Viramma is a member of the caste called Untouchable. Viramma is an agricultural worker and midwife in Karani, a village near Pondicherry in southeast India. The word encapsulates the pain, humiliation, and poverty of this community, which has lived at the bottom of India’s social pyramid for millennia. India’s untouchables have been forced to accept and eat “ joothan” for their subsistence for centuries. It is related to the word “ jootha,” which means polluted and such scraps are characterized as “ joothan” only if someone else eats them. “ Joothan” literally means scraps of food left on a plate, destined for the garbage or for the family pet in a middle-class urban home. Jhootan is a memoir of growing up ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s outside a typical village in Uttar Pradesh. Spread over the entire country, speaking many languages, and belonging to many religions, they have become a major political force.

Dalits today constitute about one sixth of India’s population. Arun Prabha Mukherjee, a professor of English at York University in Canada did a great job by making the work available to a wider audience, She has illuminated the book with her thoughtful and insightful foreword. Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki is one such work of Dalit literature, first published in Hindi in 1997 and translated into English by Arun Prabha Mukherjee in 2003. Valmiki and a few others like him have breached an opening for our understanding and knowledge about a people so marginalized that they disappeared from the world’s awareness, their cultures, lifestyles, folk knowledge, and aspirations represented nowhere in mainstream or scholarly sources. Most significantly, though, Valmiki’s story is a voice from the half of India that has been voiceless for countless generations. Omprakash gives us an anatomy of oppression. The highest purpose of Dalit writing is not beauty of craft, but authenticity of experience. He describes how these people are subject to an institutionalized slavery. Himself born in a desperately poor family in North India, the lowest caste in Indian society, a community of the illiterate Untouchables, he describes from his personal experiences the torments of the Dalits who even have no right to fight for education or food. Omprakash Valmiki’s voice is today recognized as an empowered voice of a writer who works on behalf of Dalits. But Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan is written from the personal experiences of dalit who rises to prominence from his marginalized presence. The name ‘Untouchable’ always brings to our mind Mulk Raj Anand’s book. An Untouchable’s Narrative of An Untouchable’s Life

Joothan book in english