Cut by the Serrated Leaf: Caste, Capitalism and the Brutal Architecture of Dalit Existence in Bama's "Karukku"

This paper provides a Neo-Marxist literary reading of Bama Faustina’s autobiographical novel Karukku (1992). It examines the systematic perpetuation of caste oppression, economic exploitation and colonization of consciousness within the intersecting structures of Brahminical hegemony, Christian institutional betrayal and postcolonial Indian capitalism. This analysis, through close reading, contends that the protagonist’s humiliation, disillusionment and ultimate departure from the convent are not the result of personal inadequacy but are rather the direct products of structural violence, caste-based economic dispossession and the manufacture of false consciousness through religious and educational institutions. The paper contends that Bama’s work provides a radical political critique of the confluence of caste and class that creates a brutal architecture of exclusion and how even seemingly liberatory institutions like the Church reproduce the very hierarchies they claim to transcend. The analysis ends with the conclusion that the novel remains critically relevant as a testament that Dalit suffering is not an outcome of individual failure or karmic destiny, but is the logical result of a system intentionally designed to annihilate specific bodies and minds, and that real liberation requires not just inclusion within oppressive structures, but their complete disassembly.