Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.18
https://orcid.org/0009-0003-6854-264XThis paper reads five poems by Dalit poets (Namdeo Dhasal, Jyoti Lanjewar, Mina Londe, Waman Nimbalkar and Tryambak Sapkale), as they appear in English translation in Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot’s anthology, and asks how the figure of the mother connects labour, land and history. Drawing on eco-feminist and Dalit feminist scholarship, this study evaluates the use of language, assertion of voice in each poem and then compares them. It argues that the recurring image is the mother’s burdened body: she carries earth, sticks, titles and “the burden of centuries,” often on land that she does not own. The poems thus turn the eco-feminist equation of woman and earth into a materialist one, grounded in labour and dispossession rather than in a natural kinship. They also complicate it. The “mother” that emerges is a composite figure in which personal grief, political agency and a historical claim to land meet, and through which these poets assert a self-hood that caste has denied.
Aijaz, Mibdah. “The Image(s) of the Mother in Select Dalit Poems.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 298-311, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.18.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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