HUMANS ARE DALITS: A PROBE INTO MAHASWETA DEVI’S 'SALT' AND 'LITTLE ONES' (Pages 66 - 71) by Mr. R. Sundararaj in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Literature in general and dramatic literature in Particular-Greek tragedies and English moralities of the earlier Renaissance present a picture of calamity, a resultant of the villainous human mind, propelled by natural instinct to perpetuate the down trodddenness that creeps into the human mind unsought. Human life has the need to be characterised by ethical imperatives. World literature shows how people are rooted to the soil of their mind to be inhuman, tyrranical and sinful which are helpless and hopeless. Mahasweta Devi’s writings exhibit the rootedness of the Dalits to their soil and rootedness of the caste Hindus to the soil of the mind to inflict ineffable agony to the Dalits and bring out the true picture of social realism. Her short story Salt is a graphic presentation of facts about the Dalit misery at the hands of perpetrators of agony. It is villainy in the mind, rather than its physical outlet that is more dangerous. The performotive language of expression “A new ministry after the vote. The old offices and old officers reborn in new roles”, is emphatic of new troubles in store for Jhuharis. “Do you know the betbegariis illegal?” This interrogation from government officials is another instance of the unchangeable tyrannical situation to be explicated from the complex fabric of caste oppression as picturised by Maha Swetadevi. This is killing the Jhuharis by salt. This attitude is demonstrative of the archetypal satanic intensity of vengeance. This paper explores how this great Bengali writer demonstrates that Dalits are humans with their own past, history and cultural-rootedness. Keywords: Dalit writing, Mahasweta Devi, Resistance literature, Bengali literature,, caste oppression, cultural rootednes