Dalit Textuality and Sexuality: Narrative and Gender in Tamil Women’s Writing

Abstract

Born out of a cultural conflict and poised as the untouchable ‘other’ to the mainstream literary tradition, Dalit literature has been seen as a genre within modern Indian literature. This study is an attempt to liberate Dalit literature from home-grown nativised aesthetic modes, what Bhalchandra Nemade calls ‘Deshivad’ and to relocate it within a comparative internationalist–global frame. Using theoretical tools of narratology, feminist intersectionality and post-modernism, this study reads Bama’s Sangati (2008), Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess (2014) and P. Sivakami’s The Grip of Change (2015) as sophisticated aesthetic fictions (art) rather than unmediated ideological investments in Dalit experience (life).