Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to examine the varied underlined, invisible ways of suffering embedded in the lives of the Dalit community, particularly woman and their life experiences portrayed in Bama’s Karukku. Bama foregrounds the affinity between the two groups and uses feminist strategies of representation, rereading and historicizing the oppression of Dalits in her narrativization of Dalit experience. She repeatedly points out in her writing that Dalits would have to support themselves and affirm their difference from the dominant castes as an approach of self-affirmation. She seeks to represent women by tracing gaps in literary history, underlining difference as a principle of assertion even if it is located as a social disadvantage to the group. The present study tries to envisage the reconstruction of prevailing unequal order, Bama’s writings is the saga of resistance against the hegemony of upper-class literature which pretends to be omniscient and all- encompassing while presenting a narrow, one sided, twisted and biased view of reality.

Key words: Dalit, Caste system, Resistance, Subjugation, Oppression