanatan: A Novel (2024), arguing that caste survives less through spectacular brutality than through the everyday, repeated, largely unremarked practices that Pierre Bourdieu names symbolic violence. Reading naming, spatial placement, ritual marking and institutional discipline across autobiography and fiction, the article traces how humiliation is absorbed into body and self until domination requires no further enforcement, appearing instead as custom, fate or pride. It argues further that both texts locate, within this same mechanism, the conditions of its undoing: memory, literacy and narration convert private shame into public testimony and reassemble a fractured selfhood. Reading autobiography and fiction together makes visible a shared grammar of domination that single-text criticism has so far only partly described.