From Caste To Race: Comparative Sociolinguistic Strategies In Dalit and African American Autobiographical Writing

Abstract

This paper offers a comparative sociolinguistic analysis of selected Dalit and African American autobiographies, with particular attention to language as a site where caste and race are simultaneously reproduced and contested. Taking Indian Dalit autobiographies such as SharankumarLimbale’sThe Outcaste and Baby Kamble’sThe Prisons We Broke alongside African American classics like Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the study explores how subordinate groups narrate their lives in relation to dominant linguistic norms. Using theoretical insights from W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness”, Geneva Smitherman’s work on African American English, and sociolinguistic accounts of language, power and stigma, the paper argues that both Dalit and African American writers navigate a tension between vernacular speech and standard languages (English or high Marathi). Vernaculars function as repositories of community memory and solidarity, while standard registers are associated with education, mobility and institutional authority. Through code-switching, stylistic hybridity and metalinguistic commentary, these autobiographies transform linguistic vulnerability into critical self-awareness. The paper concludes that, although the structures of caste and race are historically specific, a comparative focus on language reveals convergent strategies of resistance and important limits to analogy.