Birds and animals have distinctly marked and informed Dalit art and literature. Dalit literature effectively mines the imageries of birds and animals as motifs, metaphors and anthropomorphic devices, not only to express Dalit agony and degradation under the caste system but also to subvert the Brahminical sociocultural ethos and aesthetic conventions. Dalit life-writings, novels, short stories, poetry (across Indian languages) and paintings are some of the prominent forms that vividly illustrate this. In her memoir The Prisons We Broke, Dalit writer Baby Kamble affirms:

Baby Kamble's visceral imageries of animals, birds and Dalits vying for the raw meat of the carcasses strikingly portray Dalit precarity and destitution. The juxtaposition of Dalits with scavenging birds and animals shines a light on the dehumanisation of Dalits because of the caste system. Likewise, Telugu Dalit poet Gurram Jashuva exposes the Brahminical notions of purity and pollution in his poem ‘Gabbilam’ (‘The Bat Messenger’), in which the Dalit poetic persona reassuringly addresses the nocturnal bird: ‘You’re a bad omen to them. / For me you are a friend.’