Anthologising Dalit literary works began in the last decade of the twentieth Century with Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (1992), edited by Arjun Dangle, which is considered the first anthology of Dalit literature, but it has no Dalit drama in it. Nearly all of the more than eighty authors who have contributed to this singular phenomenon are among the most well-known names in Marathi Dalit literature, and they are all offered here in English translations. A wave of writing by Marathi Dalit authors that exploded in poetry, prose, fiction, and autobiography with a raw vigour, maturity, depth, and richness of content, as well as being shocking in its exposition of the bitterness of their experiences, paralleled the revolutionary social movement started by Dr Ambedkar. However, though this anthology covers almost all the genres of Dalit literature, it does not contain any Dalit drama. An Anthology of Dalit Literature (1992), edited by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot, is one of the most significant books on Dalit poems. Two short essays at the beginning of this book by the editors trace the history of Dalit literature and Dalit poems. This one-of-a-kind collection of heart-breaking poetry and prose by modern Dalit poets is a fervent protestation of the marginalised people. A great number of works have been done on Indian drama in English or in English translation, but no significant work has been done so far on Dalit drama. Dalit plays are written mainly in local vernacular, and adequate translations have not been made. As a result, Dalit plays in translation are drastically inadequate in number, which makes this research work stimulating as well as challenging. Very few Dalit plays in translation are incorporated in some of the major anthologies like Modern Indian Drama: An Anthology (2000), which was edited by G. P. Deshpande and published by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. This is the first exhaustive collection of contemporary Indian plays. The book contains fifteen plays written in various Indian languages that show the subject and formal concerns of modern Indian playwrights. Sriranga, Vijay Tendulkar, Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, Girish Karnad, Satish Alekar, K.A. Pannikar Chandrasekhar Kambar, Utpal Dutt, Mahasweta Devi, Surendra Verma, Datta Bhagat, and other playwrights are included in this volume. While some plays explore the fundamental challenges of human life by reinterpreting myths and folktales, others express serious socio-political concerns. This volume contains a play, Whirlpool, by Marathi Dalit playwright Datta Bhagat. This play was originally written in Marathi as Avart and later translated into English by Georg Nagies, Vimal Thorat, and Eleanor Zelliot. It mainly adopts the folk style to show the caste oppression of the lower-caste people. The anthology thus encompasses the complete spectrum of modern Indian theatre’s form and content. Another anthology, DramaContemporary: India, edited by Erin B. Mee, was published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi in 2002. Six contemporary plays from all around India that highlight the dynamism of Indian theatre are collected by Erin Mee in this volume. These plays were written in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and Marathi, and their translations into English are included in the anthology. This collection specialises in plays that have been published within the past five to fourteen years. Each play explores themes facing contemporary India from various points of view and in various literary genres. These works provide important insight into both the specific and universal issues that the Indian subcontinent is currently grappling with. This anthology includes another of Datta Bhagat’s Dalit plays, Routes and Escape Routes, which was originally written in Marathi as Wata Palwata. This play has been translated by noted translator Maya Pandit and mainly deals with the much-debated subject of inter-caste marriage. Published in 2011, The Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Dalit Writing depicts the ideological and aesthetic distinctions between mainstream Malayalam writing and Malayalam Dalit writing. The fifty literary works in this collection, which include songs, poems, short stories, novel excerpts, biographical profiles, drama, and critical articles, are the creations of thirty-six authors and nineteen translators. The collection is organised both chronologically and by genre, and it includes brief biographical notes on the authors and translators as well as section introductions for each genre. The “General Introduction” examines the historical and socio-cultural settings of Malayalam Dalit writing and offers the logical and conceptual framework of the texts included in the anthology. It contains a Dalit play, Dreamhunt, originally written in Malayalam as Swapnavetta by Malayalam Dalit playwright A. Santhakumar. K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu’s anthology No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India (2011) aims to trace the rise starting in the 1990s of Dalit writing and ideas in each of the major South Indian languages. This anthology provides a nuanced sense of the changing circumstances in which Dalits themselves are addressing the Dalit dilemma today by collecting in English translations the works of more than forty intellectuals from Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Here Dalit activists, political intellectuals, and creative authors made unsettling yet provocative claims about private and public life in India. However, this anthology has not included any drama. Another anthology called Staging Resistance: Plays by Women in Translation, edited by Tutun Mukherjee, was published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi, in 2012, and includes a Dalit play. The book collects the works of notable playwrights and authors, including Catherine Thankamma, C.S. Lakshmi ‘Ambai’, Malatibai Bedekar, Swarnakumari Devi, Usha Ganguli, and Nabaneeta Dev Sen. This collection of eighteen plays by women, which is composed of works in ten distinct Indian languages, represents an important gender intervention in the discourse of Indian theatre. Each play explores social concerns from the viewpoint of women in a unique way. The collection makes explicit the different forms of oppression and violence that women experience on a daily basis and dramatises how they fight social pressures to limit their fields of action. In this anthology, the translation of a Dalit play entitled Dahaam, written by a Telugu Dalit woman playwright, M.M. Vinodini, has been incorporated. The play has been translated into English as Thirst by K. Suneetha Rani. The Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing, published in 2012 and edited by D. Ravikumar and R. Azhagarasan, is an important anthology in the history of Tamil Dalit writing. This collection, which contains seventy-eight pieces, includes writing by forty-two authors and fifteen translators in the genres of poetry, fiction (short stories and novel excerpts), drama, and prose (autobiographies, speeches, biographies, and archive materials). The chosen works explore identity/subjectivity, nationalism/colonialism, and the caste–gender nexus outside the confines of what is commonly referred to as ‘Dalit Studies’. This important collection gives readers a clear picture of the many stages of Dalit writers and their activities in Tamil Nadu from the late nineteenth century to the present. The selections that make up the volume provide new perspectives on literary, artistic, political, and cultural topics. This volume establishes the growth of Dalit writing as a defining force. This anthology contains K. A. Gunasekaran’s translated play Touch, which was originally written in Tamil as Thodu. Forty-three writers, activists, and public intellectuals from Kannada and Telugu are collected in English translation in From Those Stubs, Steel Nibs are Sprouting: New Dalit Writing from South India (2013). Edited by K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu, this book chronicles the rise of Dalit writing in South India that started in the mid-1970s. The fundamental concepts of contemporary literature, culture, and society have been altered by the authors’ poetry, fiction, essays, critical commentary, self-writing, and investigation into mythical pasts. Each author challenges conventional thought with a distinctive political note. K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu’s other edited book The Exercise of Freedom: An Introduction to Dalit Writing (2013) highlights the best Dalit writers from all over India, from Chentharassery to M.M. Vinodini and B.R. Ambedkar to Devanoora Mahadeva. The editors contend that Dalit literature is an exercise in liberation rather than merely a literary activity or trend. It is a social movement dedicated to the fight against injustice. Those who are untouchables and suffer from economic, social, and cultural inequality have produced a wide range of intellectual and artistic works in this body of literature. However, both of these anthologies are devoid of any drama. The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing (2016), edited by K. Purushotham, Gita Ramaswami, and Gogu Syamala, aims to offer nearly a century’s worth of Dalit writing in Telugu, including critiques of Hinduism, the Left, Dalit women’s activism, and other specific issues including Dalit movements and activism. Andhra Pradesh is perhaps the only state in India where the Left-led movements have coexisted with an active Dalit movement. Although there is a sizable collection of Dalit literature in other states as well, the Andhra Pradesh Dalit movement has persevered in the face of numerous other mainstream movements. The collection of texts encompasses all facets of Dalit life and represents a living tradition that spans both ancient and modern times. Poems and melodies from the oral tradition, the earliest verbal art forms and the foundation of Telugu Dalit arts and letters, open the selection. In chronological order, it includes poetry, short stories, novel excerpts, critical essays, etc., that depict the feminist, nationalist, and regional Dalit movements that coexisted with elite movements at the time. Twenty-one significant Dalit authors are incorporated into the collection Listen to the Flames: Texts and Readings from the Margins (2016). The editors of this volume, Tapan Basu, A. Mangai, and Indranil Acharya, have made an effort to incorporate as many literary forms as possible, including poetry, story excerpts, autobiographies, memoirs, dramas, and prose compositions by Dalit authors. Representative voices from twelve different Indian languages are presented in the anthology, and a writing extract by B. R. Ambedkar in English. This anthology contains an excerpt from Achintya Biswas’ play The Portrait of Ambedkar. With notes on the authors, pre-text discussions, and messages from the authors, this collection is specifically edited for study with the goal of opening the scholar’s eyes to a critical perspective on the subject. Janajati Darpan, the only international multilingual publication series from West Bengal on Indigenous Studies, edited by Indranil Acharya, is another significant series of books that bring out various Indigenous and Dalit texts like short stories, poems, essays, autobiography extracts, and Dalit plays along with interviews of the authors in local vernaculars as well as in translation. From 2019 to 2021, in Vol. 6 to Vol. 8, four Dalit plays, Chuni Kotal Speaking, Nachni, Bhigu Dusad, and Shudrakanya, written by well-known Bengali Dalit playwright Raju Das, were published. These plays were translated by Baishali Hui, Shubhendu Shekhar Naskar, Benil Biswas, and Debi Chatterjee, respectively. In Vol. 9 in 2022, the series published three Dalit plays: The Encircling Pressure by Achintya Biswas, one of the pioneers of the Dalit movement in Bengal, Matanga by Harshabardhan Chowdhury, and Manju Bala’s Transcendence. The first two plays were translated by Sanchita Mukherjee, and Amitava Pal translated Manju Bala’s play. Janajati Darpan is actually a record of the rising intimacy among the several marginalised communities, both Dalits and Adivasis, in eastern India. Debi Chatterjee and Asit Biswas’ edited book Dalit Protest Unbridled: Two Dozen Plays of Raju Das (2022) anthologises the plays of renowned Bengali Dalit playwright Raju Das. This collection of twenty-four plays covers a wide range of topics, including historical, social, political, diasporic, and even autobiographical ones.