Ethnography of the Marginalised Self: Reading of

Dalit Womens Autobiographies

PUTUL SATHE*
Abstract
Autobiographies /self narratives by Dalit women have
brought to the centre-stage a gendered marginalized
self by re-writing the self in a genre which is masculine
in its orientation. Articulation of collective experiences
of hurt and humiliation challenges the hegemonic caste
structure and gendered oppression and the text is
transformed into a vibrant literary space, where new
registers of aesthetic and literary are formulated. This
paper focuses on Baby Kambles The Prisons We
Broke (2008) and Urmila Pawars The Weave of My Life
(2008) in translation as narratives, which navigate the
realm of Dalit autobiography and womens
autobiographies to emerge as socio-biographies. The
writing of gendered marginalised self results in the
writing of resistance and the text emerges as the site
of re-claiming lost histories.
Gendering the Autobiography
The genre of autobiography in literature has been
implicitly masculine and middle-class. As a critical
narrative form, autobiographies point to a truth, which
is shared and endorsed by everyone and in the process
the narrator establishes a particular view of the
individual transcending both social and historical
difference. Starting with Saint Augustines Confessions
(A.D 398-400) which is often thought of as the
beginning of modern Western autobiography, this text
also heralded the beginning of what Georg Gusdorf
defines as a cultural space, which is both Western and
Christian. Rousseaus Confessions, which were
published posthumously between 1781 and 1789, broke
away from the spiritual model and ushered in the secular
model located within Romantic era. Confessions herald
the assertion of the individuals own singularity: I have
resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and
which, once complete, will have no imitator. My
purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way
true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself
(Rousseau quoted in Anderson 1988: 44).
However in the 20 th century, with the advent of
psychoanalysis and deconstruction, the concept of a

universal complete model of subjectivity is replaced

with multiple subjectivities. Now the autobiographical
subject is no longer the essentialized subject. This
ideological construct will be challenged by many and
in this context Roland Barthess autobiography Roland
Barthes by Roland Bathes (1977) is probably one of
the most powerful attempt to write an autobiography
against the grain: What I write about myself is never
the last word : ........ the more sincere I am, the more
interpretable I am, under the eye of other examples than
those of the old authors, who believed they were
required to submit themselves to but one law:
authenticity (Barthes quoted in Anderson, 71).
Jacques Derrida in his commentary on Rousseaus
Confessions in On Grammatology has pointed to the
impossibility of an unified autobiographical I and has
problematized this understanding with the introduction
of new space in which the autobiography operates: For
Derrida the point is - once one problematizes the
border, once the life and the work become difficult to
separate and the status of empirical facts as they apply
to the authors life or his corpus, his works, is thrown
into question, then the autobiographical also has to be
redistributed or restructured (Anderson, 80).
This trajectory of restructuring the genre had many
ramifications in the hegemonic understanding of the
autobiographical space and the autobiography will now
be a performance, where there will be seamless
collision of the conscious and the unconscious selves.
Within this field, womens autobiographies drew
attention to the absence of womens texts within this
canon. Womens autobiographies were defined by
feminist critics as texts with reference to life.
Difference becomes an important term to situate the
concept of gendered narrative with reference to
womens autobiographies and subject position.
Difference was confined not just to sexual difference
but there was pluralisation of difference (Anderson,
117) across race, gender, ethnicity, class and
sexuality. Autobiography has been one of the most
important sites of feminist debates because it
demonstrated that there are different ways of writing

Faculty, S.N.D.T. College of Arts and S.C.B. College of Commerce and Science for Women, Mumbai

OCTOBER DECEMBER 2013

25

the subject that are often experimental and challenged

the existing critical boundaries (Anderson, 87). Virginia
Woolfs unfinished and unpublished autobiography
Sketch of the Past is a narrative where conventional
modes of representation were unsuited to represent
multiplicity of selves and displaced the masculine
discourse of singular I. Deconstructing autobiography
as a genre which privileged Western, masculine
subjectivity also gave way to the political use of
autobiographical form by marginalised subjects. The
radical potential of this form was a political strategy
which resulted in autobiographies emerging as text of
the oppressed, where articulation of experiences of an
individual testified to the oppression of the group
moving beyond the personal and forging link between
the self and material conditions. As a conjunctural
document (Elspeth Probyn quoted in Anderson, 91)
autobiography now has the potential to be the text of
the oppressed and the culturally displaced, forging a
right to speak both for and beyond the individual. People
in a position of powerlessness- women, black people,
working class people- have more than begun to insert
themselves into the culture via autobiography, via the
assertion of a personal voice, which speaks beyond
itself (Swindells quoted in Anderson, 104).
The present paper attempts to analyse two Dalit
womens autobiographies in translation, where the
personal has been revisited to testify to the humiliation
and hurt experienced by marginalized community to
create enabling cultures (V. Geeta 2012: 252) and in
the process engage in a subversive appropriation of
literary institution and tools that had marked them as
other. The texts are Baby Kambles The Prisons We
Broke (2008) and Urmila Pawars The Weave of My Life
(2008).
Writing the Dalit Self
In the Indian context autobiography representing a
unified self appeared on the literary scene as part of
emerging modernity resulting from colonial encounter.
However there was a tradition of self-reflexive writing
in the autobiographical mode (Ramaswamy and
Sharma, 2009) and autobiography representing a
reflective individual can be read as a resolutely public
utterance (Udayakumar, 2008: 419). A large number
of autobiographies written by men during the 19th and
20th century were occupied with the subject of historical
change. Therefore autobiographies as self-narratives
are sites where there is an intersection of autobiography
and history (Udayakumar, 2008).
26

With reference to womens writing in India, women could

write about only a few things in the absence of a
sustained high level of formal education. Beginning in
the 19th century it was the high caste Hindu women,
who started writing autobiographies, which were located
in the new emerging material and social condition
resulting from reforms and legislative innovation in the
public sphere (Sarkar, 1999). Womens autobiographies
then become a cultural site, where tensions were
articulated resulting from colonial modernity. The
dominant ideology of 19th century cultural nationalism
celebrated Indias spiritual superiority over material
West but remained silent over caste/gender based
humiliation. The autobiographies of upper caste women
have to be located within this framework. The question
of caste was invisible in their writings. Sharmile Rege
has drawn attention to this erasure: ..........Brahmin
womens autobiographies have been narratives of upper
caste women, their struggles with tradition and their
desire to be modern. It is this self that claims to be
universal, modern unmarked by caste through its
journeys of companionate marriage, modern institutions
and marital discord. This claims of the upper caste
womens autobiography to represent modern Marathi/
Indian women serves, on the other hand, to render
invisible their complicity in privileges of brahminical
patriarchy; and on the other, it classifies the narratives
of women whose self-definition is located explicitly in
caste as a relational identity, as if it were the other
of modern and feminist (Rege 2006:50)
Dalit autobiographies were part of Dalit literature, whose
arrival on the scene of Indian literature caused much
anxiety among the gatekeepers of literary
establishments resulting in a shift in existing literary
paradigms. G.N. Devy has identified Dalit writing as
one of the forces, which has challenged the bourgeois
nationalist perspective in Indian literary historiography.
Dalit literature is not merely a collection of texts, but
mark the emergence of a new self consciousness
influenced by the philosophy of Dr. Ambedkar and the
writers in this movement show a clear awareness of
belonging to a distinct literary culture and society
(Devy, 2006: 126). Within Dalit literature, autobiography
as a literary and cultural expression has created a
praxis, which has challenged existing literary structures
through their articulation of cultural and caste
discrimination: It focuses on the question of otherness,
difference, marginality, canon and the categories of
aesthetics. In order to voice the protest of the
marginalised, Dalit literature often follows the subversive
WOMENS LINK, VOL. 19, NO. 4

historiographic path of personalizing history .It is

therefore, perhaps, that autobiography is the most
potent and often exercised form of fiction produced in
Dalit literature (Devy, 272).
Autobiographies by Dalit writers governed by
subversive historiographic path of personalizing
history become a political gesture in the in the context
of Indian literary historiography to focus upon a sort of
epistemic mutations (Mohanty, 1998: 120) not only
in cultural criticism but in social and historiography as
well (ibid, 120) and point to the need to create cultural
paradigms, which will challenge the notion of
essentialism prevailing in Indian nationalist
historiography. This will bring to the centre stage the
issue of marginality resulting from caste fractured Hindu
identity.
Central to these narratives is the articulation of hidden
histories of hurt and humiliation (Rao, 2003: 3) and the
caste body is the site where the inequalities of the
caste system in terms of purity and pollution are
reproduced. Each life narrative addresses the very
hegemonic structure of the caste system
(Ramakrishnan, 2011: 67) which appears natural by
appealing to the moral corruption of the society which
legitimizes caste oppression (ibid, 67). Subject to
constant humiliation a profound crisis besets the self,
a crisis which Cornel West has described as
ontological wounding (Geeta, 2009:93). In Dalit
autobiographies by male authors like Sharan Kumar
Limbales Akkarmashi, Kishore Gaikwads Uchalaya
and Om Prakash Valmikis Joothan the narration of
caste based humiliation is a political act of resistance
(Ramakrishnan, 67). This has resulted in a shift from
hero-centric world to anti-hero position according to Sisir
Kumar Das. Dalit literary representations have
challenged the writings of upper caste writers located
within the discourse of pity (Limbale, 2004) and the
neat binary of postcolonial literature, Dalit subalternity
is not located within the colonial structure of the
colonizer and the colonized, but in a caste based
social, economic and cultural structures. Dalits are the
upper caste Hindus other, but the other is not
ethnocultural, religious and linguistic other. This other
is a part of the Hindu society. The other is not only
spatial but also normative. As a counterhegemonic
discourse, which sought representation for caste based
subalternity, Arjun Dangle has coined the term
differentness to understand the larger literary paradigm
of Dalit autobiographies. This has given rise to different

OCTOBER DECEMBER 2013

register, where the rules of literary are different:

.........Dalit literature is deeply immersed in lifes
struggle. The Dalit world is filled with dreadful, terrible,
humiliating events. Dalit writers cannot escape being
tied physically and mentally to this world. Dalit writers
are doing the difficult work of portraying this life, through
personal experience and empathy, absorbing it from all
sided in their sensibility. To live this life is painful
enough; it can be equally painful to recreate it on the
mental level. Dalit writers are deeply involved in this
process (Jadhav, 1992: 303)
Autobiography as Sociobiography
Dalit womens self-narratives traverse the realm of Dalit
autobiographies and womens autobiographical writings.
Articulated along the multiple axis of gender, class,
caste and identity and not a given demographic or
sociological condition (Pandey, 2010), the texts under
consideration can be historically located within the
Ambedkarite movement and point to alternative modes
of conducting politics and part of alternative archive
since conventional archive have refused to record their
activities (Pawar and Moon, 2008). Situated within the
Ambedkarite, the narratives are not only an
engagement with a gendered subaltern history, but they
entail a process of listening to historical voices of
politicized activist Dalit women. This method
underscores the epistemological disadvantages of
unmarked feminism (Anand, 2007). Dalit women
through their literary representatives of their struggles
have questioned the geneology of Indian feminism,
where the position of caste has not been articulated.
Articulation of gendered marginality with the emergence
of autonomous Dalit womens organization drew
attention to the complex relationship between feminism
and a castes complex history. Anupama Rao has
probed the specificity of this position: Dalit feminism
poses anew the position of how we might understand
castes complex history as a form of identification and
as a structure of disenfranchisement and exploitation,
how we revisit an forgotten and repressed histories that
illuminate the criticism of feminism by its most
vulnerable and exploited constituency (Rao, 2003: 3).
Baby Kambles text can be located within the existing
oeuvre of protest writing in Marathi. According to Maya
Pandit the translator of Baby Kambles autobiography,
this autobiography is probably the first autobiography
by a Dalit woman in Marathi. Most of the Dalit
autobiographies written by men were for a mixed
readership of Dalit and non-Dalit readership. This

27

narrative on the other hand is not only representative

of the Dalit community but is also an engagement with
the history of Dalit oppression (Pandit in her
introduction to Kamble, 2008: IX) and is located in the
tradition of direct self-assertion (ibid, IX). Located on
the margins of social imaginary, the representation of
marginality emerges as a tremendous transformative
potential for oppressed people (ibid, XI). This
performance is not an individual act but is collective
in nature: I wrote about what my community
experienced. The suffering of my people became my
own suffering. Their experiences became mine. So I
really find it very difficult to think of myself outside my
community (ibid, 136). The autobiography as a sociobiography creates a subject position which is at
collective and individual. The autobiographer is
simultaneously the author of an individual act of truthtelling and the subject of a shared historical memory
(Udayakumar, 421). The act of articulation in the public
domain becomes a mode of understanding the political
economy of graded inequality embedded in the caste
system from the point of view of a gendered
untouchable identity. The narrator while mapping the
semantics of caste/gender exploitation is a witness
speaking for the entire community and points to the
historicity of Dalit womens struggle, whose features
are located within the writings of Phule and Ambedkar:
When the Mahar women labour in the fields, the corn
gets wet with their sweat. The same corn goes to make
your pure, rich dishes. And you feast on them with
such evident relish! Your palaces are built with the
sweat and blood of Mahars. But does it rot your skin?
You drink their blood and sleep comfortably on the bed
of their misery. Doesnt it pollute you then? ........... and
you have been flogging us with the whip of pollution.
This is all that your selfish religion has given to us.
But now we have learnt how utterly worthless your
religion is ........... (Kamble, 56).
The kind of experiences narrated in the text draws
attention to the production and reproduction of the
caste body and the text resurrects the history of
experience to reflect and to contemplate upon and
thereby use the experience radically to annihilate the
structures which renew and underlie this experience
(Guru, 2012): .............. We obeyed every diktat of
your Hindu religion; we followed all your traditions........
why did you single us out for your contempt? We were
the people who lived in your house, yet we dared not
to drink even a drop of water there. We never dared to
cross your path. We dedicated ourselves to the service
28

of the civilization and culture that was so precious to

you, in spite of the fact that, it was always unkind and
unjust to us (ibid, 38).
The autobiography narrates the manner in which
Brahminical hegemony turned untouchable body into
a cultural space (Guru 86). Kambles fathers body
defined the mutually connected but culturally exclusive
spaces, namely the agrahara (the main village) and the
Dalit ghetto. Whenever he would visit the village his
chest would deflate like a balloon and he would shuffle
around inconspicuously as possible so as not to offend
anyone of the higher castes(75). His speech power was
replaced by the noise of the bells that were tied to the
top of the stick that the Mahars were to carry with them
whenever they entered the village. However when he
would enter Maharwadi, the Dalit ghetto he would twirl
his moustache and clear his throat as if he was a
important man (ibid, 75) and the stick would be
transformed to the royal staff and the blanket on his
shoulder would become the coat of a barrister.
Humiliation as Gopal Guru has pointed out is an
individual, collective, social and political phenomenon.
The articulation of Dalit womens experience of caste
based violence results in the visibility of caste, which
then scripts a polemical attack on gender and caste
structures of Brahminical patriarchy. Within this
paradigm, the Dalit woman is also located within Dalit
patriarchy and experiences the worst form of
exploitation, when Dalit men do not hesitate in chopping
off the nose of Dalit women, who fail to confirm to Dalit
patriarchal norms (Kamble, 98). The body of the
violated Dalit woman provide a critique of Dalit
patriarchy and destroys the myth of Dalit patriarchy as
democratic. Dalit women negotiate not with multiple
patriarchies but with what Uma Chakravarti has termed
as graded patriarchies operating within the grid of
Brahminical patriarchy. The events which populate the
text are ordinary and belong to everyday realm and
untouchability and caste reproduce themselves by
repetition (Pandhian, 2008).
Located within the Ambedkarite movement the text
maps the emergence of an early female Dalit political
subjectivity attentive to caste injustice. This agency
is not an autonomous one and is part of the emerging
Dalit counter public sphere. At this point the text
documents the impact of Dr Ambedkars political ideas
on the community and traces the rise of modern Dalit
self : Otherwise , we were merely skeletons, without
any life in us! The flame of Bhim started burning in our

WOMENS LINK, VOL. 19, NO. 4

hearts. We began to walk and talk. We became

conscious that we too are human beings. Our eyes
began to see and our ears to listen. Blood started to
flow through our veins. We got ready to fight as Bhims
soldiers. The struggle yielded us three jewels humanity, education and the religion of Buddha (Kamble
122). The chawdi in the text emerges as the cultural
space, where Ambedkars ideas were constantly
discussed and those discussions generated more
ideas. One such idea was to celebrate Babas birth
anniversary on 14th April(ibid, 111). The decision to
celebrate 14th April as Babas first birth anniversary
marks the struggle within the community to gain a
principled distance from the views and practices of the
community (Alam quoted in Rege, 58).
The text opens up as a site of articulation of
Ambedkarite tenants, which brought to the centre stage
of Indian political modernity the stigmatized Dalit
community as a political community, which questioned
the liberal, unified, humanist vision of a nation
controlled by elites, who tried to control and regulate
the unchartered spaces of living communities
(Ramakrishnan 71). The autobiography maps the
journey of Dalit community to seek and create a
crucial space of alterity (Rao, 2003: 108) informed by
liberal spirit of inquiry and self-doubt to question their
position in a hierarchical society and develop a new
vocabulary of emancipation (Guru, 2012: 79).
Urmila Pawars autobiography has been categorized as
A Dalit Womans Memoirs and the metaphor of woven
elements runs throughout the narrative. The narrative
is made up of several texts and inscribes a complex
notion of the margin. The trajectory of Urmila Pawar is
very different from Baby Kamble in terms of modern
education, modern education, salaried employment and
involvement in womens movement and opened up new
spaces and takes her away from the world of physical
labour and struggle for livelihood. One perceives the
emergence of an individual identity, which was in
contrast to ones identification with the community and
represented success stories resulting from affirmative
action of the state and the onset of neo-liberal
programmes during the 1980s and 1990s. Narendra
Jadhavs autobiography is representative of the life
story of a de-caste Dalit (Pandit in Pawar, 2008: XVI).
However atrocities against Dalits still continue. Pawars
narrative traverses a range of positions, graded
marginalities and the text can be read as a complex
narrative of a gendered individual who looks at the world

OCTOBER DECEMBER 2013

initially from her location within the caste but who also
goes on to transcend the caste identity from a feminist
perspective(ibid, XVII). The narrative is a continuation
of the tradition of Kambles narrative in portraying the
inhuman condition of the community, but it moves
forward, where caste identities morph into a larger
human identity influenced by Buddhist philosophy. The
dialectics between self and community finds a larger
articulation with Pawar re-defining the category Dalit
to include a radical human agency: Dalit! How are
we Dalit now? They asked angrily. We had to make
an elaborate explanation: Dalit does not mean socially
oppressed or oppressed people. It also signals rational,
secular people who have discarded the oppressive
system and concepts like God, fate and caste system
(ibid, 275). Pawars re-definition of Dalit as a liberatory
agency promotes greater historical sensitivity (Rege
in Pawar, 325) to Dalit identity lost in the grand
narrative of the nation.
This re-casting of the Dalit identity can also be related
to an important theoretical development in the
understanding of caste, where the concept of caste is
no longer confined to an objective structure as
represented in the caste system or census details.
Caste emerges as the subjectively effective identity
of a social group (Tharu, 2011: 12) and moves out of
stigmatized caste identity associated with
untouchables, depressed classes, Harijans or
Scheduled Castes. In Pawars self narrative, Dalit caste
identity acquires a new meaning as the social,
economic and cultural capital of the community (ibid,
13). Caste as a political identity enables the
subordinated caste identity to affirm the solidarity of
a community, regain the world and affirm selfpossession and confidence (ibid, 13) and change
existing equations of power.
The text articulates the aspiration to achieve full
citizenship but is also aware about the impossibility
of this fulfilment because of past historical legacy.
Therefore the quest for personhood in a liberal
democracy is addressing the singular nature of Dalit
pain in the form of testimonio by the narrator in the first
person, who is also the protagonist or witness of the
events or a significant life experience (ibid, 146).
Introduced by the Latin American historian John
Beverley in 1992 as a type of literary genre, testimonio
enables a certain aesthetics of witness, where art
becomes witness to that which real victims cannot,
for they have been obliterated (ibid, 146) and hence

29

makes explicit the process of recognition and redress.

In the text the articulation of humiliation is the moment,
when the narrator inscribes her identity as a member
of low caste and brings to the centre stage a subaltern
tract and calls for new cultural consciousness. There
are several such episodes in the text. One such
episode is when Pawar goes to deliver the baskets
woven by her mother to her customers house and she
would be made to stand outside their houses on the
threshold. Pawar would put the baskets down and the
customers would sprinkle water on them to wash away
the pollution, and only then would they touch them
(Pawar, 65) and would drop coins in my hands from
above, avoiding contact as if their hands would have
burnt had they touched me (ibid, 65). Later when
Pawar would move to Ratnagiri with her husband, the
couple would be told by their landlady to look for another
accommodation on account of their caste location: My
earlier landlady was a maidservant and this landlady
was a municipal councillor. Yet the maid and the
honourable councillor were united on one point: caste
(ibid, 206).
As has been mentioned, both the narratives map the
emergence of a politicized Dalit feminist
consciousness situated within the philosophy of Dr
Ambedkar. Baby Kambles representation of the Dalit
movement focusing on the creation of Dalit counter
public, but Pawars critique of this movement from a
feminist viewpoint initiates the process of creating what
Nancy Fraser has termed as intrapublic sphere within
Dalit counter public: The people from the Dalit
movement, however treated women in the same
discriminatory manner as if they were inferior species
(ibid, 235). Within this sphere, the inscription of gender
points to the fractured modernity of Dalit movement and
simultaneously the contours of Dalit feminism is being
defined by recovering womens agency in Ambedarite
movement: The women in the movement left an
indelible print on the history through their indefatigable
work. ......... And yet their history now lay forgotten.
Some women had themselves forgotten the work they
had done. We awakened their memories and made
them talk. Many women like Lakshmibai Kakade and
Geetabai Pawar had tears in their eyes when we met
them. They were overwhelmed to know that their work
had been acknowledged (ibid, 294-95).
The critique of Dalit movement coupled with the critique
of invisibility of caste within the Indian feminist
movement argues for the need of Dalit women to speak

30

differently and brings to the forefront new discourses

on caste and gender: One thing was, however, very
clear to me. Womens issues did not have any place
on the agenda of the Dalit movement and womens
movement was indifferent to the issues in the Dalit
movement (ibid, 260). Gopal Guru argues that this
discourse of dissent has brought forward three issues,
namely that it is important to take into account gender
identity along with class and caste identity, secondly
Dalit men were reproducing the same mechanisms to
which they were subjected to by upper caste and finally
it was important to show local resistance (Guru, 2003:
83) within the community. The writing of resistance
results in Dalit women emerging as the defining points
of a simultaneous recovery of a space for language of
caste and the womens question on its own terms
(Rege, 2006: 58).
Understanding the Dalit Literary Space
Central to both the narratives is the creation of a literary
space, where the production of autobiographies calls
for recovery of Dalit voices and mobilization of Dalit
women from epistemological standpoint Defining this
space along the lines elucidated by Rege in her essay
A Dalit Feminist Standpoint would be to understand
the politics of knowledge generation when marginalised
voices begin to gain public voices. This in turn provides
a critique of the failure of the dominant group to
interrogate their privileged position since the subject
of its knowledge is embodied and visible (i.e. the
thought begins from the lives of Dalit women and these
lives are present and visible in the results of the
thought) (Rege, 2003: 98). As sites of recovery of Dalit
discourse, the texts represent what Gauthaman has
defined as antipodal culture, a culture which the
opposite of the order of the hegemonic order
(Gauthaman, 2011) and the aesthetic dimension is
governed by painful and difficult task of portraying the
Dalit world which is filled with dreadful, terrible and
humiliating events(Jadhav, 1992: 303). By inscribing
subaltern past, the texts call for an understanding of
subalternity which pushes the limits of literature and
literary produced at the institutional site of university.
The texts represent the complex relationship of social
location, experience and history (Rege, 2006: 72) and
the category literature will now include literature, history
and politics (Belsey, 1988) and the texts emerge as
one of the places to begin to assemble the political
history of the present (Belsey, 1988:408). This
transformative potential of the texts have been

WOMENS LINK, VOL. 19, NO. 4

represented by the role of memory, initiating a process

of translation and recovery. Bell hooks observation
about the role of memory in the context of Black
literature is apt here. She believes that the role of
memory expresses an effort to remember that is
expressive of the need to create legacies of pain,
suffering and triumph in ways that transform present
reality (Hooks, 1996:50). Here fragments of memory
have not been flatly reproduced as documentary but
have been constructed to give a new take on the old,
constructed to move ........ into a different mode of
articulation (ibid, 50). As transformative site, the text
represent a culture where respatalization of the centre
and the margin happen with the articulation of
marginality with interlocking oppressive social relations
point to multiplicity of meanings (Lorraine Code quoted
in Heckmann, 2004: 236) .
Finally to conclude, a mode of negotiating, which the
essay seeks to postulate calls for an understanding of
literature based on what Marathe Nussbaum calls the
compassionate imagination, which result in not only
acknowledging the excluded but listening to a language
that may not be considered literary any result in revisiting received institutional literary sensibilities.
However, this is not a move in the direction of sudden
shift in ideological gear but initiates a process whereby
an engagement with Dalit womens life-narratives can
move in the radical direction of reading literary
representations as metaphors of revision, rewriting and
reclamation (Waugh, 1997: 59) to produce new
liberatory revisions of history.
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Devy, G. The G.N. Devy Reader. Hyderabad:
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Ganguly, D. Dalit life stories. The Cambridge
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Gauthaman, S. Dalit Culture. No Alphabet in
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More women being sterilized in Delhi

The number of tubectomy (female sterilisation) cases has gone up from 18,505 in 2009-10 to 25,228 in
2012-13. However, in the same period vasectomies (male sterilisation) have come down to 1,892 from
4,386, according to an RTI plea. Experts are of the view that despite governments population policy and
their concerns about gender equality, the burden of birth control continues to rest with the women. Weve
filed a case in the Supreme Court against several government sterilisation camps, which violates the National
Population Policy. These camps promote tubectomy, while vasectomy takes a back seat. In several cases,
when women go to hospitals for delivery or abortion they are made to undergo tubectomy without informed
consent, said Sanjay Sharma, director, Health Rights Initiative, Human Rights Law Network. According to
doctors, the rise in the number of tubectomy cases reflects the attitude of society towards women. But
they hasten to add that this might also reflect the growing awareness among women about birth control.
The gradual rise in the cases of tubectomy proves that women are taking over control of their fertility.
They are becoming independent and better informed. Its a woman who has to undergo pregnancy or abortion
and face the related complications, said Dr Ranjana Sharma, senior consultant, gynaecology & obstetrics,
Indraprastha Apollo Hospital. It is very difficult to convince men to go for vasectomy. It is perceived that
after the procedure they would lose their sexual vigour or potency. Hence, they force their wives to go for
tubectomy, she added. The procedure of sterilisation for women is more complicated than that for men,
say doctors. Vasectomy is a safer option than tubectomy for permanent sterilisation. Vasectomy is done
under sedation and local anaesthesia, it rarely needs general anaesthesia. Tubectomy is a more invasive
procedure. It usually requires general anaesthesia and a laparoscope is inserted inside the abdomen. Its
complication includes risk of anaesthesia, bowel and vessel injury. However, the overall risks and
complication of tubectomy is less than 1%.The risks of vasectomy are much lower (0.5%), said Dr Kaberi
Banerjee, senior consultant, gynaecology and infertility, Nova Speciality Surgery. Men may feel that this
surgery will lead to sexual problems in men. This is, however, a myth and sexual dysfunction is not a
complication of this procedure, she added. According to an NDMC health officer, awareness programmes
about family planning and sterilization are rare in the city. Married couples should be counseled and educated
about the outcome of sterilization, he said. (Hindustan Times 11/8/13)

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