“Depressed Sufferings”: Reading Dalit Life-Writings as Testimonies of Collective Resistance

Paulomi Sharma

doi:10.17951/nh.2021.6.36-50

Abstract

Dalit life-writings have often been identified as reified spaces of protest against the Brahmanic oppression continuing since centuries in the Indian society. Banished to a space of invisibility, both metaphorical as well as physical margins of the Social Imaginary, Dalits continue to push back boundaries by transforming the ‘marginal’ space into a space of ‘subaltern resistance’. My aim in this paper is to interrogate the methods of collective resistance in the life-writings of Dalit women authors and show how the peripheral spatial geography becomes the central site of resistance. Both Baby Kamble’s The Prisons we Broke (2008), and Bama’s Karukku (1992) belong to entirely different historical periods, and therefore, inevitably differ in their plot-narratives and manner of expression. However, they converge in their emphasis on how the Dalit segregated spaces in their village assume an important role in awakening their collective consciousness first – as members of a community, and second – as women.

Highlights

The subaltern as gendered subject has been a source of significant scrutiny ever sinceS postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak came up with herfamous contention that the “The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” (308)
My aim in this paper is to interrogate the methods of collective resistance in the life-writings of Dalit women writers and consider the primary texts, Baby Kamble’s The Prisons we Broke (2008) and Bama’s Karukku (1992) as works which elude generic conventions of the autobiography and should be read as ‘testimonial narratives of resistance’, with the Latin American genre of the testimonio as its referent
Since the Indian caste system derives its justifications from the Hindu law of divinity that are apparently inalterable according to Hindu purists, challenging the ‘savarna’ customs and rituals has been a persistent preoccupation within Dalit activism

Summary

Introduction

The subaltern as gendered subject has been a source of significant scrutiny ever since. My aim in this paper is to interrogate the methods of collective resistance in the life-writings of Dalit women writers and consider the primary texts, Baby Kamble’s The Prisons we Broke (2008) and Bama’s Karukku (1992) as works which elude generic conventions of the autobiography and should be read as ‘testimonial narratives of resistance’ (or testimonios of resistance), with the Latin American genre of the testimonio as its referent. Baby Kamble and Bama raise pertinent questions against the dominant religious ideology and contribute to a social change in the conditions of women Baby Kamble was one of the first Dalit women to write an autobiography Because she writes about the sufferings of the Dalit community in the colonial period, the reader might encounter several practices and incidents described in the text, which do not exist anymore. Denied access to basic education and made a constant target of oppression by the patriarchal order both outside and within their communities, Dalit women have endured and continue to endure extreme subjugation

Dalit autobiographies as ‘Testimonios of resistance’

Social Spaces of Dalit Resistance

Conclusion