Ashraf Hegemony and the Erasure of Caste: Towards a Pasmanda Literary Criticism in South Asian Fiction

Abstract

This article examines the persistent erasure of caste hierarchies among South Asian Muslims within canonical postcolonial literature. While sociological scholarship extensively documents the stratification of Muslim communities into Ashraf, Ajlaf, and Arzal groups, dominant literary representations consistently privilege elite Ashraf subjectivities. Through a comparative analysis of canonical novels by Ahmed Ali, Attia Hosain, and Mumtaz Shah Nawaz alongside the sociological interventions of Ali Anwar and Masood Alam Falahi, this study demonstrates how literary canon formation functions as a mechanism of cultural hegemony, homogenizing Muslim identity and rendering Pasmanda (marginalized) communities invisible. Even Progressive writers, while addressing class and gender, largely overlook systemic caste oppression. To address this epistemic exclusion, the paper proposes "Pasmanda Literary Criticism," an interdisciplinary framework integrating intersectionality, postcolonial theory, and the sociology of literature to recover neglected histories and challenge monolithic constructions of the South Asian Muslim subject.