A Critical Study on Dalit Feminism in Bama’s Karukku

Abstract

In this paper, I examine Bama’s seminal autobiography Karukku (1992) through the theoretical framework of Dalit feminism. It claims that “Karukku” makes a revolutionary epistemological turn in mainstream Indian feminist discourse and in patriarchal Dalit political movements. Mainstream Indian feminism has largely focused on the experiences of “Savarna” (upper-caste) women and universalised the category of "Indian womanhood." Major narratives in Dalit literature have tended to subjugate women's gender-based oppression to the larger anti-caste struggle. In this paper, Bama uses Dalit feminist theory (Sharmila Rege, Gopal Guru) and intersectional frameworks (Kimberlé Crenshaw) to examine Dalit Christian women’s “triple marginalization” of caste humiliation, gender subordination and institutional religious exploitation. The study looks at Bama’s critique of the caste hierarchy in the Catholic Church, the physical and spatial effects of Untouchability, the politicisation of dialect (Paraiyar Tamil) and the formal transition from the bourgeois autobiography to the collective ‘testimonio’ (collective testimony/narrative of experience). In this way, “Karukku” does not merely record the oppression of the subaltern. It builds a subversive, alternative poetics of agency, labour, outrage, and spiritual reclamation.