Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
Language is a prerequisite for quotidian human life. For the most part, it plays an instrumental role in defining national, ethnocultural, and caste identifications in a polyglot society like India. Language shapes our views and bestows meanings to our thoughts. However, the analysis of language’s roles, functions, and usefulness, especially in studies grappling with Dalits life in Kerala, has been considerably overlooked by vernacular Dalit scholarship. Against this backdrop, the present article attempts to delve into one of the Dalit languages in Kerala, the Parayans’ language. Drawing insights from two-year-long ethnographic fieldwork, this article sheds light upon the unfolding of Parayans’ everyday life and the process of self-identification besides explicating the ontic properties of the Parayans’ language. In a subtle manner, the article adopts the methodology of ‘linguistic turn’ and urges Dalit scholarship to attune itself to afresh conceptual orientation so that it can bring the linguistic question as the central a priori of discussions in relation to life, identification, and subjectivity of Dalit beings.