ABSTRACT
Bama’s Karukku is an autobiography of a Tamil Dalit Christian woman and is singular for dealing with her caste experience without imposing an activist perspective upon it as the portrayal of the marginalised in Indian literature tends to do. She has been criticised for not citing ideologues like BR Ambedkar and Periyar (EV Ramaswami Naicker) but her strength lies in the fact that she tries not to be swayed by ideology. The condition of the marginalised may cry out for change in India but that cannot mean that such groups should be prohibited from recording their own experiences truthfully and produce a literature of their own; they cannot be coerced into describing it in the same activist terms that upper-class liberals do. Karukku records experiences like intra-Dalit conflict and the relationship between the Paraiyans (Bama’s caste) and the non-Brahmin landowning castes, obscured by Periyar’s anti-Brahminism. It also notes caste discrimination among the Christians although Christianity notionally disallows caste. Critics have tried to see Dalit records of their own experience as ‘testimony’ but Bama is producing literature, perhaps more valuable to its body that the activist writing from upper-caste writers with no personal experience of caste marginalisation.
