Accepted Panels

Emotions are one of the significant aspects of the everyday social life of human beings, and specialized knowledge in the academic discourse is now becoming an integral part of the realm of anthropological inquiry. Caste is a socio-psycho-cultural category which is unavoidable to study and understand social anthropology in India.  The caste hierarchy operates the practices of untouchability in a way that creates anathema and violence in the society where a particular section is relegated into a terrible emotional condition, a state of pain, humiliation and trauma currently known as Dalits. The question arises of how the Dalits are confronted and contested with such a terrible emotional state and how these emotions are connected to constitute a collective identity to fight against discrimination and pain. Therefore, the paper will attempt to analyze the proximity of emotions and collective identity and how it is visible and operates in Dalit resistance in India. The paper will engage with some secondary literature, such as autobiographies and novels written by Dalit writers. The methodological inquiry would be based on the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) by conducting individual in-depth interviews of Dalit activists and will discover the proximity of emotions in protest and resistance through their case narrative.