The village and the city: Dalit feminism in the autobiographies of Baby Kamble and Urmila Pawar

Abstract

As a reaction against mainstream Indian feminism that tended to ignore the problems of caste, Dalit women and those who advocate their cause have been making a valid case for Dalit feminism. This standpoint acknowledges both the patriarchal oppression from outside the caste as well as within it. Both Baby Kamble and Urmila Pawar have been activists as well as writers, whose autobiographies and creative works are vivid elaborations of the same. Showing how Dalit autobiographies have broken the conventional notions of autobiography coming out of the post-industrial revolution West by locating the individual firmly within the community, Sharmila Rege has pointed out that the Dalit women’s “testimonios” are also their protest against a “communitarian control on the self” (Rege, 2008). Baby Kamble’s autobiography brings out the blatant caste exploitation and violence against women in pre-Ambedkar rural Maharashtra, while Pawar’s begins with the village but focuses more on subtler urban forms of oppression. The latter text reflects on the story of postcolonial India’s development as, even in an urban milieu, caste and gender only change forms of oppression. Both authors’ lives make interesting studies for Dalit gynocritics. Kamble seems to completely submerge the self in the community, living as she does in a feudal patriarchal milieu in the countryside. Writing from a generation later that has felt the impact of urban modernity and feminism, Pawar brings out the self in a bolder way, inviting criticism from established Dalit writers like Sharan Kumar Limbale and others. In a broader sense, both autobiographies are significant as women’s writing and as contemporary Indian literature.