Dalpat Chauhan’s alternative Dalit history of Gujarat
An unsung giant of Gujarati literature, Dalpat Chauhan has fought to reclaim a Dalit history, identity and idiom that resist Gujarat’s exclusivist politics and pride
ABOUT A DECADE AGO, as Gujarat seized the national imagination in India, with Narendra Modi touting it as a model to emulate while he went from ruling the state to ruling the entire country, I was reading and translating Dalpat Chauhan. His poem ‘Rise’, from his collection Kya Chhe Suraj (Where is the Sun?), which appeared in 2000, reads,
