ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the issues involving literature as one of the institutionalized sites of historical memory and identitarian politics before analysing the translation of gender caste and identity in Bama's Sangati. The historicity of Bama's Sangati and its translation in English explains how the translation worked, why the text was translated, and who did/does the translating. Bama's Sangati underscores 'social epiphanies', pointing out to us the key role of 'memory'. It creates a site of collective 'counter-memory' of Hinduism and its caste system. Distinctive about Dalit women's narratives in general, and Bama's Sangati in particular, is its interlocutory, or dialogic, character, reflecting not only a relationship with the 'other(s)' but an internal dialogue with the plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of Dalit female subjectivity. The opening line of Bama's Sangati is a proverb, a mythic voice appropriating the collective memory of the community.
