The Politicization of Body and Desire: Caste, Gender, and Resistance in the Poetry of Meena Kandasamy and Chandramohan S

This paper examines how contemporary Dalit poetry transforms intimate spaces of body and love into sites of political resistance against Brahmanical patriarchy. Through a close reading of Meena Kandasamy’s “Touch” from _Ms Militancy_ (2010) and Chandramohan S’s “Love Poem for a Dalit” from _Letters to Namdeo Dhasal_ (2016), the study argues that caste operates as a biopolitical regime that regulates touch, desire, and marital choice for Dalit subjects. Drawing on Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s conceptualization of caste as an enclosed class and Gopal Guru’s theory of the Dalit body as a site of humiliation, the paper demonstrates how both poets reject victimhood and articulate what this study terms “angry intimacy.” Kandasamy politicizes the Dalit woman’s body to resist both caste and gendered violence, while Chandramohan S reclaims inter-caste love as a constitutional act of defiance against endogamy. The analysis reveals three common strategies: the reclamation of the polluted body, the criminalization of Dalit desire by the state-society nexus, and the assertion of erotic agency as a mode of democratic assertion. The paper concludes that these poets move Dalit literature beyond narratives of pain towards a militant aesthetics of hope, thereby contributing to what Sharmila Rege calls a Dalit feminist standpoint. This research establishes contemporary Dalit poetry as crucial jurisprudence of emotion, documenting how Article 17 and Article 21 of the Indian Constitution are violated in everyday intimate life.