ABSTRACT
Foregrounding Bama's Tamil Dalit women's narratives, Karakku (1992) and Sangati (2005), this chapter maps out how the intersecting issues such as Dalit women's identity politics, borders, marginality, and resistance are linked to existential phenomenology: being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. In Bama's narratives, the links between the “lived body” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception) and the flesh (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible) is made visible by its emigration into language, a “less heavy, more transparent body” (153). While Dalit women's need to talk differently was framed as a response to “external factors (non-Dalit forces homogenizing the issue of Dalit women) and internal factors (the patriarchal domination within the Dalits)” (Guru 1995, 2548), this paper explores how Dalit women's spoken and written styles tie in with “the phenomenological experience” of their body (Sarukkai 2012, 157). Tracing the dialectic relationship between visibility and invisibility, touchability and untouchability, my aim is to underscore, to understand, the interplay between the subjective, the felt embodiment and the sociohistorical context found in Bama's narratives. By framing the invisible (untouchable) Dalit women's lived experiences and embodied subjectivities, this chapter claims that Bama not only enunciates the Dalit women's “lifeworlds” (Ganguly 2008, 1), but also reclaims as well as rewrites the Dalit women's body.
