Other Tongues: A Study of Bama'sKarukkuandSangati

This article seeks to (re)position Bama's Karukku and Sangati as autoethnographies from a Tamil Dalit perspective. Drawing on the combined tradition of Bakhtin's thought and feminist dialogics, the author engages in a transdisciplinary analysis of theoretical debates of Dalit autoethnographic narratives in order to understand the creation of dialogic spaces as spaces that both subordinate and subvert. Through a delineation of narrative hybridization in Karukku and Sangati, this article explores how Bama enables an understanding of the radicalization of Tamil Dalit women's consciousness itself by the appropriation of different registers—the self, the cultural, and the ethnographic—and dialectal Tamil.