Book Review | Portrait of an open wound

In many ways, Sharankumar Limbale’s novel Sanatan is a history of the present, examining as it does the fate of several generations of a family belonging to the Mahar caste across parts of the 19th and 20th century — equal parts reclamative Dalit history and an account of the deep, enduring evil of caste violence in India. It has often been iterated that it isn’t the novelist’s remit to educate the reader — not least one whose work has in so many significant ways already paved the way for greater understanding of a Dalit literary consciousness. Bhootnak kept hitting the hard wood with his axe in the hard sunlight.” Along the way, in brief snapshots across history, Limbale pauses across significant events almost as a larger corrective to the historical narratives that overwhelmingly sidelined Dalit figures. The author’s ideas for “a new human formation” directed towards the “creation of a great country” echo Benedict Anderson’s dictum that the novel represented “an imaginative technology for the form of the nation”.