Experimental Dalit Literature

Experimental Dalit work of art whether through textual or visual medium has made its own accord in Modern Indian literature and art. Theorists of Dalit literature such as Sharan Kumar Limbale and D.R. Nagaraj have postulated the tenets of literature by both Dalits and non-Dalit writers and how it should facilitate the work of such an art in treating the issue of caste to have a revolutionary impact that could shake the casteist framework. If Limbale calls for a serious political and social intervention through literature then Nagaraj astutely discredits the explicit use of the political and rather focuses on the subversive potential of twisted narrative scheme, vocabulary, and use of humour to inflict the same blow on the structures of tyranny.

We shall see how Bama shifts such norms to invent a novel form of life-writing for a specific purpose. Bama plays with the concept of time, anonymity, space, linearity of narrative establishing multiple positioning of the self vis-a-vis society whereby expression is not only given to an individual but also to the people of her community. Both compliment’s each other and nurture each other’s existence. M.S.S Pandian quotes Mark’s foreword from an earlier version of the book as, ““At the first sight it reads like a history of a village. From another angle, it reads like an auto-biography. From yet another angle, it reads like a brilliant novel.” In other words Karukku crosses over genre boundaries. It is neither history, nor autobiography, or fiction; yet it is all of them at the same time.” (Pandian 35). This is how a subaltern position is being exploited for an affirmative action not just for the purpose of locating the self but also giving space to community consciousness as

He suggest that how upper caste female writers have eschewed the use of this genre as revealing about one’s personal details could be humiliating while lower caste women by opening up themselves about them and their community’s self have reinstated the avowal of personal which is also political which has been a potential proclamation in feminist studies. In Karukku, Bama subtly makes entry into the discourse politically intermeshed with the personal as she recalls and pens down the humiliating experience that she had faced in her childhood. One of the instances she summons is being commented upon as Harijan, children who were “contemptible” (Bama 18). The demeaning chores that she and other children of her caste were made to do in school were to carry water to the teacher’s house or watering the plants and so on. She also compares the inferior lifestyle in terms of dressing and other material aspects with the luxurious style of the upper caste children. In yet another instance she would recall how the low caste children were made to stand separately in the ground in a shameful manner. She notes “We felt really bad then. We’d stand in front of nearly two thousand children, hanging our heads in shame, as if we had done something wrong. Yes, it was humiliating.” (Bama 21). The concept of