Abstract
This article will consider two Hindi-language autobiographies by Dalit women, to explain how we can emphasize the collective, relational, and specifically gendered character of Dalit women’s life writing without simplistically categorizing them as testimonio, “witnessing”. Nor should we over-privilege their gendered specificity, thereby effacing the very real narrative authority, purposefulness, and perspectival control of their authors. Instead, we must be especially attentive to the language of a text and understand how the relationality and collectivity of experience is not accidental or necessarily organic to a woman’s view on her world, but is actively, politically, and consciously constructed in the course of a narrative. Predicated on a reasonable concern over the appropriation of a revolutionary new literary voice, attention to narrative form has been slow in coming to the critical and scholarly analysis of Dalit literature, somewhat paradoxically resulting in the rendering of this literature too as “untouchable”. In exploring what is therefore only a nascent formal criticism of the Dalit autobiographical genre, I believe it is important to express a note of caution against replicating the same kinds of essentializing processes of differentiation (the kind we have seen before in the critical reception of life writing in other cultures and languages) between men’s and women’s Dalit life narratives as ego-driven and individualistic linear progressions to political awakening versus relational, community-based, politically and purposefully diffuse “witnessings”. In this exciting moment in which we have the opportunity to engage with a critically important and rapidly expanding rhetorical movement such as Dalit literature, it is, I believe, a diligent recourse to textual analysis that may yet save us from such facile stereotyping.
This article focuses on two contemporary Dalit women’s autobiographies, both in Hindi, to intervene in scholarly discussions about both Dalit and women’s autobiographies respectively. 1 Through a close reading of both texts, we can emphasize the collective, relational, and specifically gendered character of Dalit women’s life writing without simplistically categorizing it as testimonio, or narrative “witnessing”, or perhaps over-privileging its gendered specificity, and thereby in both cases effacing the very real narrative authority, purposefulness, and perspectival control of its authors. However, if we pay attention to the language of a text and acknowledge how that relationality and collectivity of experience is not accidental or necessarily organic to a woman’s view on her world, we can understand the ways in which it is actively, politically, and consciously constructed in the course of the narrative.
Since the explosive arrival of the modern Dalit voice on the Indian literary scene with the radical resistance poetry of the Dalit Panthers in the 1970s, the genre many Dalit writers have turned to in order to share in an emerging discourse of power is autobiography. Predicated on a reasonable concern over the appropriation of a revolutionary new literary voice, attention to narrative form has been slow in coming to the critical and scholarly analysis of these autobiographies, and indeed to Dalit literature as a whole, somewhat paradoxically resulting in the rendering of this literature too as “untouchable”. In exploring what is therefore only a nascent formal criticism of the Dalit autobiographical genre, I believe it is important to express a note of caution against replicating the same kinds of essentializing processes of differentiation (the kind we have seen before in the critical reception of life writing in other cultures and languages) between men’s and women’s Dalit life narratives as ego-driven and individualistic linear progressions to political awakening versus relational, community-based, politically and purposefully diffuse “witnessings”. In this exciting moment in which we have the opportunity to engage with a rapidly expanding rhetorical movement such as Dalit literature, it is a diligent recourse to textual analysis that may yet save us from such facile stereotyping.
Thus, this paper seeks to understand the ways in which Dalit women authors Kausalya Baisantry and Susheela Thakbhaure complicate — by foregrounding a gendered experience of caste — the typically linear trajectory of the narrative subject from target of social oppression to politically awakened social subject, which has emerged as a meta-narrative in the collective voice of male-authored autobiographies that dominate the Hindi Dalit literary scene. Instead, their focus on the interstices of gender and caste in shaping experience and perspective results in a new emphasis on the domestic sphere and a more capacious understanding of the individual self as the subject of autobiography illustrated in each case through a focus on several generations of women in their families. On the other hand, this article also seeks to intervene in what seems to be emerging as a normative critical discourse for Dalit women’s autobiography as testimonio, a term that is meant to underscore the political urgency of Dalit women’s life writing but that also serves, I believe, to efface its formal literary qualities.
Twice cursed
Pūtra, bhāī, pati: sab mujh par nārāz ho sakte haiṃ, parantu mujhe bhī to svatantratā chāhiye ki maiṃ apnī bāt samāj ke sāmne rakh sakūṇ.
My son, brother, and husband may all be angry with me, but I too should have the freedom to tell my own story to the world. (Baisantry, 2009: 8)
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So begins Dohra Abhiśāp (“Twice Cursed”), the 1999 autobiography of Nagpur-based Kausalya Baisantry, a pioneering feminist voice in the Hindi Dalit literary sphere. 3 After such an unequivocal expression of her personal right to tell her own story, her introduction continues with a clear articulation of the social and feminist imperatives of doing so. Baisantry writes: “Other women too must have had experiences like mine, but fearing society and their families they are scared of making their stories public and live their whole lives in suffocation. It is important for these stories to come forward in order to open society’s eyes” (8). Baisantry thus announces a purposeful framework for her own autobiography: a strategic desire to “open society’s eyes”, and to speak for women who are scared into silence. In the years since Baisantry’s death in 2011, her 1999 autobiography has undergone renewed evaluation from Dalit feminists and international scholars. In a remembrance of Baisantry published on the occasion of her death, Delhi-based Dalit feminist activist Anita Bharti refers to Dohra Abhiśāp as a Dalit strī saṅgharṣ kā mahākāvya, a “classic” of Dalit feminist struggle. She writes, “Taken altogether, in Dohra Abhiśāp, Baisantry is successful at creating a poignant picture of the poverty that pervades Dalit society by way of [the story of] her own family and community” (2011: n.p. Christi Merrill (who at the time of this writing is completing a full English translation of Baisantry’s life story) explains, “The characters Baisantry presents — especially her own opinionated, sometimes prickly narrator — evoke not so much pity and outrage as a damning scrutiny of the larger society she is in” (2014: 53). Baisantry herself has claimed that she does not see her own life story as the tale of an extraordinary individual, but rather as a record of the days and thoughts, opportunities and hardships, relationships, and joys and sorrows of a Dalit “everywoman”. What is extraordinary is that she wrote it all down and published it, providing us with the first ever autobiography of a Dalit woman written in Hindi, shockingly and tellingly only at the turn of the millennium.
In 2011, the year of Baisantry’s death, another Dalit woman from Nagpur — Susheela Thakbhaure — published her life story, Shikanje kā Dard (“The Pain of the Trap”) in Hindi. The whole autobiography had previously been serialized in the Hindi magazine, The Public Agenda, and even before this Thakbhaure had established herself as a prolific Dalit writer mostly of short fiction and drama in Hindi. Thakbhaure too speaks of the negative reactions of her daughters and husband upon reading her manuscript:
Sometimes they’d get angry, and sometimes I would. Many so-called well-wishers told me I shouldn’t write so much about family matters, but I wrote about them anyway. I want to tell the whole truth. My autobiography is not just a Dalit autobiography, but it is also the autobiography of a woman. (2011: 8–9)
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Both Baisantry’s and Thakbaure’s autobiographies are preceded by introductions that they themselves have written, and the parallels between them are striking. In addition to the acknowledgement of the domestic turbulence that ensued from their choice to write as women (in other words, of the domestic sphere) as well as Dalits, both authors explain that their choice to write their life stories was inspired by other people in the Dalit public sphere telling them that they should. Thus, both claim that their works are born of a sociopolitical imperative, rather than a personally reflective one, a claim underscored in particular by Baisantry’s conscious choice to write in Hindi, rather than Marathi, for the very fact that no other life narrative written by a Dalit woman had ever been published in Hindi. Finally, both women allege there is nothing “literary” about their works, a claim belied by the existence of the introductions themselves that frame both readers’ expectations and the thematic and stylistic decisions taken by the authors, as well as the acknowledgement in both cases of the help and advice of several other writers and critics in the preparation of the manuscript — and lastly, in Thakbhaure’s case, the fact that she is indeed an accomplished author with several works of fiction and drama to her name.
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And Christi Merrill has written of Kausalya Baisantry:
The form her rhetoric takes […] is at odds with her stated declaration of “not being a literary person” and thus evinces a consciousness that the rules of testimonio risk missing. Here, as throughout her account, her ability to cross adroitly from high registers to low, from Marathi formulations to Hindi, and especially from the unenlightened perspective of those who speak of “untouchable society”, rather than the politically correct Dalit women […] does suggest a kind of artfulness, in addition to being politically strategic. (2014: 54)
Kausalya Baisantry was born on 8 September 1926 in a Dalit basti (settlement) called Khalaasi Line near Nagpur station in Nagpur, Maharashtra. When she was born her father worked in a “double-roti” (European-style baked bread) bakery across the road, in an upper class neighbourhood with “big houses and good jobs”, the single road between the two neighbourhoods as metaphorically vast as the space between “earth and sky”. Eventually her mother and father both took jobs at Empress Mill in Nagpur, an old British thread mill and rare place where men and women worked together. Indeed the gender parity and apparent happiness of Baisantry’s parents’ marriage is a focal point of her narrative, one that puts into relief the abusive marriages of Baisantry’s grandmother and Baisantry herself.
Baisantry grows up as one of several sisters; other brothers and sisters die tragically in their infancy. Even while mourning her inability to raise a son — and Baisantry expends some ink musing over the preference for sons among both high and low castes — Baisantry’s mother is fiercely committed to educating her daughters, influenced as she is by both Ambedkar and the activists for women’s education whose efforts to open schools for girls are documented in the narrative. She is educated, and eventually marries a man she refers to throughout the narrative very formally as “Devendra Kumar”, who abuses her. They divorce, and after a court case Baisantry extracts a 500-rupee monthly alimony payment. Freed from the domestic slavery of her marriage, Baisantry becomes involved in the Ambedkar movement and a prominent women’s rights activist.
Several elements of the content in Dohra Abhiśāp are striking. Notable in particular is the distinctive position of authority her mother holds in the basti, an authority that does not appear to be begrudged or challenged by any man, including Baisantry’s father. In two very prominent instances, Baisantry’s mother forbids Dalit men in the basti from carrying beef home from the butcher shop in cloth sacks because the dripping blood draws public attention to the “untouchable” food; she later demands a raise from her husband’s employer and, when he refuses, enjoins her husband to quit and find a better job. Baisantry’s mother’s strength, influence, and feminist perspective, particularly on the subject of education for girls, shines through the narrative and demands a re-evaluation — despite the title of the autobiography — of the idea that Dalit women live in abject submission to the dual hierarchies of caste and patriarchy.
Striking, too, is Baisantry’s deeply personal account of the difficulty of living with her husband, his abuse, and the ultimate demise of her marriage. 6 Additionally, Baisantry emphasizes domestic — and not specifically Dalit — gendered labour. In an insightful essay, Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay has pointed out the privileged role that the topic of caste-specific labour plays in Dalit autobiographies, allowing us to recognize, therefore, the singularity of Baisantry’s extensive documentation of domestic “women’s work”, work which is not caste-specific, but gender-specific, work that functions similarly to marginalize and diminish the position of a woman in the home, much as caste labour relegates Dalit men to a particular margin of the public sphere (2010: 31–60).
Susheela Thakbhaure’s 2011 autobiography reflects many of the same narrative preoccupations as Baisantry’s. In her discussion of her childhood she emphasizes her deep desire to go to school — despite the marginalization she felt there — and her mother and grandmother’s unique dedication to allowing her to pursue her education. From them, and from her own experiences, Thakbhaure develops a fierce belief in the power of education as the only truly effective tool against the social and political forces of caste-based oppression. Like Baisantry, Thakbhaure also confronts her personal history of domestic abuse by her husband, describing many different forms of physical and psychological abuse bluntly and with a remarkable candour as she ponders how — even with a PhD and job as a college professor — she continues to allow herself to suffer such torment. It is in these passages that her experiences as a woman confound her “Dalit consciousness”, and it is therefore here that we can consider how Dalit women’s autobiographies may complicate generalizing critical frameworks for both “women’s” and “Dalit” life narratives. 7
The pain of the trap
“Power is the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter”. So writes Carolyn Heilbrun in her seminal Writing a Woman’s Life (1989: 18). It is in this spirit of claiming space and demanding to be heard that the genre of autobiography has emerged in recent decades as the most significant literary intervention by Dalits in the discourse of Dalit power, and thus has been valorized as a site of the “authentic” voice of Dalit experience, social critique, and the politics of both despair and hope, and, lastly, has been the most avidly consumed of all the formal genres of Dalit writing. 8 Arun Prabha Mukherjee’s English translation of Hindi Dalit author Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography, published as Joothan: A Dalit’s Life more than a decade ago in 2003, was a watershed moment in the circulation and critical recognition of Dalit literature, and particularly of Dalit life writing, both in and outside of India. In her foreword to the translation, Mukherjee writes cannily of the ways in which a long upper-caste Indian literary tradition has striven to “contain” rather than “express” Dalit voices and experiences. Her translation of Valmiki’s work, therefore, constitutes a self-conscious “creation of space” (specifically, English language space) for the Dalit subaltern to speak his own life, a project that extends that of Valmiki’s in authoring and publishing his own life story. This echoes Baisantry’s and Thakbhaure’s exhortations that no matter what domestic consequences they must endure amongst the men in their households and their society, they must help “open up a space” for the published accounts of the lives of Dalit women in particular. This social imperative is also made clear by Baisatri’s choice to write in Hindi, though her mother tongue is Marathi, for the very fact that so few such narratives exist in the Hindi literary sphere.
The framing of these two life stories by their authors is remarkably similar, as are the themes of education, domestic violence, and close emotional bonds between generations of women. However, the two employ their own individual narrative strategies that suggest neither is so easily representative of a singular “woman’s style” of life writing and thereby disallows an easy critical recourse to the evocation of an essentialized gendered — or Dalit — approach.
As she makes clear in her introductory comments, Baisantry seeks in her narrative to clear the fog of anonymity away from the experiences and feelings of Dalit women like her. She achieves this through a narrative that spans three generations; she begins the story of her life with vivid descriptions of the child marriage, and subsequent child widowhood of her grandmother, Aaji, who died when Baisantry was ten months old. Then she turns to her mother, and describes the difficulties in fixing her marriage and the complicated circumstances that eventually led to the selection of the man who would be her father. Grandmother, mother, and father are presented with nuanced fullness, and Baisantry only comes to her own birth about a quarter of the way through the book.
Thakbhaure, on the other hand, begins with her own birth, occasionally juxtaposing both the particularly progressive educational philosophy of her mother (and father) with the overwhelming anti-woman sentiment that suffocated Thakbhaure outside her home. But this juxtaposition is always against her own developing consciousness, which is at the heart of “the story of the pain of the trap” (shikanje kā dard kī kathā), perhaps better construed as the pain of captivity (captivity in a Dalit margin, as well as in an abusive marriage). The key difference with Baisantry’s narrative is that this “pain” is construed in the story as Thakbhaure’s own, yet also apart and distinguishable from the events of her life in that its story (the story of her pain) parallels her life (zindagi). This setting up of the story of a metaphor that Thakbhaure suggests defines her life, and her consistent return to that metaphor throughout her narrative, makes the self-consciousness of her storytelling clear.
Thakbhaure’s narrative is also characterized by an honest confrontation of her own thoughts and character development at different times in her life. In an early passage in which she discusses how she strove to be as invisible as possible at school, always hanging back with her head down so that she could avoid the abuse of her teachers and peers, she offers a keen perspective into an adolescent girl’s mind and heart, and the painful challenges of belonging, the particularly bitter circumstances of caste and its attendant social ostracization notwithstanding. This is especially poignant when Thakbhaure describes her contradictory feelings for her grandmother: a mix of crippling shame and intense love. Thakbhaure explains that she was horrified to see her grandmother walk near her school every day as she went to and from housework jobs, with her coin purse (jholī) and other small objects dangling from the end of her sari. Thakbhaure describes how she burned with shame as her classmates teased her about her grandmother and how, in her child’s mind, one unable to understand caste as a larger social phenomenon, she attributed her family’s social ostracization to her grandmother. She describes how she would “fight with her, shout at her, pull at her clothes, and bite her” (23). But in the very next paragraph she explains how her grandmother also nurtured her self-confidence, telling her to “get a good education and become an officer, shine a light on your family’s name” (23). Thakbhaure would heat water for her grandmother when she returned home from work, would rub soap on her back and put oil in her hair and tie ribbons in her small, white bun. The narrative proximity of these two vivid scenes — a young girl, overwhelmed by a community’s cruelty, lashing out at her grandmother and in the next moment (and in Thakbhaure’s narration, in the next paragraph) gently bathing and adorning her grandmother’s tired, old body — conveys with careful skill the painful contradictions that define a young girl’s consciousness as she simultaneously grapples with her natural affinity and love for her grandmother and the distinctly unnatural social ostracization that leads her to lash out at that same object of her adoration. Finally, Thakbhaure explains the interconnectedness of her life — and consciousness — with that of her grandmother:
Nānī ke jīvan kī vyathā-kathā kā lambā adhyāy hai. Āj bhī maiṃ abhinn rūp se use juṛī hūṇ. Apnī kathā ke sāth maiṃ nānī kī kahānī batānā zarūrī māntī hūṇ kyonkī merī zindagī usī se śurū hotī hai. […] In sapnoṃ kā sūtrapāt nānī se sambhav ho sakā. Nānī ko apnī beṭī ko kaṣṭ se bachāyā thā. Māṇ ne hameṃ aise kaṣṭ se bachāyā. Paṛhā-likhākar insān banāyā.
I have a long section on the painful life story (jīvan kī vyathā-kathā) of my grandmother. I am tied to her in so many ways even today. I believe it is necessary to tell my grandmother’s story along with mine because my life sprung from her. […] I could start to dream because of her. My grandmother saved her daughter with great struggle. Ma saved me with that same struggle. By educating me, they made me human. (28)
Kausalya Baisantry too makes a concerted effort to illustrate the relational context of her own life story, focusing on the generations of women in her family as well as the larger caste community in which she grows up. Baisantry experiments with different modes of temporality in the text, employing various stylistic strategies to emphasize at different times what therefore emerge as the two dominant objectives of the text: first, to document the quotidian detail and domestic labour that make up the repetitive days and seasons of a Dalit household and neighbourhood and, second, to intimately illustrate the experiences and emotional perspectives of three generations of Dalit women. Baisantry opens the first chapter of the book as one might expect, with a few sentences of general description in the past imperfect tense, the generalized past, “used to” tense in Hindi (“My Ma and Baba used to work in Nagpur’s Empress Mill. Ma worked in the thread-making unit, and Father did the work of oiling the machines”) (11). But she quickly shifts to a more specific characterization of this generalized past (“Today, because it was Sunday, was a day-off from the Mill”) (11). The description that follows of “Aaj/Today” is not of any remarkable occurrence, but of the domestic labour that characterized every Sunday: piling the stove with wood and heating water to bathe in the early morning, washing and detangling five sisters’ long hair one after the other, cleaning and picking through a week’s worth of rice, sweeping the house and courtyard, and so on. The effect of this shift in perspective to highlight the events of “one” day that were undoubtedly repeated over and over every week throughout Baisantry’s childhood is to invest these regular domestic labours with narrative significance and a sense of dignity. It is these mundane details of which the bulk of a life is constituted, and Baisantry makes a purposeful attempt in her use of language to “zoom in” on these details and allow them to provide rich context to the various women who most fully inhabit her narrative.
Baisantry also experiments with sudden shifts in temporal perspective in order to expand and dramatize the descriptive episodes in the lives of her mother and grandmother, a narrative practice most pronounced in the first half of the book, when she narrates several moments in their lives that occurred before Baisantry herself had been born, but which she significantly understands as constitutive of her own life story as well. For example, in the second chapter, after the end of Sunday’s long labours, Baisantry’s mother sits the girls down to oil their hair. Baisantry writes: “As she combed our hair, tears started to flow from Ma’s eyes. Seeing Ma cry, our eyes also filled with tears. […] Ma started to say that Aaji was very beautiful” (15). This is the entry point to a narrative description of Baisantry’s grandmother Aaji: first a general account of her appearance and her family, then a documentary passage of village conditions at the time of Aaji’s childhood, to the sudden intimate description of the day Aaji’s husband — himself merely a young boy — died from a snakebite as he lay resting under a mango tree. Baisantry describes the scene of a house in mourning from an authoritative perspective, almost as a witness, though this happened decades before her own birth. She writes, “She came to her in-laws’ house with her brothers. Here too everyone was crying. Aaji’s mother-in-law embraced Aaji and began weeping loudly. Aaji was crying, terrified, looking at everyone” (18). Baisantry’s narrative perspective has telescoped into a moment in the past — via the remembrance of her mother — and has provided the reader with a description of this scene with an intimate sense of immediacy. We learn next of Aaji’s remarriage, her subsequent abandonment of that abusive husband, her struggles to raise her children on her own and in particular the complicated details of fixing Baisantry’s mother’s marriage, the early years of her parents’ marriage, the birth of Kausalya herself, and the death of Aaji. This is all before we are suddenly pulled back out of this rabbit hole into the past when Baisantry — a full 15 pages later — returns us to the scene of her mother oiling her and her sisters’ hair with the simple statement: “Ma used to tell us all this and would keep crying as she fixed our hair” (30).
Thakbhaure too marks time in her life story, primarily through the location of the quotidian details of her narrative within a national political context. She recalls with some humour the ways in which the children in her school class would shout out gleefully “Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai” whenever a plane passed overhead. She also makes clear the insufficient effects of the Harijan uplift campaign in her village, and explains that in the 1960s, Ambedkar’s political ideas had not yet reached her village. Thus Thakbhaure moves easily outside the immediate time of her childhood in order to command authority over the political (in other words, masculine) sphere as well.
Having therefore considered some of Baisantry’s and Thakbhaure’s narrative strategies for evoking life experience and individual perspective at the intersections of both gender and caste, and public and private, how might we be able to see what the critical categories of both “women’s autobiography” and “Dalit autobiography” obscure? Western feminist theorization of women’s life writing has suggested that the male narrative voice has been constructed as universal, thereby allowing for a supposedly “traditional” view of men’s life narratives as ego-centred, individualist stories of personal trial and triumph, while women’s life narratives that emphasize domestic, kinship, and communal spheres are marginalized as “relational”. Over 30 years ago an early scholar of women’s autobiography, Mary Mason, argued that women’s autobiographies — as compared to men’s — are less ego-driven and more likely to position the self within a network of others, a consequence of the role of women as responsible for the maintenance of family relationships in a patriarchal society (1998: 321–24). More recently, feminist critics have questioned whether or not it is even relevant to discuss “women’s autobiography” as its own genre, somehow by definition “other” than “regular” (read: male) autobiography. Feminist critics have also begun to argue for a reconsideration of the supposedly “individualist” concerns of men’s autobiographical writing, suggesting instead a critical challenge to masculinist, individualist narrative voices that do not appear to acknowledge their own plurality.
Such debates throw into relief similar discursive trends in the scholarship of Dalit autobiography that tend to betray the same practices of essentialization now under the microscope in feminist criticism. Seen for a long time primarily as “source material” in a new postcolonial investigation into Dalit personhood and political identity construction, only recently have Dalit autobiographies, and other fictional and poetic genres produced by self-identified Dalit writers, come under the lens of literary criticism. At first a revolution of expression in which we stood in awe of the power of this new voice, Dalit literature has matured and expanded and institutionalized itself (with literary collectives and journals, newsletters, conferences, degree programmes, translation initiatives, and so on), to the point that it is no longer responsible to allow the discourse of “authenticity” to obscure and disallow a considered analysis of the formal and aesthetic — as well as content-based — evolution of Dalit literature. So even while the critical debates over Dalit literary styles are themselves in their infancy, I do think it is possible to see certain essentializing and gendered trends of critical reception emerging; trends that mirror the kinds of gendered debates that continue to surround life writing in many parts of the world.
Debjani Ganguly (2009) argues that Dalit autobiographical writing serves a distinct role in the Dalit movement for human rights and sociopolitical equality as “a rich and expressive medium of Dalit personhood”. She argues, rightly, that Dalit literature — and life narratives in particular — is able to counter “media slights and obfuscations” and “herald the emergence of Dalit personhood as a figure of suffering, unsettling the celebratory mood of late modern Indian democracy”. With an uncommon and quite welcome attention to literary form, Ganguly overlays the generic, traditionally individualist and masculine narrative genres of the Bildungsroman and the picaresque onto Valmiki’s Joothan (2003) and Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi (1984), suggesting that these life narratives are ego-centred and “articulate an aspiration to personhood through the realization of full citizenship” (2009: 429–42). What gives me pause is the way in which Ganguly’s delineation of the individualist, linear trajectory of the Dalit person from social victim to politically awakened social subject depends only on male-authored autobiographies and that the personhood she seeks is steeped in the language of the public sphere — language that would preclude conferring personhood on a Dalit woman author, such as Baisantry, who emphasizes the ways in which power and political awareness can function in the domestic and relational spheres of the home and family.
Let us consider another example of the ways in which these two autobiographies confound these binary divisions between private and public, and female and male. In her article, “Hindi Dalit Autobiography: An Exploration of Identity”, Sarah Beth rightly seeks to define Dalit autobiography as inhabiting a space between a story of the self, and a testimony of the experience of the multitude. She observes: “Dalit autobiographies conceptualize Dalit identity in terms of the story’s protagonist, claiming that the experiences of this individual Dalit is sic representative of the entire Dalit community” (2007: 545–74). Yet I would add to this that, rather than purporting to speak for a multitude (despite the sociopolitical framing of their narrative projects, specifically Baisantry’s exhortation to “open society’s eyes”), Baisantry and Thakbhaure suggest in the intimate details of their intergenerational stories that they — as subjects — are themselves plurally constituted, products of their own experiences as well as those of many generations of women in their families.
On the other hand, testimonio, a critical category originally created to describe the life narratives of Latin American women such as Rigoberta Menchu during times of political persecution, has emerged as a popular catch-all category for Dalit women’s life narratives as well. Tamil author Bama’s well-known volumes Karukku and Sangati are slotted into the category of testimonio by critics like Pramod Nayar and M. S. S. Pandian. Nayar suggests that there is no “problematic hero” at the centre of Karukku, but rather a “problematic situation” that is caste, and the narrative “I” is a stand-in for the whole of a community who wrestle with the consequences of casteism (2006: 83–100). Similarly, Pandian (1998) understands testimonio in a Dalit context to mean the sublimation of the individual subject for the purpose of providing an account that can “witness” the plight of an entire community. Sharmila Rege too, in her book Writing Caste/Writing Gender (2006), characterizes Dalit women’s life narratives as testimonio because they ostensibly both displace the Western, bourgeois narrative “I” with a community as subject and because they dispense with aspirations to literariness and instead practise a kind of narrative “witnessing”, privileging a testimonial immediacy and authority and relinquishing to readers the task of providing a critical framework or judgement of events. Rege takes to heart this imagined critical role of the reader in her edited collection of women’s life narratives when she opts to paraphrase large sections of each woman’s narrated life story, ordering, prioritizing, and emphasizing aspects of these women’s narratives by proxy. Reading Baisantry’s and Thakbhaure’s narratives, however, makes it clear that testimonio is also insufficient as a catch-all category for Dalit women’s writings. Indeed, these authors’ emphasis on the interconnectedness of multiple generations of Dalit women serves not to efface themselves as narrative subjects, but rather to advocate for an expanded understanding of the narrative subject, indeed of the self. In both cases, their grandmothers’ stories are as integral to their own self-understanding as their own experiences, and therefore their stories too must be told, intimately integrated with the stories of these two women.
The striking similarities in the self-deprecating framing, the avowedly multigenerational emphasis in storytelling, as well as the shifting emphases on spheres both domestic and public of these two autobiographies by Dalit women writers, exhort us to consider the potential conflicts between competing demands put on Dalit texts — especially in a transnational context. What are the varying demands made of a text by activists, literary critics and scholars, historians of the Dalit movement, translators, and others? How do we reconcile — in both the original work and its translation — our expectations of an “authenticity” of voice and experience with qualities of literariness, documentary specificity, and humanist themes of oppression and the construction of politically conscious subjecthood? To what extent do we — as readers, writers, scholars, and translators — have to read against the grain of an author’s mediating voice in her own life story to elicit alternative analyses?
Christi Merrill writes from a translator’s perspective when she points to the qualities of multivocality and the recourse to multiple modes of storytelling that animate women’s life writing like Baisantry’s, and concludes that “the task of the translator is to make these switches between different lives and modes sound purposeful and deft, so as to initiate readers artfully into this special category of human rights literature without drawing attention to its very crafting” (2014: 53). It is, I would argue, the task of the literary scholar to do just the opposite: to draw out and highlight those elements of a narrative’s crafting in an effort to adequately understand and therefore justifiably celebrate the unique contributions, both aesthetic and political, of a particular work of Dalit literature. In their various emphases, however, on several distinct female characters who contend, in individual ways, with both caste and gender trouble, and with the particularly intimate descriptions of both Baisantry’s and Thakbhaure’s disillusionment with marriage and deeply personal accounts of feelings in the face of abusive and exploitative husbands, these stories are Baisantry’s and Thakbhaure’s alone, however much they may also speak to and about Dalit women more broadly. They both manage to maintain a reader’s personal connection with the autobiographical “I” of their narratives. At the same time, both also very carefully construct — through the steadfast employment of specific stylistic strategies such as plural temporalities, and savvy shifts between the domestic and the public spheres — narrative bridges to other subjectivities and documentary narrative practices, which create an important historical archive of subjects like domestic labour, practices of child marriage and rituals of widowhood, and the development and management of various sites of girls’ education, among others.
According to many Dalit feminists, such as the author and critic Anita Bharti, Dalit women’s autobiographies are powerful for their address of the nexus of “ghar-parivar-samaj”, or spheres both domestic and public, rather than an emphasis of one over the other. In an essay about the growing number of Dalit women’s autobiographies in several Indian languages in the last few years, Bharti writes,
There is no doubt that Dalit women’s autobiographies are both individual and societal. The use of “we” in place of “I” expresses the desire for the liberation of the whole of “woman caste”. That’s why their autobiographical voice is overflowing not just with Dalit consciousness, but with feminist consciousness as well. (2013:)
Baisantry’s and Thakbhaure’s autobiographies make it clear that in the Dalit struggle for social justice and equality, in which Dalit literary discourse forms an increasingly important site for contestation and the creation of identity and community, women’s voices, experiences, and perspectives do indeed matter. What matters too is that we not only listen to their stories, but also pay close attention to how they tell them, to fully understand their literary contribution to the Dalit public sphere.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.