Confronting the Other: Dilemmas and Contradictions in the Approaches to the Marginalised

Abstract

How and when does the ‘Other’come into being? How is the process of othering materialized? When a person is humiliated, persecuted for treason, victimized for their sexuality, discriminated for their race or class or gender or caste, denied happiness, displaced in the name of development, raped, molested, immorally policed, thrown acid at, they immediately become conscious of their being as an object, they become the other, they embrace their shame. They become one with their immediate identity, losing all their other identities and manifold possibilities. All the freedom vanishes into thin air and they allow themselves to be objectified, defined, classified, confined, arrested literally. Their self-esteem depends on the other(‘s) esteem (the other extreme). They know themselves as the other knows them. The research paper analyses various literary, social media and everyday affairs and tries to calibrate the position of ‘the other’ in the Indian background of marginalization of Dalits, extreme nationalism and islamophobia.