Resisting Caste and Patriarchal Subjugations: A Dalit Feminist Reading of Bama's Sangati and Baby Kamble's The Prisons We Broke
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the predicament of Dalit women and the multiple ways they are oppressed and stigmatized in Hindu society by the caste inequalities and patriarchal suppression, which subjugate their radical subjectivity along the caste and gender lines. Dalit women bear the victimhood of ‘thrice oppression’ on account of caste, gender and class identities, and face an imposed ‘silence’ on their quotidian living. Infliction of graded violence and humiliating behaviors is endemic in the lives of Dalit women which are never depicted in the narratives of Dalit men who turn blind to the question of Dalit women’s emancipation. But the arrival of Dalit women’s autobiographies marks a significant departure from the existing Dalit theoretical parlance, and pluralizes the conceptualization of ‘Dalit identity’ by unmasking the inner contradictions and congruities that restrain any homogenization of Dalit identity based on Dalit men’s lived experiences. A meaningful intervention is made in this paper to analyze and understand the entire spectrum of Dalit women’s existential crisis and their adoption of diverse survival strategies from the prism of Dalit feminism which calls for an inclusive feminist politics that focuses on the ‘intersectionality’ of Dalit women’s lived realities to locate and theorize the Dalit women’s precarious socio-political location. The functional dimension of caste hegemony and the prohibitive role of graded patriarchies have been foregrounded to exhibit how they subjugate the transformative potential of the marginalized women and force them to feel humiliated and alienated in Hindu society. It also traces how these marginalized women subvert the prevailing stereotypical notions on ascriptive identity, womanhood, sexuality, and untouchability, and engage in meaningful ways to carve out an emancipatory space and a dignified identity for them outside the attributes of upper caste feminism.
Keywords: History, Reality, Trauma, Second World War, Fictional Narratives.
Introduction: Dalit feminist viewpoint
Emergence of Dalit women as writers of personal narratives has broken new grounds in the overall aesthetic of Indian literature by unseating the dominant perception that Dalit women can’t write. The arrival of Dalit women at the literary milieu poses troubling questions to the traditional perception on aesthetics and literature. They use autobiographies as a means of ‘self-expression’ which challenges mainstream upper caste feminism by including the issue of caste as a determinant factor in the reproduction of social inequalities and gender oppression. Unlike the upper caste feminist, they give critical attention to the systematic humiliation and otherisation that Dalit women undergo in the Hindu society, due to their socio-political locations, and how the notion of social differentiation based on ascriptive identity creates barriers in their ways of imagining a just society based on egalitarian ethos. Dalit female writers introduce a new dimension to our understanding of caste system and gender inequality by exposing the deep-rooted patriarchal notions that construct the defining features of Hindu society which manipulate women and curb their sexual freedom and individual choice. They argue how the dominant codes of caste hierarchies coupled with strict gender norms transform the lives of Dalit women a living hell. These writers from marginalized social groups envision an egalitarian society, which does not divide and discriminate individuals along caste and gender lines. The imagination of gender equality and a dignified identity for all women forms the core of Dalit feminists’ emancipatory politics.
Dalit female autobiographers such as Bama and Baby Kamble draw our attention to different constraining factors that look down upon and torment Dalit women based on their caste and gender identity. The pervasive nature of an unequal Hindu society that sustains the stigmatizing practice of untouchability, allows graded patriarchies to perpetrate torrents of humiliation and atrocious acts upon Dalit women. A gendered perspective reveals the extent and depth of the inferiorization and otherisation that these marginalized women undergo under caste hegemony and patriarchal inequalities. Dalit women are victimized within and outside their communities by both Dalit patriarchy and brahmanical patriarchy, thus showing the graded ways and forms of patriarchal oppression.
Dalit feminists are of the view that women of Dalit backgrounds face a ‘triple oppression’ on account of their locations at the intersectional point of caste, class and gender, thus giving us a rare access to pinpoint the ‘co-impacting’ and ‘intersecting’ factors that affect the collective lives of Dalit women. It exhibits how the interlocking technologies of caste, gender, community, self-esteem, education and landed property together are related to the subjugation and oppression of Dalit women in a male-dominated Hindu society. The ideology of caste plays a pivotal role in reinforcing gender inequalities and in manipulating their agency in the pretext of ‘streeswabhav’ and ‘izzat’ that discipline women along the axes of caste and gender norms. Compared to the brutal and violent forms of atrocities committed against Dalit women by the men of forward castes, the upper caste women face less sinister and less traumatizing patriarchal violence in their quotidian living. In addition, the persistence of endogamy (marriage within same caste) is seen as an effective tool of controlling female sexuality and in perpetuating caste and gender subordination. Dalit feminists are very critical of endogamous marriages since women remain non-descript and consent of bride grooms are not taken in such matrimonial alliances.
Graded patriarchies and the need for Dalit feminist viewpoint
Bama Faustina Soosairaj is a well-recognized face in Dalit writing in India. Her autobiographies bear a provoking insight into the internal contradictions of untouchable communities and their daily face-off with the dominant caste groups, which highlight the unique dimensions of Dalit women’s everyday struggles against both the upper castes and the male-dominated Dalit society. Though the story of Sangati is centered on a Dalit woman, yet her journey transcends the boundaries of the individual to assume a shape of collective experience based on the shared experiences of pain, humiliation and otherisation in Hindu society. The text is based on an autobiographical material that tellingly demonstrates the precarity of Dalit women’s struggles in a caste society, and their attempts to carve out an emancipatory space based on gender equality and human dignity.
Dalit women possess the most vulnerable socio-economic locations in Hindu society and they suffer from the multitudes of caste and gender-linked deprivation and otherisation. Sangati is seen as a general commentary on the entire Dalit society and their women who toil from dawn to dusk to keep families alive, yet they receive little recognition of their sacrifices, thus showing the selfish and apathetic nature of an unequal society that lacks empathy for the suffering. It shows the existential struggle that Dalit women experiences on their quotidian lives and how despite numerous pitfalls they never back out and try to create spaces for their transformative agency which is otherwise denied by a caste society that sustain its survival from caste and patriarchal hierarchies that segregate individuals and groups along caste and gender lines.
The main protagonist of Bama’s Sanagati is the author herself. The initial chapters depicts the childhood days of Bama, when she was barley thirteen; the last few chapters depict Bama as a full-grown young woman reflecting back her own childhood days and the existential crisis that she faced along with her family and were forced to ‘stay at home and keep working all the time’( Bama 7). All kinds of defiling works are the privilege of Dalit women like hers, who clean vessels, draw water, sweep the house, gather firework, wash clothes and so on (Bama 7). Bama shows the lives of Dalit women is relegated to the confines of domesticity, without any meaningful access to their self-enjoyment. Women’s enslavement to the four walls of ‘kuchulus’ (hut) pinpoints the restricted ways of living of women belonging to marginalized groups who put all their personal likings at risk to sustain the family.
As Dalit families lack landed properties, they are forced to work in the fields of the upper caste ‘big landowners’, who treat them like dogs and ask them to render all sorts of labor with any complaining. Even female members of Dalit groups join them in the fields in doing all kinds of jobs, which put them in a vulnerable position. But they continue their works despite all odds. Sometimes, the upper caste men find out opportunities to misbehave with Dalit women working on their fields. They make consistent attempts to molest women of Dalit communities since they know very well that the victims can’t resist. Here, the material deprivation of Dalit communities put them at the mercy of the dominant caste and this provides golden opportunities to the landed castes to launch their casteist and antiwoman behaviors. If a woman shows her guts by protesting against the miscreants, they are socially shamed, instead of rewarded with praises for their courageous acts. These events lead to merciless of beating of Dalit women, thus showing a naked display of patriarchal arrogance in a caste-ridden society. Bama highlights how women are ‘beaten to a pulp’ for showing feminist resolve against initiations of patriarchal oppression.
Bama demonstrates how the lives of Dalit women are threatened by patriarchal subjugation and how caste ideology sustains the notions of male supremacy in Hindu society. She highlights the breasts of Dalit women are squeezed, while they work on the fields of upper caste landowners, but the entire blame is transferred to women, who are victims in its true sense. Bama writes: ‘It’s my granddaughter who’ll be called a whore and punished. Whatever a man does, in the end the blame falls on the woman (Bama 26). Whenever cases of sexual misconduct are reported before the village council, it acts like an extension of male interests and punishes women who are ‘silenced’ by hook or crook by the patriarchal structures running deep in Hindu society. In such cases, the right to a free and dignified life is challenged, and male supremacy is established. Dalit women are not entitled ‘to open their mouths’, even if they receive ‘blows and kicks and beatings every day’ and are reduced to ‘no more than a half-life, or even less’ (Bama 42). Such regularization and normalization of sexual exploitation of Dalit women in a gender-biased society is seen as manifestations of graded inequalities and gender injustice.
The narrative of Sangati can be interpreted as a Dalit feminist text that specifically focuses on the elaborate surveillance mechanisms operative in a caste-divided society that produces structures of inequalities and discrimination along caste and gender lines. As a Dalit feminist, Bama is very vocal about the emancipation of Dalit women and loses out no scope in scrutinizing the oppressive patriarchal structures that traumatize Dalit women in graded forms. The women of Sangati are not seen as ‘mute’ spectators, but active agents of social transformation questioning such socio-political mechanisms that subjugate Dalit women collectively in a society, in which gender prejudices run rampant among male citizens. Relegation of Dalit women into the ‘other’ of Dalit men, who suffer from multiple socio-economic handicaps because of their gender and caste identities is reflective of the extreme rate of marginalization and exclusion that these socially subaltern groups face in the stratified Hindu society. Bama goes beyond the victimhood of Dalit women to establish an alternative vision of society based on gender equality that allows marginalized women agency and subjectivity to initiate their collective emancipation.
This autobiographical narrative exposes the myth that Dalit community is ‘democratic’ in nature and women of the said community enjoy a free life. But the honest portrayal of Dalit communities does establish the opposite fact and shows how Dalit women are also victims of internal colonization under Dalit patriarchal structures that treat them as mere puppets or extension of Dalit men’s imagination or self. A life of Dalit women is doubly jeopardized on account of its tragic experiences within and outside Dalit communities. This points to the intersectionality of caste, class and gender in otherisation and subjugation of Dalit women, and demonstrate how such interface creates spaces of exclusion and inequalities for Dalit women in the caste-segregated Hindu society that treats its own women in a beastly manner.
The representation of Dalit women like living corpses showcases the extent and depth of an oppressive social set-up that crosses all parameters of decency or ethical standard to subordinate Dalit women. The normative universe in a caste society is characterized by male –centric imagination and the question of gender equality remains far away from being achieved. The subordination of Dalit women’s agency and subjectivity refers to the pervasive presence of degrading social inequalities that stem from caste hegemony and patriarchal subjugation. Dalit women face oppression and violence in multiple ways, and in multiple forms, thus diversifying the overall construction of Dalits’ lived realities that form a unique understanding of Hindu society which is reductive as well as oppressive. The combined effects of patriarchy and caste hegemony produce a morally corrosive impact on Dalit women and put them in the state of permanent subservience to societal norms. Instead of getting love and mutual respect, Dalit women receive hard blows, and inhumane torture from their husbands, who are seen dragging and flogging their wives ‘like an animal, with a stick or with his belt’(Bama 42). They are left alone in their battles for survival within their homes and outside, thus making a tragic commentary on the collective fate of women belonging to Dalit communities. Even if somebody comes as a Good Samaritan to help out such women in distress, the cruel husbands advise them to ‘go and mind your business’ (Bama 43).
Bama takes a critical view of patriarchal structures that are replicated via the endogamous matrimonial alliances. She foregrounds a harsh critique of the institution of marriage. As an institution, as shown by Bama, marriage produces not happiness, but anger, fury, resentment and hatred in the minds of Dalit women (Bama 44). The caste system is interpreted as the maintainer of unequal social relations and graded inequalities along the axes of caste and gender. While highlighting the pain and suffering being faced by Dalit women, Bama remarks in a poignant manner with a subdued tone of lamentation: ‘Night after night they must give in to their husbands’ pleasure. Even if a woman’s body is wracked with pain, the husband is bothered only with his own satisfaction’ (Bama 59).
It is ironical to note that upper caste men never bother about the supposed ‘untouchable’ status of Dalit women in times of satisfying their own sexual urge from them. The customs of upper caste men’s access to lower caste women’s sexuality goes back to the past, which legitimizes the exploitation of Dalit women as a normative behavior. Bama takes an exception to such persistence of patriarchal domination, and evokes an alternative imagination of gender-just society devoid of any perpetuation of gender violence committed against female sexuality. The collective wrath of upper caste males exacerbates the vulnerability of Dalit women and raises the possibility of sexual atrocities committed against Dalit women in case of any caste-linked violent confrontation. The victimization of Dalit women by the upper caste society marks an unequal social order and the perpetuation of gender subordination under the patriarchal notions. Dalit women live at the crossroads of gender and caste-linked oppressive social order that stigmatizes and oppresses them as they face exclusion and inequality for their caste and gender identity.
The negative depiction of women in general and Dalit women in particular dates back to the ages of the Dharmashastras in the Vedic era. In this context, the role of Manusmriti as a quasi-legal text or as determinant/codifier of caste and gender-linked behaviors is increasingly recognized. It presented the context for the genesis of caste system and how people of four castes have taken birth from the different location of Brahma. It also recommended severe punishments for those who transgress such caste-ascribed normative universes of caste and gender roles for lower caste groups as well as women. The prohibitory measures include excommunication, mutilation of the human body and sentencing to death. It operationalized, for the first time, in an institutionalized way, the subjugation of women by patriarchal norms and invented ways to get the consent of womenfolk by prescribing certain gender-specific roles such as ‘pativrata’ and ‘stridharma’, and glorifying these attributes as symbols of feminine virtue. Bama underlines the inauspicious dimension of Dalit women’s normative world that characterizes the perpetuation of caste inequalities and gender discrimination. Dalit women’s lived realties hardly attract any positive connotation since they are condemned to perpetual slavery within and outside their domesticity. While commenting on the dominant hold of men over the collective fate of Dalit women, Bama makes a poignant observation that is reflective of the extent of patriarchal hold over the lived realities of Dalit women. It provokes her to remark: ‘They still control their women, rule over them, and find their pleasure. Within the home, they lay down the law; their word is scripture (Bama 59).
Bama also reminds the fact that upper caste women also face such types of patriarchal domination within the four walls of domesticity, yet they hide it from the outside world only to give a false impression that everything is fine with their lives. But it is a fact that they also experience gendered restriction in their quotidian experiences. Hence the question of upper caste women being free from patriarchal manipulation is ill-founded. Forging a universal sisterhood is essential to accommodate the diverging and contrary lived experiences of Dalit women to secure their fundamental rights in a concrete and genuine way.
Bama’s Sangati turns into a manifesto for the radical agenda of Dalit women’s emancipation that emphasis much on the need for building a resistance against brahmanical culture and their double standards towards Dalit women. It also prepares a plan of action in a concretized way to ensure that an egalitarian society is established based on gender equality in which women can augment their agential capacities to transform the entire community. It also calls for a change in the perception of Dalit men who consider their women as mere properties and an extension of their patriarchal whims. The recognition of women as equal partner in the imagination of an equalitarian society would be the first step to correct the mistakes committed in the past against the self-dignity of Dalit women. She uncovers the hidden social structures that sustain and reproduce caste and gender inequalities for Dalit women, and how they get traumatized by the naked display of brahmanical patriarchy in their quotidian experiences. She also takes a critical view of the institution of marriage that eats away the freedom and enjoyment of Dalit women by transforming their lives into ‘a perpetual hell, we must still grit our teeth and endure it for a lifetime’ (Bama 123). Refashioning of Dalit women’s subjectivity requires a holistic transformation of the normative patriarchal approach to women that treat the latter as a mere tool of patriarchal manipulation and sexual satisfaction. As a Dalit feminist, Bama emphasizes the fact that men and women are equal, and should be attributed ‘with equal rights’, since ‘Women can make and women can break.’ (qtd in Bama 123). To attain freedom and a dignified human identity, she requests all women to stay ‘strong’ and to confront stigmatizing practice of untouchability and patriarchal torture with strong determination.
Creating emancipatory spaces via education
In The Prisons We Broke, Baby Kamble foregrounds a radical emancipatory agenda for Dalit women by demolishing the myth of brahmanical superiority and ritual purity, and interrogates the patriarchal structures that are operative along the caste hierarchies to oppress and subordinate women from the marginalised socio-cultural backgrounds. She also created the image of Dalit women as active agents of social transformations that negotiate with caste, gender, community, education, class and religion to ensure an emancipatory and dignified space for Dalit women outside the oppressive structure of caste system. In this autobiographical narrative, she represents those Dalit women who can talk, interrogate and resist any unwarranted approach from both upper caste as well as their own communities. She is no more just a mute spectator in the general drama of human tragedy, but acts like a rebel who confronts the stigmatising practices and attacks the stereotypical notions based on gender identity. That is the reason why she dedicated the text to all her ‘comrades who wish to change the world.’(Kamble v)
First written as Jina Amucha in Marathi in 1984, and subsequently translated into English by Maya Pandit, this memoir of a Dalit woman from her childhood in the backward region of Maharwada traces the journey of a Dalit girl who experienced an abject poverty and gigantic scale of deprivation, and subsequently found new ways to negotiate with her marginalised life by confronting all social ills in a single-handed manner. Her transformation is really insightful, which uncovers her diverse strategies that she used to carve out an emancipatory niche outside the repressive Hindu social system that looks down upon women and imposes its brahmanical hegemony and patriarchal domination on the hapless lives of Dalit women. Her autobiography transforms into a general statement on the collective state of the Mahar community and how in diverse ways they are excluded from the different spaces of public utility in the name of caste hierarchy and gender impurity. Considered as a Dalit feminist text, this memoir ‘brings to the fore the tremendous transformative potential of oppressed people to change the world’ (Bama, introduction xv).
Kamble in this autobiographical sketch narrates the different ways in which Dalit communities in general and Dalit women in particular are oppressed and subjugated in the name of brahmanical Hinduism and its ritual celebration. She expressed her utmost despair at the fact that Dalit communities generation after generation ‘wasted away in the senseless worship of stones, in utter misery’ (Kamble 11), thus reflecting the strong hold of superstitions over the minds of these marginalised communities that emanate from the brahmanical Hinduism and its utter unscientific ethos. In the name of throwing away the possession of evil spirits, it reproduces patriarchal oppression of Dalit women and imposed caste-based hierarchies on the lives of Dalit communities. She makes a harsh critique of ‘Hindu philosophy’ that consider Dalits as ‘dirts’ and throw them ‘into their garbage pits, on the outskirts of the village.’(Kamble 18). She highlights the ‘filthiest conditions’ in which Dalit groups are forced to live in a caste-stratified social order that denies them the minimal humanity and self-confidence. The hold of ‘rituals’ of Hinduism is so intense that Dalits accept them as their predestined fate and mandatory duty to carry out their living as per directions laid in the Hindu texts. Though Dalits are separate from Hindus constituting the fifth varna, yet they consider them as integral part of Hinduism and identify themselves as Hindus despite all types of stigmatisation and social ostracism that they face from the dominant castes who occupy the upper strata of the caste system.
The tragic lived realities of Dalits remind the author about the heavy baggage of historic denial and deprivation that Dalits experienced so far in their social lives, and how they act like mere extension of patriarchal domination and caste prejudices since they lack the courage and agential capacities to resist them collectively. The internal segregation of Dalit communities along sub-caste categorisation never allows them to feel like a unified force that can put up a head-on resistance against the upper caste domination. Kamble showcases how Dalits are ‘imprisoned in dark cells’ and bound by ‘the chain of slavery.’ (Kamble 49). She also shows how all, ‘dirty and laborious jobs’ constitute ‘the privilege of the Mahar’, the subcaste the author belongs to. She shows how the ‘twice-born’ Brahmins dupe Dalits in convincing the fact that Dalits who carry the duties of a ‘yesker’ get an honourable position despite their untouchable identity in Hindu society. All the stigmatising acts are performed by Dalits such as ‘cleaning of dead animals’ and performing last rites of dead bodies of the upper caste in the Hindu society.
Embarking on a feminist trajectory, Kamble goes on digging the patriarchal structures that run pervasive in the ideology of caste which torments Dalit women in particular by perpetrating violent acts against them. She shows how the custom of child marriages remains high among Dalit communities, and how such institutions of marriage soon metamorphoses into ‘calamity’, due to the absence of consent of women in such matrimonial alliances. The pressures of domesticity are so intense that their bliss of married experiences evaporate very soon, thus turning their ‘new life’ into a ‘harsh and arduous’ experience. Even Dalit women soon become the victims of domestic violence and sexual exploitation after their marriages, with mother-in-laws launching a torrent of physical and mental abuse against new brides. Instead of supporting their wives, Dalit men lend indirect support to such cycles of repression and oppression by staying mute, which exacerbates the already-distressed life of newly-wed Dalit women. Kamble remarks that Dalit women are ‘an easy prey’ to such cases of domestic violence and patriarchal subordination, and the saddest part of the human tragedy is that none comes in their rescue from such pitiful condition in which her nose is ‘chopped off’ sometimes. ‘Everyday the Maharwada would resound with the cries of hapless women in some house or the other’ (Kamble 99)
To escape such harsh realities and gender-based atrocities, Kamble envisions the idealistic kingdom of Bali Raja, the mythic god of the marginalised who carved out a discrimination-free egalitarian society that recognised potentials of each individual irrespective of one’s identity, and offered them equal access to tools of self-empowerment and a dignified life. She thus invokes the ideologies and theoretical formulations of Jyotiba Phule and Dr Ambedkar who saw the dream of a just society based on gender equality. She paid a critical attention to the ideological moorings of such social reformers and heroic figures that provided an alternative vision of lived realities based on ‘three qualities of character, truth and morality, to fight injustice and to break the chains of slavery that shackled our feet’ (Kamble 104).
Kamble, in this testimonio, is seen foregrounding the emergence of a new type of Dalit women, who are bold and eager to take greater risks to avenge the perpetration of pain and humiliation on Dalit women by gendered norms of patriarchy in a straight forward manner. She narrated how she confronted upper caste girls in school who abused Dr Ambedkar and eulogized Gandhi. The promptness of their responses displays the infusion of a radical spirit in their character, with which they encountered various social stereotypes. Armed with moral power, they confront graded inequalities of patriarchy and establish their agency and subjectivity. She reminisces the radical call of Dr Ambedkar to establish an alternative vision of egalitarian society that promotes ‘the spirit of sisterhood’ and inspires the marginalised women to discard ‘cowardice’ so that a new vista of opportunities and human dignity can be opened outside the ambit of Hindu society.
This ‘politically subversive’ autobiography reveals the inclination of Dalit women towards the attainment of social mobility through education. The role of education as a modernising force has been recognised, and it is used as a tool to weaponise the suppressed souls of Dalit women who feel overpowered by centuries-old caste and gender-linked oppression and otherisation. Born at a transitional phase of India’s pre-independence days, she saw the reverberation of Dr Ambedkar’s radical politics and social movement across India, especially in the regions of Maharwada that inspired her to remain undeterred in the face of any challenges. Though she was married at the age of thirteen to a man much older than hers, yet she never abstained from nurturing her intellectual as well as creative capacities in the face of crises that determined her resolve to carve out an emancipatory space for female empowerment. Apart from sitting with her husband in a grocery shop, she dedicated some hours to writing that gave birth to this personal self-narrative. She kept her husbands in the dark about her creative activities, and continued chronicling her daily memories in a note book, thus testifying the fact that Dalit women do not lack any intellectual or creative capacities. She says that ‘sheel, pradnya and karuna’ have been the ‘founding principles of her life’ (Kamble 135). The moulding of a Dalit woman’s personality in the lines of empathy, love, strength, self-confidence and self-respect is truly an alternative feminist vision that bears both agency and subjectivity, unlike the stereotypical imagination of Dalit women as ‘dirty’ beings and devoid of any voice.
Kamble in this narrative focuses much on the education of women and how education can be an effective tool to combat social stigmatisation and gender discrimination. Educating the self is the first step towards educating the whole community that ultimately leads to the holistic development of the society, and since women play a multifaceted role as mothers and wives in a community, they possess play a key role to eradicating illiteracy and superstitious attitudes running pervasive in Dalit communities. Since the second half of the 19th century, a concerted attempt was made by some social reformers such as Jyotiba Phule and Sahu Maharaj to incorporate the emancipatory agenda of these marginalised communities via educational uplift. Kamble highlights the transformative potential of education, and how Dalit women utilised it to launch a harsh critique of brahmanical Hinduism that stops women from accessing educational opportunities. Bama refers to the anticaste social movement, which resounded across the country under the leadership of Jyotiba Phule and Dr Ambedkar that used education as deterrence against caste and gender-based inequalities and discrimination. She seems to be debunking the myth that upper castes do possess the exclusive rights over knowledge by paying a focused attention to expanding education among the marginalised women as a tool of attaining social mobility and dignified identity. Bama seems to refer to Dr Ambedkar’s call of ‘Educate, Agitate and Organise’ to confront the stigmatising curse of untouchability along with gender-based exclusion of Dalit women. The story of Kamble shows, how education can be transformed into a weapon to launch a scathing attack on the evil institution caste, and the discriminatory practice of untouchability and gender discrimination, by recognising the radical potential of education in subverting patriarchal domination and social hegemony that lead to the creation of an emancipatory space for all women.
Conclusion
These two autobiographies venture into the politics of ‘self-determination’ and ‘self-recognition’, and foreground a Dalit feminist viewpoint that confronts the caste hegemony and gender subordination, and aim at recovering the lost voice of women of subaltern classes living at the margins by asserting their rights to a dignified and discrimination-free life. The graded inequalities existing beneath the caste hierarchies are brought to the fore that torment and otherise Dalit women in their quotidian existence. A gendered perspective into the functional dimensions of the caste hierarchies reveals the impunity that patriarchal forces enjoy in Hindu society, and how they commit heinous cycles of physical torture and sexual exploitation against the hapless Dalit women that receive a tacit support of the dominant caste groups. These autobiographies also showcase how education could be used as a force of modernity to rescue Dalit women from the clutches of untocuhability and patriarchal slavery to refashion their subjectivity and recalibrate their agential capacities to transform their suppressed selves into powerful dynamites that have capacities to destroy the caste order and to establish an egalitarian society based on gender justice and human dignity.
Works Cited