Caste hegemony within Christianity in Bama’s Karukku : reproducing social spaces of symbolic power and symbolic violence

Symbolic powers govern societies in subtle ways. Pierre Bourdieu defines symbolic power in Language and Symbolic Power as the power ‘to ‘consecrate and constitute groups’. Such symbolic powers perpetrate symbolic violence wherein one class reinforces its distinctive powers contributing to the ‘domestication of the dominated. Symbolic violence and power exist across different axes of intersecting social stratification such as gender, religion, ethnicity, class, race and caste. Caste hierarchies often manifest symbolically in a society conditioning the human mind to internalise the status of a subaltern or the dominant. Ambedkar suggested that Dalits (the marginalised in the caste system) should embrace religious conversion to liberate from caste hegemony. However, the insidious effects of caste oppression thrived, affirming its allegiance to caste hierarchy and relegating the Dalits to secondary status. Bama, a Dalit writer, in her autobiography, Karukku, underscores caste discrimination existing within the Christian fold. The paper examines the politics of domination and suppression persisting within Christianitythrough caste discrimination. The study draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic power’ and ‘symbolic violence’ to analyse the limitations of religious conversion as a tool for Dalits’ social liberation.