The following excerpt is from History Professor Chinnaiah Jangam‘s recent review of Sujatha Gidla’s book Ants and Elephants entitled “How Not to Write a Dalit Memoir“.
The shrouded lives of ‘untouchables’, also known as Dalits, in the form of life narratives are emerging as a niche genre in the Indian public sphere. This is because Dalits have emerged as a formidable political force, challenging their marginalisation and demanding social equality, dignity and right of representation. Even though historically, the anti-caste motif of Dalits as rebellious subjects existed for centuries in the form of everyday resistance, their access to writing culture under colonial rule added a new dimension to their politics of resistance.
While contesting dehumanisation by the Hindu Brahmanical caste system, Dalits are writing personal and family narratives of experiences of subjugation as a way to represent themselves and recuperate stolen humanity. These accounts are testaments against Hindu Brahmanical philosophy which justifies inegalitarian social relations and valorised them as religious dharma.
In both form and content, Dalit life narratives mirror counter-cultural narratives and provide a window into the everyday experience of Dalits as untouchables. They help us gauge the intensity of epistemic and ontological violence inflicted on them. For example, Bama’s Karukku, Viramma’s Viramma: Life of an Untouchable, Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoir, and Y.B. Satyanarayana’s My Father Baliah narrate stories of existential struggles and triumph against untold miseries. They also narrate the indomitable courage with which the protagonists strived and fought to sustain and build their self-identity and carved paths of emancipation. The recently published semi-autobiographical memoir of Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India adds another leaf to the collective narratives of suffering and emancipation.