Tracking obscenities: Dalit women,devadasis,and the linguistically sexual

Abstract

In his 1993 Dalit Panpaadu, Raj Gauthaman declares that Dalit writing should “outrage and even repel the guardians of caste and class” (qtd. in Holmström, 2008: xii). Writing by Dalit women has been exceptionally successful in achieving this goal, particularly in its representation of the sexuality and sexually-charged language of Dalit women. For instance, in Sangati, Tamil author Bama describes the difficult and deeply moving lives of Dalit women in south India. Although multiply subversive, Sangati is the most outrageous in its exposure of the sexual violence that often underpins the language of her female characters. Similarly, in her oral autobiography Viramma: Life of an Untouchable, Viramma repeatedly speaks in ways that suggest her embrace of that which, from an upper-caste and middle-class perspective, might seem vulgar, especially since it issues from the mouth of a woman. The present article theorizes this use of sexual language, arguing that it can be read as a powerful disruption of the feminine in that it refuses to play to patriarchal expectations about feminine decorum, and, as such, it models a defiance that mainstream feminism, rooted as it has been in predominantly middle-class values, might very well copy. To understand the contours of this defiance, I compare Dalit women’s bodily language, including that found in Sukirtharani’s poetry, to other expressions of Indian feminine sexuality: in Kamala Das’s biography and poems, and in the lyrics to devadasi songs.

I begin with the personal because the personal isn’t just political but the place from which we activate our theories and in which they are accorded validity or not. When I was about 14 years old and living in rural Ontario, Canada, my father was fixing my older sister’s moped in our driveway with a number of other fathers from the mobile home park in which we lived at the time. They were engrossed in what must have been a devilishly difficult mechanical task, since none of them noticed that I’d wandered out of the trailer and was standing on the porch watching them. I remember this moment because of what happened next: my dad, apparently frustrated, suddenly let fly a long and astonishingly creative string of profanity. I wish I could recall the small details of this unexpected poetic storm of obscenity because it impressed me; I think there was something in there about a “witch’s tit”, but that’s the only bit of that intriguing line that lingers still in my memory. Whatever its details, it was clearly something my father thought was not entirely proper for his daughter to hear, since, looking up from the moped and seeing me standing there, he grinned and charged me not to tell my mother what he had just said.

There were at least three insights I gleaned from this event: first, that swearing wasn’t just about using the occasional taboo word in a sentence or as an expletive but that it could, in fact, be artful; second, that swearing to this extreme had a certain masculine component to it that my mother wouldn’t have wanted me exposed to, hence my father’s concern that my mother might discover that he’d uttered this thing in my presence; and, third, that swearing could work to forge or cement a group bond — apparently, I realized, all these dads spoke differently when their wives and children weren’t around, as if they had an identity outside of us.

Current scholarship on swearing confirms some of the insights that tumbled down onto my teenage self. It turns out that there is a psychology of swearing, a sociology of swearing, a politics of swearing, and even a neurobiology of swearing, and all of them suggest that the use of linguistic obscenities is a powerfully gendered activity. While both males and females swear, and have been doing so, according to one group of scholars in the medical fields (Bylsma et al., 2013: 288), “since the emergence of language” — although how they know this is beyond me — because the use of expletives has been understood as an inherently aggressive or violent speech act, it has historically been interpreted as representing “an accepted social means of constructing a masculine identity” (Stapleton, 2003: 22). This was in part what my father was engaging in when he slung off his slew of profanity: he was solidifying his masculinity among other men, all of whom were engaged in a traditionally masculine project, namely, fixing a mechanical object. Wanting me to be feminine, my mother, my father knew, would have objected to my eavesdropping on this male bonding in case I were to adopt such behaviour and therefore undermine my femininity.

Further, since swearing is usually done only in the vernacular, its use, even now, “carr[ies] strong connotations of lower socioeconomic groupings and/or working-class culture” (Stapleton, 2003: 22). The three writers of one essay, “Swearing: A Biopsychosocial Perspective”, assert, without bothering to construct an argument, that people from the lower socioeconomic classes of a society are much more likely to utter verbal obscenities because they possess almost no cultural capital and so have little to lose by engaging in risky speech acts that might be read as antisocial or morally offensive: “Lower class individuals are relatively resistant to negative reactions of other people, since they do not run the risk of a diminished social status” (Bylsma et al., 2013: 297). Far from diminishing his social status, the profanity that tripped off my father’s tongue proclaimed his mastery of a linguistic art form that working-class men highly valued: to be able to swear innovatively and rhythmically suggested that he was clever, defiant, and, therefore, good company for other men.

But while swearing heightens the masculinity of boys and men, especially but not only those from the working class, when girls and women from any class communicate with obscenities, particularly outside the private realm of the domestic space — that is, in public — such an act tends to weaken their claims on femininity because swearing in many, perhaps most, global societies violates feminine norms, which generally require at least the public expression of deference, politeness, and attentiveness to the needs of others. Much recent scholarship has questioned the belief that it is only men who swear, demonstrating instead that there is, nowadays in Western societies, “no gender differences in swearing frequency” (Bylsma et al., 2013: 298). Still, females who swear publicly, especially those who use expletives that refer to female body parts, undermine their femininity, their social acceptability, even their feminist credentials, and run the risk of being viewed as morally offensive much more than men who use obscenities linked to female anatomy, for whom such use in male-only groups is actually “constitutive of ‘masculinity’” (Stapleton, 2003: 27). Obviously, all over the world women from a range of class and cultural backgrounds have historically engaged in swearing, and it seems in some societies they are swearing now more than ever, but their decisions regarding where they swear and which words they choose to swear with have much more bearing on how they are perceived by both men and women than men’s choices in this matter. In other words, in spite of more than a century of feminism, there is a double standard still at work here that needs to be analysed and understood.

Dalit literature by women provides us with an excellent site for the exploration of this interesting gendered difference because some of it is openly and persistently linguistically obscene. In this article, I will discuss a novel/autobiography/short story collection Sangati, by the Tamil Dalit writer Bama (1994/2008), in conjunction with the oral autobiography by another Tamil Dalit Viramma, an illiterate woman who, over a period of 10 years, described her life to scholars Josiane and Jean-Luc Racine. Both Sangati and Viramma: Life of an Untouchable (Viramma, Racine and Racine, 1997) were originally published in the 1990s — Sangati in Tamil and Viramma in French — and later translated into English, and both are remarkable texts for many reasons, not least of which is their refusal to sugarcoat the dialogue of their female characters to make them more acceptable to national and global readerships that might balk at the ferocious profanity they regularly use. It seems to me that Bama’s and Viramma’s texts suggest that swearing for female Dalits, especially swearing that involves the use of sexual words referring to female body parts and to bodily acts such as defecation and menstruation, constitutes an attempt to fashion a female and feminist solidarity, which endorses a form of womanhood that has rarely been characterized in literary and other cultural forums and hence represents a new and more effective way of being female because it powerfully resists a patriarchal middle-class feminine norm that is increasingly becoming globalized as a result of the rise of neo-imperialist capitalism, a norm that has always been limiting and even dangerous for women to embody.

When I teach these texts to my undergraduate students, I draw attention to the way in which Bama and Viramma depict Dalit women deploying decidedly sexual language in their everyday communications with one another and with other members of their communities. I do this purposefully because I know that most of the students in my classes will not mention this subject or quote these bits of the texts since they are generally young women who hail from the Canadian middle classes and so have likely internalized ideas about the obscene nature of such language when it issues from the mouths of women and girls and that, consequently, they might believe, perhaps unconsciously, that it functions as a signifier of the moral depravity and even lack of intelligence or education of the female characters in these books. This association of swearing with stupidity or educational deprivation is an extraordinarily tenacious one that resists dislodging in spite of the fact that linguists have been arguing for years that the first does not indicate the second. ¹ Keith Allan and Kate Burridge point out that, while it is commonly believed that — as a character in a 1975 novel eloquently puts it — “Obscenity is a crutch for crippled minds” (qtd. in Allan and Burridge, 2006: 76), there is no evidence at all that such is the case. Going further, they write that “swearing and cussing is something that most people engage in from a very early age. To dismiss it as an act of an uneducated person or as linguistically inadequate performance is gross prejudice, with no basis in fact” (2006: 78).

Yet perhaps my students might not be prejudiced about swearing but instead might be avoiding making reference to those moments in Dalit texts by women because they see themselves as staying true to feminist principles. Like the middle-class Irish women in Karyn Stapleton’s study, when they evade the obscenities in Sangati and Viramma my female students might be endeavouring to resist patriarchy’s tendencies to use our genitals against us. By refusing to utter obscenities that malign female anatomy — repeating the word “cunt”, for instance, can these days hardly be understood as anything but an insult — they are trying to avoid being perceived as sexist and are, therefore, aligning themselves with me and other feminists in the room. Referring to the Irish women in her study, most of whom were also university students, Stapleton observes:

[T]hey display a highly developed awareness of “equality” issues, and therefore resist any action (linguistic or otherwise) that places them in a subordinate position. A number of respondents also comment on the “threatening” nature of obscenity which is directed specifically at women […] Moreover, they not only feel antipathetic towards language that they consider to be offensive; they are also unprepared to accept others’ use of such terms and references […] In this way, women may be seen as “letting the side down” if they engage in the use of certain (“obscene”) terms of reference. (2003: 31)

This intricate feminist justification for avoiding swearwords that signify female anatomy, coming as it does from middle-class, well-educated women who otherwise see swearing as something that is perfectly acceptable for them to do in socially friendly settings, I find very intriguing. The study also points out that men use these same words in male-only contexts to consolidate their masculine identities in the midst of other men, a fact which suggests that certain kinds of swearing continue to possess gender constitutive properties even today in the West. Given these complexities behind what has for so long been commonly perceived as indicative of mental simplicity and educational deprivation, how Dalit women — mired as they themselves are in immense political complexity — might deploy this category of obscenity seems to me to be an especially fruitful subject of analysis for us in the West because we appear to be using swearwords differently in the constitution of ourselves as gendered subjects.

These literary moments, then, provide us with an opportunity to uncover debilitating and demeaning assumptions about women and girls who swear, as well as to trace their source to larger forces that seek to restrict the women in the texts and the women in the classroom. I commonly point out in my classes that, even though women who use sexually explicit profanity in public places create no harmful effects to themselves, their listeners, or to their societies in general, we continue to be unsettled by them, so much so that we are willing often to dismiss them and what they say — though this is frequently expressed joyously, humorously, or creatively — because it is couched in a form of “bad language” regarded as taboo for females, a fact that would seem to indicate that decades of feminism have not actually eroded some of the most oppressive rules through which we perform our femininity. While global feminism has introduced ideas in both academia and the mainstream that have radically challenged patriarchal imperatives about gender, thereby enormously altering the lives of many women and girls, the movement has had difficulty moving outside of its middle-class comfort zone. Not surprisingly, most feminist speakers who get national or international attention are from middle-class or elite communities; they often bring into their feminism engrained convictions about the normality or even superiority of middle-class beliefs, ways of living, and language norms. If they engage with feminists lower on the sociocultural and economic scale, they tend to assume the role of fixers because these unexamined convictions justify such a role. That this is the case not only in the West but in India has been attested to by numerous feminist scholars. Radhika Govinda, in an essay on feminist activism among middle-class and Dalit women in northern India, avers:

Dalitbahujan activists and others have criticized the women’s movement for the lack of representation of women from marginalized communities, and for its lack of engagement with the caste identity of women. Activists have pointed out that as caste-Hindu, middle-class, urban-educated women have been at the helm of the women’s movement, this has resulted in their perspectives dominating the movement, often at the cost of women from marginalized communities. (2006: 183)

Similarly, Smita M. Patil exposes the existence of “monolithic Indian feminist appropriations of the discourse of sexuality” and speculates that the “incisive interpretations by dalit activists and intellectuals promise to impose a radical edge to the dominant theorisations of sexuality in India” (2014: n.p.). I would add that it is important to study texts by Dalit and other working-class and lower-caste women writers because these texts come from places where middle-class norms are consciously observed, since only by seeing them can Dalits resist them in order to defy them or adopt them in order to get ahead. Therefore, these texts can lead us somewhere new, where we too might realize things about gender that class privilege obscures.

For instance, one of the many things that Dalit texts render visible is the complicity of caste/class and gender practices: caste is, in fact, a crucial aspect of gender constitution. As the Dalit activist and scholar, B. R. Ambedkar made clear during the nationalist movement in India, the caste system is dependent on the existence of a patriarchy. Describing his theory, Sharmila Rege notes that Ambedkar emphasized “the fact that the caste system can be maintained only through the controls on women’s sexuality and in this sense women are the gateways to the caste system” (1998: 42). It is patriarchy that obliges women to marry within their caste by punishing those who do not, and this restriction curtails the possibility of marriages between members of different castes, ensuring that such mixed marriages do not destabilize the caste system by clouding its categories. In Sangati the story of Esakki attests to the existence of this patriarchal practice of restricting women’s marriage choices. As the narrator’s Paatti or grandmother tells it, Esakki “didn’t die naturally, but was butchered to death” (Bama, 1994/2008: 53), ² beheaded by her brothers for daring to marry a man of her own choosing from another caste. The brothers then slice open her pregnant belly and strangle her almost full-term foetus. The brutality and injustice of her death brings Esakki back as a “pey” or spirit who possesses girls and women, especially virgins, and must be placated with gifts of a cradle and a winnowing fan. Though terrified of peys as a child, as she grows older, the narrator begins to recognize how such stories are used to constrain women and girls, to make them internalize their vulnerability as female beings. Clearly aware of the connection between the story of peys and the dominance of men, she declares:

We need not fear peys and, what’s more, neither do we need to fear men. But now we are frightened of the dark of going anywhere alone; they create terrors for you on every side, and wherever you look […] They tell us all these stories, take away our freedom, and control our movements.” (58)

Esakki’s story has a double purpose: it works to constitute femininity in opposition to masculinity, since peys do not prey on men but only women, and it is also a cautionary tale meant to make girls fearful of making their own choices, which might result in their marrying outside their caste, thereby ensuring that the boundaries between castes are not breached.

That Dalit communities should bolster the caste system in this way seems odd, since it is this very system that oppresses them as Dalits. But Bama reveals further the pressure exerted by upper-caste people on Dalit men, who are compelled by their dependency on these elites for work and so must do their bidding. In Sangati the chapters that delineate the sad fate of Mariamma demonstrate this structural dependency. When a landowner attacks her, clearly with the intent to rape, and Mariamma escapes his grasp, he orchestrates her punishment by approaching the men of her Paraiyar Christian community with the false claim that she was the one who had misbehaved sexually. The village council fines her family, which further undermines their already precarious home economy and forces her to accept a marriage to a paraiya man who beats her. Commenting on the injustice of this series of events, the narrator of Sangati voices a fury that is visceral:

When I thought of Mariamma’s life history, I was filled with such pain and anger. Because of some upper-caste man’s foolishness, she was made the scapegoat, and her whole life was destroyed […] I was disgusted by it. I wanted to get hold of all those who had brought her to this state, bite them, chew them up, and spit them out. (42)

The stories of Esakki and Mariamma are connected since both delineate the sexual control of Dalit women by Dalit men whose actions against their women are actually working to sustain a caste system that radically undermines everyone in the community, including themselves. The narrator hints at an alternative social configuration when, towards the end of the text, she asks, “Why shouldn’t a woman belong to no one at all but herself?” (121).

Viramma, who is a grandmother when she communicates her biography to Josiane Racine, relates a lifetime’s worth of ill-use as a consequence of her female sexuality. Unlike the women and girls depicted in Sangati, however, she tends to represent herself as being able to manage the injustice associated with her sexuality once she is past childhood, but only in relation to the men in her own community. She speaks graphically, for instance, of thoroughly enjoying sex with her husband (1997: 48−51), ³ and she often describes herself and other Paraiyar ⁴ women openly defying their men when they use patriarchal privilege against them. Telling Racine the story of Kannima, who, being chased by her husband with a knife, made him scream by grabbing his testicles, Viramma approvingly remarks,

[W]hen a bastard is chasing you with a knife, you’re not going to put up with it. While waiting for someone to arrest him, women have found a clever way to get their revenge. It’s very effective you know! The men scream on the spot! Kannima is fearsome at that. (196)

But fierceness can’t always protect these women from upper-caste men, whose sexual aggression Viramma characterizes as a constant source of oppression:

We Paratchi ⁵ have the reputation of being easy women who’ll jump into bed with anyone if they whistle. It’s true that our young are happy to have sex before marriage. I even know some who sleep around afterwards. But that’s between us […] we’re not whores […] It’s the same in the hospital. All of them make passes at us, from the doctor to the sweeper […] We’re harassed non-stop down there. But we don’t dare shout or make a scandal: we’d be called liars, our names would be crossed off the hospital registers and we wouldn’t be given any more treatment. (52)

Viramma makes it clear that the harassment of Paraiyar women and girls is structural in its effect; it works not only to gender them as different from and inferior to their own men and to the people, especially the men, of other communities, but it also reinforces their positioning at the bottom of the social hierarchy and restrains their capacity for resistance and retaliation, as in the case of doctors at the hospital, who can deny them treatment if they refuse to capitulate to their demands for sex. In the face of these constraints on Dalit women, their use of sexual language makes perfect sense. It is expressive of their rage and their anguish and so has a catharsis effect. According to medical research that involved participants swearing while holding their hands in ice water, the use of expletives reduces pain caused by physical or emotional stress (see Bylsma et al., 2013: 292−94).

More than relief from the pain of living difficult lives, for the Dalit women depicted in Bama’s and Viramma’s stories, swearing is also about taking ownership of their own bodies and their own identities. A middle-aged woman when she narrates her life, Viramma is nevertheless proud of the reputation she has earned in her village as a teller of risqué riddles and a speaker of obscenities, a reputation that gives men leave to make her the object of their own jokes (197−99). But by taking control of sexual language and even deploying it so excessively that she embarrasses these men, Viramma demonstrates that she has a long history with sexual things and so refuses to be cowed by men or to surrender authority to them. In Sangati, women call each other “cunts” and “sluts” and “shit-eating pigs” (116); they fight with their men on the streets and threaten them with coarse taunts and curses. One woman, Raakkamma, challenges her drunk and violent husband with words so vulgar that she shocks everyone on the street:

How dare you kick me, you low-life? Your hand will get leprosy! How dare you pull my hair? Disgusting man, only fit to drink a woman’s farts! Instead of drinking toddy everyday, why don’t you drink your son’s urine? Why don’t you drink my monthly blood? (61)

When finally she lifts her sari to expose her genitals and is censured for being “shameless”, “uncontrollable”, and unwomanly (62), she responds by discrediting her accusers: “Why don’t you lot just go off and mind your own business? It is I who am beaten to death every day. If I hadn’t shamed him like this, he would surely have split my skull in two, the horrible man” (62). Raakkamma is deploying foul language and rude gesture preventatively, to forestall the impending violence of her brutal husband. Physical violence against women plays a clear role in the maintenance of male supremacy. Realizing this fact, Raakkamma uses references to her bodily functions and the exposure of her genitals to shock and stop her husband. His surprise and subsequent departure from the scene is the consequence of her decision to speak what, in public, is supposed to be unspeakable for a woman, the language of genitalia, menstruation, and defecation. In effect, by engaging in taboo language and taboo behaviour, she is using her own female body parts to threaten him but also perhaps to embolden herself. As Robert M. Adams points out in Bad Mouth, language that deliberately violates accepted standards of morality for the purposes of hindering or hurting another is as much about the speaker as it is about the spoken to:

it’s often a function of linguistic aggression to exercise pseudo-courage […] as a surrogate for the genuine article […] False courage builds true […] Threats, boasts, and bluffs […] try to obviate conflict by scaring off an enemy, but prepare for it at the same time. (1977: 10−11)

In this way, the bad language that Raakkamma uses can be said to have a performative effect, for its utterance allows her to actually produce something in the world: namely, to alter a dangerous situation and prevent her husband from beating her. ⁶

Lars Andersson and Peter Trudgill distinguish swearing from slang by arguing that swearing “is always connected with taboos of some kind” (1990: 74). And given that, as Stapleton notes in her essay, “taboos play an important role in maintaining the status quo of a society” and further that “women have traditionally been more fully subject to their effects than have men” (2003: 22), we can interpret Viramma’s and Raakkamma’s taboo language and behaviour as well as that of many other female characters in Life of an Untouchable and Sangati as attempts to foster disrespect for authority as well as a radical rejection of the rules for feminine conduct established and policed by those in power — their own men and people from the upper castes. Edwin L. Battistella observes just how effectively swearing identifies a person as an outsider or rebel: “Like non-standard grammar, offensive language positions its users with respect to the perceived mainstream. Avoiding coarse language in public signals an understanding of the boundary between public and private discourse and a tacit acceptance of that boundary” (2005: 83). What makes these Dalit women’s rejection of this boundary radical — and immensely brave — is the risk involved in it. More than any other group of women in India, physical and sexual violence has been used against Dalit women as an exercise of masculine privilege and power, both by their own men and by those from higher castes, as a means to shame them and keep their men in line, and even as a trope to constitute their collective identity as female beings who are fundamentally rapeable. ⁷ To deploy sexually obscene language as a threat, like Raakkamma, or in everyday speech, like Viramma and so many of the other women in her autobiography and in Sangati, when the use of that very language marks all female beings as rebellious and wayward and Dalit women especially so, is to show great contempt for the patriarchal and caste rules that seek to render these women perpetually vulnerable. It is a dangerous act and must therefore also be read as an extraordinarily courageous demonstration of agency.

When we contrast the celebrated sexual descriptions of Kamala Das in both her poetry and her autobiography with the profanity used by the female paraiya/Paraiyar characters in Life of an Untouchable and Sangati, we can recognize just how edgy the language of these Dalit women is. Das has always seemed to me to be slightly bored with sex and its hungers; still, I find the expression of her sexual ennui beautiful in a high modernist kind of way:

We lay

On bed, glass-eyed, fatigued, just

The toys dead children leave behind

And, we asked each other, what is

The use, what is the bloody use?

That was the only kind of love,

This hacking at each other’s parts

Like convicts hacking, breaking clods

At noon. (Das, 1996: 129)

In spite of what are actually quite decorous and poetic descriptions of sexual acts, Das’s writing has evoked violent reactions from critics, her family, and the general public. In the preface to her autobiography My Story, Das declares, “This book has cost me many things that I held dear, but I do not for a moment regret having written it” (1996: n.p.). Often praised for being daring, Das has also been castigated for being sexually obsessed and pornographic. And yet next to the writing of Bama and the testimonies of Viramma, Das’s language seems tame precisely because it is generally aesthetically pleasing. Consider these lines from “In Love”, for example:

O what does the burning mouth

Of sun, burning in today’s,

Sky, remind me… oh, yes, his

Mouth, and… his limbs like pale and

Carnivorous plants reaching

out for me, and the sad lie

of my unending lust. (Das, 1992: 547−48)

Although there is surely something progressive about a middle-class and upper-caste Indian woman acknowledging her own lust, her poetic expression here silts over the sheer carnality and fleshiness of sex. Furthermore, in some ways her quite laudable assertion of her right to be considered an individual, which we see in “An Introduction”, for example — “I too call myself I” (2001a: 111) — works to obscure the class privilege that allows her to assume an entitlement to that right. Adopting a classic liberal voice, the first-person speaker in many of her poems also tends to take for granted the universal female applicability of her insights, as in “The Looking Glass” where she offers the following sexual advice to women:

Getting a man to love you is easy

Only be honest about your wants as

Woman. Stand nude before the glass with him

So that he sees himself the stronger one

And believes it so, and you so much more

Softer, younger, lovelier. (Das, 2001b: 111)

Both this performance of female sexuality to bolster the dominance of masculine sexuality as well as Das’s insistence on the right to see herself as an individual in “An Introduction” draw us away from what is perhaps a more salient fact about the patriarchal function of female bodies: that they are coded as prey and that they are the site on which masculinity is often violently authenticated. Staking claims to an individuality grounded in an Enlightenment discourse of rights and expressing sexual playfulness seem to be skirting the direr issues that haunt the female body and that become especially perceptible through representations of Dalit female subjectivity.

There is nothing that is conventionally poetic about the female sexuality depicted in Bama’s text, and, if anything, Viramma’s language reaches even greater heights of coarseness. The obscene language in these narratives is part and parcel of the aggressive activism that both these texts implicitly and explicitly advocate; it embodies that aggressive activism by drawing attention to the female Dalit body itself on which acts of caste and gender oppression are imposed. It signifies a refusal to be humiliated even by the language that is meant to humiliate and demean them. The use of such openly offensive language also allows for the redefinition of the poetic and the beautiful.

Dalit theorists and creative writers Sharankumar Limbale (2004) and P. Sivakami (2012) both insist on the need to redefine these categories of the poetic and the beautiful in relation to Dalit literature. Arguing against the applicability of traditional literary aesthetics to writing by Dalits, Limbale asserts that “Dalit literature is not pleasure-giving literature” and its aesthetics “cannot be based on the principles of an aestheticist literature that privileges pleasure derived from beauty” (2004: 116). As a literature that should evoke unease and outrage in its readers, Dalit writing is meant to awaken a Dalit consciousness in the world: “This revolutionary consciousness is based on ideas of equality, liberty, justice and solidarity, rather than pleasure” (2004: 115), and, far from issuing from some form of “narrow identity-politics”, the struggles of Dalit peoples inscribed in its literature, according to Sivakami, “has implications for oppressed communities everywhere” (2012: 436). She further argues against literary values, such as those that insist on the universalist nature of human experience and insight and that therefore adhere to liberal beliefs that refuse to acknowledge caste, declaring that it is time for mainstream literary critics to “examine the embedded class and caste privileges of the criteria that claim universality but are actually based on unexamined privilege” (Sivakami, 2012: 442). Full of invective, insult, and decidedly unfeminine obscenities, literature by Tamil Dalit women often forces us to rethink our standards for literary beauty, perhaps ultimately recognizing what gets hidden when we believe in the value of beautiful language: harsher realities and differential access to power and opportunity, the description of which evades the beautiful and even renders it banal. In many ways beautiful language allows us to speak the speakable.

In a persistently fierce opposition to conventional literary language, Tamil Dalit poet Sukirtharani calls for the creation of a poetic language that can articulate what poetry has so far mostly ignored: the experience of being Dalit in a world that belittles this experience and renders Dalits victims. In “Infant Language”, she writes:

I need a language

still afloat in the womb

which no one has spoken so far,

which is not conveyed through signs and gestures.

It will be open and honourable

not hiding in my torn underclothes. (Sukirtharani, 2012: 193)

A political language that will “put an end to sorrow, | Make way for a special pride” (Sukirtharani, 2012: 193), it will also disturb the status quo:

You will read there my alphabet, and feel afraid.

You will plead with me in words

that are bitter, sour and putrid

to go back to my shards of darkened glass.

And I shall write about that too, bluntly,

in an infant language, sticky with blood. (Sukirtharani, 2012: 195)

Fully aware that people from other castes see her and her community as especially tied to the physical, Sukirtharani claims this placement as especially her own, seeing in it possibilities not only for justice but for a kind of beauty based in honour and sexual openness. Her poetry offers an unapologetic “politics of the body” (qtd. in Holmström, 2012: 26) that aligns it with Bama’s writing and Viramma’s oral testimonies.

Viramma also allows us to witness the delight and freedom available to those women who embrace the human body’s embeddedness in the physical. Speaking about a lifetime of sexually teasing her husband and slinging sexual taunts to those in her community who have sought to contain her, she is gorgeously shameless in describing the pleasure it gives her:

I had become more confident, and I still really liked talking like that, crudely, even to young people or relatives like an uncle or a cousin, Hold on a bit, you bastard! Wait till I pour my juices over your face! Get your packet out and come outside with me! I’ll give you an eyeful! I’ve had a full bushel of children! When they hear me, the young ones hide their heads in shame and say, “Ayoyo! That woman is just too rude! She’s got a son and a grandson, but even at her age, she’s still talking dirty!” And that makes us laugh very much, all the women and me! (55−56)

Scholars of swearing frequently point to the use of profanity as a gesture of trust, intimacy, and solidarity, particularly for females. Such language can perform the work of strengthening already existing ties between group members, as it did in the story I told earlier about my father and the other dads. But, for girls and women, many of whom are encouraged by patriarchies to conceive of themselves in competition with one another for the attention of men, Stapleton argues: “In addition to contesting social norms of femininity, the use of ‘bad language’ may also function to construct and enact new modes and versions of ‘being a woman’” (2003: 23). In my view it is precisely this that Bama’s Sangati and Viramma’s autobiography offer their readers: a new form of womanhood that is aggressive in the obscene expression of its rage, its humour, and its solidarity with other women.

What the translator and introducer of Sangati, Lakshmi Holmström, says about Bama’s text can equally be said of Viramma’s: “the ideals Bama admires and applauds in Dalit women are not the traditional Tamil ‘feminine’ ideals of accham (fear), naanam (shyness), madam (simplicity, innocence), payirppu (modesty), but rather, courage, fearlessness, independence, and self-esteem” (Holmström, 2012: xix). I would go one step further and suggest that these latter qualities are particularly evident in the disrespectful, irreverent, and wicked, wicked language that these women consciously deploy to combat and repel the patriarchal middle-class feminine norm imposed upon them by their own communities and the larger societies in which they live. This norm is among the most restrictive of all forms of femininity because of its links to respectability and to an entirely invented tradition of feminine conduct. The female characters in Sangati frequently distance themselves from this feminine norm, recognizing it as restrictive and debilitating. One scene describes numerous women and children bathing and swimming naked in a well when the narrator wonders aloud why women from other caste communities do not take the opportunity to engage in such pleasurable activities. The others propose various reasons for what seems a senseless refusal of enjoyment, speculating that “none of them know how to swim”, “those people won’t bathe naked like this in front of each other”, and “[t]hey are all scaredy-cats”. When a woman cutting grass nearby overhears the conversation, she argues that their absence is the result not of their deficiencies but of their prosperity. Living in large houses with “different, different rooms to bathe, to shit or piss, and do whatever they like” (116), unlike the Dalit women, they do not need to bathe in a well. In response, a woman identified as Purnam rejects an explanation that diminishes her:

But do they have the freedom to come and jump into the water and swim about as we do? They never get all this fun. God knows how they can stay indoors all twenty-four hours of the day, gazing at the walls. I certainly couldn’t do it. (117)

Although undeniably oppressed by caste and gender structures, the women in Sangati still celebrate the fact that their positioning as Dalit accords them a freedom from some of the restrictions that bind other women from higher castes. Their placement at the bottom of the social hierarchy also allows them to recognize the feminine norm when they see it working in the lives of other women.

Not an old form of femininity, as many conservative thinkers claim, the contemporary feminine norm is relatively new, a product of Enlightenment capitalism, which in India came with British imperialism and the rise of its anti-imperial opposite, nationalism, and smothered the diversity of feminine roles available to pre-modern Indian women. ⁸ As a norm, it does what norms do: it seeks to enfold all of the feminine and all females into its discursive embrace, even those who are not middle-class but can, in certain situations, still be made subject to its judgements, often through male violence but also by means of the disapproval of other women. That this norm is modern and that it is especially oppressive for women becomes clear when we look back to texts written before the capitalist mode of production, with its normative middle class, took over the social economy of India: in, for example, the poetry of the devadasis, in which there is almost no sign of the markers of the patriarchal middle-class feminine norm that Holmström (2012) identifies as Tamil ideals regarding feminine behaviour. In this poetry, written by devadasis as well as for them by male poets, fear, shyness, simplicity, and modesty are simply not valued. Instead, we see physical and linguistic playfulness, complex forms of irony, intense eroticism and sexual daring, and a bold self-confidence.

These poems show us female speakers and characters for whom sexual discussions and conversational eroticism are not taboo. They talk to their lovers, their girlfriends, to younger courtesans, and to messengers about love, hate, body parts, and sexual acts. In “A Woman to Her Friend” by the seventeenth-century male poet Kṣetrayya, ⁹ the female speaker describes making love to a man who teases her by referring to his other lovers:

When lustily I jump on top

and pound his chest

with my pointed nipples, he says,

“That girl Kanakāṅgi is very good at this.”

I slap him hard with all five fingers. (Kṣetrayya, 1994b: 91)

And in “A Courtesan to a Messenger” the speaker articulates desperate sexual desire to a friend:

You know, my friend

with the body of a flower

that I don’t really know

he untied the knot of my sari

and did, inside me,

whatever he has done.

Just go bring that Muvva Gopāla ¹⁰ to me (Kṣetrayya, 1994c: 116)

In other padams we see an intriguing sexual audacity and adventurousness, such as in the following stanzas from “A Courtesan to her Lover”:

Who was that woman sleeping

in the space between you and me?

Muvva Gopāla, you sly one:

I heard her bangles jingle.

Thinking it was you, I reached out for a hug.

Those big breasts collided with mine.

That seemed a little strange,

but I didn’t make a fuss…

Who was that woman?

You made love to me first,

and then was it her turn?

Does she come here every day?

Muvva Gopāla,

you who fathered the god of desire,

you can’t be trusted.

I know your tricks now

and the truth of your heart.

Who was that woman? (Kṣetrayya, 1994a: 73−74)

Refusing to explain away the blatant eroticism of such devadasi poems as simply expressions of bhakti or devotional spirituality, the editors of When God is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others (Ramanujan et al., 1994: 38), describe the devadasi as having embodied “a mode of experiencing the divine that is characterized by emotional freedom, concrete physical satisfaction, and active control”. Not surprisingly, after the advent of the modern period in India, which narrowed down the roles for women to just one — the wife — these kinds of poems were regarded as obscene and, though preserved in the devadasi repertoire for centuries, consequently fell out of use when the devadasi’s dance and music was appropriated by middle-class artists in the mid-twentieth century.

My point in drawing a connection between these contemporary Dalit women writers/speakers and seventeenth-century devadasis is not to collapse the obvious differences between them but to suggest that a tradition of linguistic sexuality already exists in India, though it has been elided in historical texts by the imperatives of a nationalist pursuit of respectability. This is a tradition of outsiders to the mainstream feminine norm, who, because they are outsiders, are able to see the contours that define and contain that norm. Not having any claim or stake in middle-class femininity, nor any compensation from it, the Dalit women in Bama’s Sangati and Viramma’s Viramma: Life of an Untouchable possess a certain freedom to use and abuse the sexual language used as abuse against them. These women, much like the devadasis before them, powerfully and shamelessly wield this language: as a marker of their caste and class difference and of their placement outside a norm that they know can never redeem them. It can’t redeem any of us really. So perhaps we need to look to these women to find ways to identify it and resist it.