Assertion of Identities: A Study of the Select Dalit Women’s Narratives

Abstract

AbstractDalit literature has been established and popularized in the early 1970s in India depicting radical thinking of oppressed, subordinated and subjugated dalits by orthodox upper-caste people with relation to power and history. The word “dalit” means “oppressed” or “broken” which has been used in Hindi and Marathi languages in the 1930s. It is derived from the Sanskrit language. The dalits are referred to with different terminology over a different period in Indian history. For instance, they have been referred to as ati-Shudras, panchamas, chamar, chandals, harijans, depressed castes and scheduled castes. In the literary domain, many dalit writers and translators have contributed to the proliferation of dalit literary aesthetics and movements. The dalit autobiographies have been written as an emergent model of dalit discourse with the collective consciousness of their assertions and perceptions about the exploitation and violence faced by them due to caste-based discrimination. Therefore, the research paper will analyse, by taking into consideration, the select dalit women’s autobiographies such as Baby Kamble’s The Prison We Broke (1987), Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of my Life (1988), Bama’s Karukku (1992) in the light of threefold discrimination faced by dalit women, that is, gender, caste, class, both within their community as well as outside in the society. It will further explore the autobiography as a genre adopted by dalit writers and depict the reasons of dalit women for the existential search for identity that is denied to them maliciously by society even in contemporary times. The paper will draw attention to the differences in the representation of issues of dalit women in dalit male writings and the upper-caste female writings. Last but not least, the paper will discuss the discourse that initiated a new feminist movement of dalit consciousness and how it transformed the hegemonic Indian feminist movements.KeywordsCasteGenderDalit womenIdentityFeminist movements in India