Indian writing in English has flourished over the past two hundred years. A large variety of literature in English has been written in all the genres---poetry, drama, and fiction. The concerns of Indian English literature have similarly covered a very large area but it is noticeable that very few works of Indian short story in English have addressed the issue of the 'untouchables' in India. However, there have been exceptions and two major collections of short stories in translation, namely, Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (edited by Arjun Dangle) and Survival and Other Stories: Bangla Dalit Fiction in Translation (edited by Sankar Prasad Singha and Indranil Acharya) speak of Dalit lives lived on the edge and of suffering, negation and revolt. It will be the major objective of Critiquing Caste: Dalit Short Stories to look at the spectrum of experiences as depicted in these probing and absorbing stories. Traditionally, Indian literature has either ignored untouchables or portrayed them as victims in need of saviours, or as objects without voice or agency. The two collections of short stories to be studied in detail, however, do not quite fit into this paradigm since all of them tell stories of the lives of untouchable men and women bearing witness to the oppression and exploitation.