From Object to Subject: Subaltern Self-Fashioning in Yogesh Maitreya's Water in a Broken Pot

Abstract

This paper examines Yogesh Maitreya's memoir Water in a Broken Pot: A Memoir (2023) as a site of subaltern self-fashioning, in which a Dalit subject moves from being spoken about within casteist and Brahmanical discourse to speaking for himself through the act of life-writing. Drawing on subaltern studies  particularly Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's problematization of subaltern speech and Ranajit Guha's notion of history "from below" this paper argues that Maitreya's memoir performs a double movement: it documents the structural silencing of Dalit experience within family, campus, and intimate life, while simultaneously enacting the very form of resistance that undoes that silencing, namely authorship itself. The paper explores how memory, working-class labor, Ambedkarite philosophy, and romantic and social alienation function as instruments through which Maitreya reconstructs himself as a narrating subject rather than a narrated object. It concludes that Water in a Broken Pot exemplifies a broader Dalit-Bahujan literary practice in which autobiography becomes a counter-archive, disrupting what reviewers have called "Savarna silence" and reclaiming interiority, thought, and history for a community historically denied both.