Abstract:
As part of minority discourse a Dalit woman’s life-stories are primarily designed to point out ‘caste-deficiency’ in Indian feminism and prevalence of interlocking system of domination in which Dalit women find themselves trapped. As a powerful mode of self-representation, Dalit women’s autobiographies (life-narratives) too extend the discourse on marginalization, particularly in the context of Dalit protest movement’s general apathy to gender issues in the community itself. Dalit woman’s life-writing generally takes on the form of either one coherent narrative or a variety of collected works including letter, diaries, memories and interviews where the writer’s self is either the primary subject or the principal object of verbal action. Women here place their personal experiences in more interpersonal contexts. In addition, their stories include more information about emotional aspects of events than do Dalit man’s narratives. The last two decades have witnessed a spurt in the production of Dalit women’s narratives. From Maharashtra, the birthplace of Dalit literature movement, the most notable figures are Shantabai Kamble, Baby Kamble, Kumud Pawde and Urmila Pawar. The South too can boast of a host of names but the one to have grabbed fame and titles is Faustiana Bama whose autobiography Karukku has won Crossword award for literature. Interestingly, in many ways, Karukku is an unusual autobiography. When it appeared the literary world was literally struck by its sheer energy, its newness, particularly its brilliant use of local dialect. More daring seems to be her next work Sangati- a generic muddle of sorts. Flouting received notions of what a novel should be, Bama weaves many narratives together to explore the social inequalities suffered by Dalit women. Does it signal a major shift with the promise of fresh winds for Dalit literature movement otherwise gone overly repetitive, monochromatic and clichéd? Through a reading of the novel Sangati, this paper seeks to examine how Bama ushers in a change in Dalit feminist writing and how she changes the quality and style of canonical narratives considered as literary so that they will accommodate the stories of silenced people articulated through a differentiated kind of aesthetics.
Key Words: Dalit fiction, life-narratives, Dalit feminism, form, aesthetics
“By Dalit literature, I mean writing about Dalits by Dalit writers with a Dalit consciousness. The form of Dalit literature is inherent in its Dalitness, and its purpose is obvious: to inform Dalit society of its slavery, narrate its pain and suffering to upper caste Hindus” (Limbale 18).
First published in Marathi in 1996 as Dalit Sahityache Saunndaryasastra Limbale’s book is a wide ranging exploration of a Dalit writer, of the history, controversies and considerations pertaining to the emerging literature of the Dalits. Indeed it is a brand of literature throwing up a counter aesthetics that challenges valorization of a cool, detached contemplation of life. Silenced for centuries by caste prejudices and social oppression, the Dalits of Maharashtra have only in the last 50 years, found a powerful voice in Marathi literature. The revolutionary social movement launched by their leader B R Ambedkar was paralleled by a wave of writing that exploded in poetry, prose fiction and autobiography of a raw vigour, maturity, depth and richness of content and shocking in its exposition of the bitterness of their experiences. One is jolted by a quality of writing by a group denied access for long to any literary tradition. The first Dalit literary conference happened in 1958. The twin events of Narayan Surve focusing on Subaltern issues and the little magazine movement taking root- both in the sixties- provided the real impetus. But the individuals who greatly shaped the evolving stream of Dalit literature were Anna Bhau Sathe, Shankarrao Kharat and Baburao Bagul. Bagul’s collection of stories, Jevha Mee Jaat Chorli Hoti was hailed as the epic of the Dalits while others compared it to the jazz music of the Blacks. Those who came later and significantly contributed to the growth and complexity of Dalit literature were Tarachandrra Khandelkar, Yogiraj Waghmare, Avinash Dolas, Yogendra meshram and bhimrao Shiirvale. No less important were poets like Daya pawar, Waman Nimbalkar, Tryamback Sapkale, Arjun Dangle, Namdeo Dhasal, Umakant Randhir and JV Pawar.
In the same way as, in the Western literary canon, people from marginalized social classes or ethnic groups have been historically relegated to the borders of canonical narratives; Dalits in India have been portrayed as minor figures that watch from the edge of life and literature. Alok Mukherjee acutely observes that both Dalit literature and Dalit literary criticism constitute themselves as an answer to Gayatry Spivak’s famous question ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ They actually do so when they, firstly deconstruct their inferior position as High Caste Hindu’s other by rewriting Classical Indian Literature, sanctioned by religion purity. Dalits were not allowed to learn Sanskrit, so as not to pollute the language or this canonical literary tradition. Therefore, they created a new literary canon in the local languages. Second, Dalits also address Spivak’s question when they contest Westernized Indian Literature in English committed to the needs of the individual. As they have historically been stigmatized as a community of Untouchables, for the Dalits the community stands above the needs of the individual.
As stated before Dalit Literature emerged as an expression of protest against the inhuman conditions of existence to which the Hindu caste system has subjected the Dalits for thousands of years. But Dalit Literature which was mainly dominated by male writers overlooked their women’s problems. Women were either absent in Dalit men’s writings or their presence was nullified by the way they were treated. For example, though Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature is a book that theorizes Dalit literature, Limbale fails to discuss or completely ignores the problems faced by women and disregard Dalit women’s writings which substantiate the claim that Dalit males discriminate Dalit women in consonance with the way Dalits are discriminated by the savarna or mainstream society. Nowhere in the book has he spoken about the problems of women within their community or the presence of Dalit women writers or their contribution in the same. A book which should have dealt with Dalit literature in general excluded its own women’s writings. Limbale in his interview with Alok Mukherjee says that Dalit Literature seeks to transform the savarna society (125). One wonders while reading Dalit male writings and especially Limbale’s Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, since it is considered to be the first work that theorizes Dalit literature, whether Dalit men include both Dalit men and women. Generalization will send a false message. The male writers establish a form where women writers are marginalized or their writings are pushed to conform to the accepted male norms which definitely will not include the problems of gender. This curbs their freedom to write or to express themselves.
Therefore Dalit women’s writings are a protest against their exclusion from the Dalit public spheres like literary, academic and publishing spheres and also the political parties and the movement. The self in their writings is ‘historically located and sociologically constituted’ (Guru 160). The main intention of Dalit women writers behind writing is to bring in a change in their condition. Writing is therapeutic for them. They hope for a future which can be constructed by subverting the present. Their writings reflect their zeal and spirit to construct not only alternative histories but also alternative literary traditions. As a powerful mode of self-representation, Dalit women’s autobiographies (life-narratives) too extend the discourse on marginalization, particularly in the context of Dalit protest movement’s general apathy to gender issues in the community itself. Dalit woman’s life-writing generally takes on the form of either one coherent narrative or a variety of collected works including letter, diaries, memories and interviews where the writer’s self is either the primary subject or the principal object of verbal action. Women here place their personal experiences in more interpersonal contexts. In addition, their stories include more information about emotional aspects of events than do Dalit man’s narratives. The last two decades have witnessed a spurt in the production of Dalit women’s narratives. From Maharashtra, the birthplace of Dalit literature movement, the most notable figures are Shantabai Kamble, Baby Kamble, Kumud Pawde and Urmila Pawar. The South too can boast of a host of names but the one to have grabbed fame and titles is Faustiana Bama whose autobiography Karukku has won Crossword award for literature. Interestingly, in many ways, Karukku is an unusual autobiography. When it appeared the literary world was literally struck by its sheer energy, its newness, particularly its brilliant use of local dialect. More daring seems to be her next work Sangati- a generic muddle of sorts. For instance, Bama’s three major works combine the self, community and society. While her Karukku is an autobiography, which emerges from the context of a particular moment—a personal crisis that forces her to rethink or make sense of her life as a woman, Christian, Dalit; her Sangati is a “series of anecdotes” revealing a true picture of the Paraya community. At the same time, her Vanmam speaks about the intra Dalit hostilities—the animosity between the Pallars and Parayas and how the dominant Naicker makes benefit out of the situation. The three works discuss self and the experience of the self as well as the community.
Bama’s Sangati is a unique Dalit feminist narrative. As an exponent of Dalit feminism, Bama has found in Karukku the right way to explore the sufferings of Dalit women. Sangati carries an autobiographical element in their narrative, but it is a story of a whole community, not an individual. Originally written in Tamil in 1994, it was translated by Laxmi Holmstrom into English in 2005. The whole narrative is divided into twelve chapters. The word ‘Sangati’ means events, and thus the novel through individual stories, anecdotes and memories portrays the event that takes place in the life of Dalit women. Sangati deals with several generations of women in Dalit community. The book is full of interconnected events – the everyday happenings of Dalit community. It goes against the notions of traditional novel. The book does not carry any plot in the normal sense, but it is a series of anecdotes. The author herself says the purpose of writing the book in her acknowledgement as: “My mind is crowded with many anecdotes: stories not only about the sorrows and tears of Dalit women, but also about their lively and rebellious culture, passion about life with vitality, truth, enjoyment and about their hard labour. I wanted to shout out these stories” (Bama 9). In the initial chapters, it’s narrated in the first person, then counterpointed by the generalizing comments of the grandmother and other mother figures, and later still, by the author-narrator’s reflections. The earlier chapters show the narrator as a young girl of about twelve years of age, but in the last quarter, as a young woman. The reflective voice is that of an adult looking back and meditating deeply upon her experience in the past which calls for practical actions.
What I want to argue here is that we cannot treat Bama’s Sangati simply as sociological tract on Dalit condition. It will negate her attempts to develop a distinctive form and voice. Bama is not interested in the mere repetition of authenticity argument by providing ethnographic narratives or confessional texts. There are indeed descriptions of ethnographic cultural practices, folklores, proverbs etc. But she refuses to restrict her work to this form of the novel. So Bama is creating a new kind of aesthetics, a new form and this play of form can be seen as a political act. Bama shows how Dalit narratives of loss and suffering appropriate a new register, language and discourse.
Bama, through her narrator and the use of language, challenges the institutional apparatuses that work on the reader's concept of self and social order and goes on to produce a subject free of subjection. An instance of this can be seen in the story of the pey in Sangati. This story is narrated by the author's Patti (grandmother), Vellaiyamma. She tells the narrator that Peys do not have feet and that nothing should be said out loud after dark. Such stories not only reveal the popular superstitions and cultural beliefs of people in a region but also show gender discrimination. Peys are frightened of men. A woman becomes its prey easily and especially the ones belonging to the Dalit communities. Bama again uses proverbs to show the condition of the Dalit women who are treated with contempt not only by the public but also by government agencies and she exhorts them to uphold their rights and declare that they too are human beings. In Sangati Bama has reclaimed the language of women of her community. We find multiple female voices speaking to and addressing one another and sharing the events of daily life. The language is reported exactly and is full of expletives, often sexual in nature. An apt example is the abuse hurled at Raakkamma by her husband: “Listen to the common whore shouting, even before I touch her! Shut your mouth, you whore! Otherwise, I’ll stamp so hard on your stomach, your guts will scatter everywhere” (Bama 61). Another one is from Raakkamma towards her husband: “Go on, da, kick me, let's see you do it, da! Let's see if you are a real man. You only know how to go for a woman's parts. Go and fight with a man who is your equal and you’ll see. You’ll get your balls burnt for your pains. Look at the fellow’s face! Thuu!” (61).
The text is replete with such examples. Husbands hurling abuses at wives, women hurling abuses at men and at other women and the violence and irritability evident from the time they wake up till they go to bed work to stir the reader’s consciousness and realize the existence of the Dalit mind as an independent force. Bama makes an analysis of such linguistic behavior. She draws attention to the fact that male violence is due to the fact that men do not get an opportunity to exert their pride and authority in the outside world. Therefore they vent their suppressed anger at home on their wives. Lack of sleep and rest, according to Bama, is what drives women to irritability and quarreling and the lack of pleasure and fulfillment in sexual relations is what tends to make them use terms of abuse for their body. Bama further adds:
Somehow or other, by shouting and fighting first thing at dawn and last thing at night, if need be, our women survive without going crazy. If we are to live at all, we have to shout and shriek to keep ourselves sane. Upper-caste women, though, keep it all suppressed; they can neither chew nor swallow. They lose their nerve, and many of them become unstable or mentally ill. If you look at it like that, our women have an abundant will to survive however hard they might have to struggle for their last breath. Knowingly or unknowingly, we find ways of coping in the best way we can (68).
There is another aspect to the language of Dalit women which shows a bright side to their life. It is the vigour and closeness to proverbs, folklore, folk songs and songs and chants which lay before the readers the cultural heterogeneity and richness of Dalit lives. While on the one hand the lives of the Dalit women are full of pain and turmoil, on the other hand they find time for affairs of life: coming of age, wedding, even death. Bama writes: “From birth to death there are special songs and dances. And it’s only the women who perform them. Roraattu (lullaby) to oppaari (dirge), it is only the women who will sing them” (78). So the form and language of Bama along with the events narrated go towards talking about Dalit feminism and carving a separate identity for the Dalit women: an identity different from upper caste women and Dalit men.
In Sangati we also find intrusion of other registers in the fictional world. In the novel while the narrator discusses marriage and its prospects with older women, her mother says to her:
Haven’t you heard the words the priest speaks at the time of tali-tying?...He says ‘What God has put together, let no man put asunder’…the nuns say the promise we make to the priest is as good as the promise we make to God…we have to live our lives according to the promise we made to God, in front of four, five people (94).
Here the voice of scriptural, patriarchal authority speaks through the mother. The mother here is simply the medium of articulation minus the subjective agency- she frames her identity and existence within the voice of scriptural and social authority. But the narrator’s response to the comment is worth noting:
Go on, Ma. It’s by calling on all this stuff about God, the promises we made to him, our sins and our good deeds, and Heaven and everlasting Hell, that the priests and nuns frighten the life out of us, But God created us so that we can be happy and free. I am sure that God doesn’t want us to be living like slaves to the day we die, without any rights or status, just because of a cord around our neck (95).
Here the narrator is subverting not only scriptural injunctions about marriage but her mother’s stories. Here the shift of register is a significant one. While the mother deploys the register of scriptural authority, the daughter appropriates that of human rights and law.
Thus Bama’s writing challenges and critiques the form of Indian novels in English. The cultural value of Indian fiction in English (which almost always effaces the caste question) is being called into question through narrative appropriations in her work. Lakshmi Holmstrom in her introduction to Sangati questions the idea of M.Kannan and Francois Gros (‘Tamil Dalits in Search of a literature’) who opines that “Dalit writing has tended to consist of testimonies rather than works of imagination, chronicles rather than artistically conceived text, lived experiences rather than poetic experimentation and finally a call for action rather than the conversion of life into art.” (xxi) According to Holmstrom Dalit writing challenges such assumptions and “Bama is among the few who bridge autobiography, fiction, polemics and also a call for action. She has done so deliberately and boldly, moving easily between these different elements and bringing them together with a vivid and lively inventive style” (xxi-xxii). Bama opens up the genre to new experimental forms and creates new aesthetics for Dalit feminist writing. In fine, it can be said that the Dalit life narrative of Bama (Sangati) is unique in the sense that breaks many of elite literatures’ laws because it calls for a new kind of experience: it is openly political and communal because it pressures the boundaries of what is considered as being ‘literary’ in order to fight against unfair and degrading social customs.
Works Cited
- Bama. Karukku. Trans. Lakshmi Holmstrom. Chennai: Macmillan India Limited, 2000. Print.
- ---.Sangati: Events. Trans. Lakshmi Holmstrom. New Delhi: OUP, 2005. Print.
- --- Introduction. Sangati: Events. New Delhi: OUP, 2005. Print.
- ---. Acknowledgement. Sangati: Events. New Delhi: OUP, 2005. Print.
- ---. Vanmam: Vendetta. Trans. Malini Seshadri. New Delhi: OUP, 2011.Print.
- Guru, Gopal. Afterword. The Prisons We Broke. Trans. Maya Pandit Chennai: Orient Longman, 2008. 158-170. Print.
- Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies and Considerations. Trans. Alok Mukherjee. New Delhi: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2004. Print.
- Morris, Rosalind C, and Gayatri C. Spivak. Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Print.