Article
Narrating Caste: Literary Responses to the Varna Order in Indian English Fiction
This review examines how Indian English fiction narrates caste and responds to the Brahmanical varna order. Synthesizing critical and creative works from 1935–2025, it traces a trajectory from early symbolic representations of caste to contemporary, explicitly anti-caste narratives. Foundational realist texts such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara are read alongside post-liberalization fiction and Dalit writing in English, using postcolonial, Dalit, and feminist frameworks (Rautela, 2025;, 2025; Singh, 2023; Thiara, 2016; Tilwani & Shafi, 2025). The analysis shows that recent novels, short stories, and graphic narratives like Bhimayana increasingly relocate narrative authority to Dalit and other marginalized subjects, exposing caste as a hegemonic, historically produced system and foregrounding experiences of untouchability, humiliation, and resistance (Chakraborty, 2021; Mondal, 2023; Charmakar, 2024). Intersectional studies of Dalit women’s texts reveal how caste oppression is compounded by gender, class, and sexuality, challenging both mainstream feminist and earlier anti-caste discourses (, 2025; Charmakar, 2024; Singh, 2024). The review argues that Indian English fiction now functions as a crucial site of cultural critique and counter-narrative, “Dalitifying” English, unsettling upper-caste universalism, and imagining alternative socialites beyond the Varna hierarchy (Rautela, 2025; Singh, 2023; Ashwinkumar, 2024; Thiara, 2016; Tilwani & Shafi, 2025).