A Corpus-based Study on Selected Dalit Autobiographies

Abstract

Dalit literature represents consciousness about human rights. Autobiographies written by Dalit authors are based on real-life experiences. Based on the conducted studies regarding Dalit autobiographies, women are the ones who suffer oppression and violence to a great extent (Simon, 2021) since they are the backbone of the family. Therefore, how Dalit autobiographies draw their reader’s attention is essential and makes these autobiographies unique. In recent years, text analysis tools have been introduced to facilitate information extraction from a collection of texts and compare two or more texts. So, this article using text mining tools aims to analyze three selected Dalit autobiographies of women writers. The central hypothesis of this study is that sufferers, their families and society have higher frequency in Dalit autobiographies and semantic relations between these elements at the lexical level are available. Based on the findings of this study, only in Dutt’s work, keyword in contexts (KWICs) such as “Dalit, caste, India” had higher frequencies than two other works. In Halder’s work, the frequency of these KWICs was zero. Accordingly, it can be said that in recent years, authors are explicitly willing to attract their readers’ attention toward Dalits and their problems.