Writing the Self: Identity Formation in Dalit Women’s Life Writings

The formation of self in Dalit women’s writings is a historical process which is based on their lived experiences, centuries of suffering and resistance against the atrocities meted out on them because of untouchability and being women. They depict their struggle for survival and protest through the experiences from their daily lives of poverty, hunger, humiliation and exploitation. Uniquely, Dalit women’s ‘Self’ stands for individual identity as well as the collective identity of the community they belong to. At the intersection of class, caste and gender they are considered as ‘Dalit among Dalits’. In the pages of history, they remained neglected and suffered the ‘triple’ subjugation of caste, class and gender. Presently, they have embarked their self-identity on the literary canon through their life writings as resistance against their subordination – both caste and patriarchy. Their writings are mostly in form of autobiographies, biographies, memoirs and autobiographical fiction and most of them have been written in regional languages which lead to the formation of Dalit ‘Self’. Recently, a few Dalit women’s writings have been translated into English and have got access to the wider range of readers. These translated works, though few in number, have paved ways for Dalit women’s formation of self and have succeeded in establishing a standpoint for themselves – a Dalit Feminist Standpoint. Taking up the analysis of three groundbreaking Dalit women’s autobiographies namely The Prisons We Broke by Baby Kamble, The Weave of My Life by Urmila Pawar and Karukku by Bama, the focus of the paper centers around Dalit women’s suffering and how they successfully combat the hegemony of their oppressors and formed a separate branch of identity for themselves on the literary canon as Dalit feminism.