Dalit Ilakkiyam: Enatu Anupavam. Dalit literature: my experience.

Dalit literature in India can be traced back to a corpus of writings from Maharashtra in the 1960s. Dalit literature in Tamil can be said to have begun during the 1990s after the centenary celebrations of Dr. Ambedkar's birth. Since then Tamil society has been witness to a rich and heterogeneous production of Dalit literature comprising several genres - novels, short stories, poetry and performing arts.

This volume, Dalit Ilakkiyam: Enatu Anupavam (Dalit Literature: My Experience), contains a collection of essays in Tamil (with abstracts in English) by Dalit writers, presented during the seminar 'Tamil Dalit Literature - The Challenge and the Response' held in Jan. 2004 in Pondicherry. The writers' essays are complemented by an example of their hitherto unpublished creative writing, in the form of short stories and poems.