From Silence to Defiance 9 6

The Voice of a Bengali Dalit Author

Abstract

The history of literature has long mirrored the social hierarchies within which it is produced. Women, across cultures, have often been relegated to the margins of the literary canon, their creative voices silenced or dismissed under the weight of patriarchal norms. While men were celebrated as the arbiters of culture and intellect, women were tethered to the domestic sphere, their narratives cast as minor or secondary to the dominant tradition. Yet within this silencing lies a persistent undercurrent of resistance. Women’s writing has historically sought not only to document their exclusion but also to reclaim language as a tool of self- assertion and critique. In the Indian context, the suppression of women’s literary voices has been further compounded by the layered structures of caste. Upper-caste women, though marginalised by gender, still occupied positions of relative privilege, while Dalit women, at the intersection of caste, class and gender oppression, were triply silenced. Their entry into literature thus represents not an aesthetic contribution of beauty but an urgent voice of struggle against the irrational constructions and power structures of society, one that destabilises both Brahmanical patriarchy and the elitist assumptions of mainstream feminist discourse. This paper examines how Bengali Dalit woman writer Kalyani Thakur Charal transforms this historical silence into literary defiance through her poetry collection Poems of Chandalini and her novella Andhar Bil. The paper argues that Charal’s writing functions as testimonial resistance, where personal narratives become political interventions. Her work challenges both Brahmanical patriarchy and the exclusions of mainstream feminism by foregrounding Dalit women's embodied experiences as sites of knowledge. he findings demonstrate that Charal reclaims language as a tool of assertion, turning suppressed pain, internalised silence and marginalised lives into acts of literary and political defiance. In doing so, the paper establishes Bengali Dalit women’s writing not as peripheral literature, but as a critical epistemology that demands recognition, dignity, and humanity.