MAPPING THE SUBALTERN STANDPOINT: A READING OF SELECT DALIT FEMALE NARRATIVES

Abstract

The present work endeavours to unearth and apprehend the Dalit female Standpoint as the unique slant to edifice and exhibit the consciousness of Dalit females in the select Dalit Narratives----Bama’s Karukku (1992) and Sangati (1994) Baby Kamble’s The Prison’s We Broke (2008), and Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life (2009). It further reiterates the substantive efficacy of having a standpoint of one’s own and the privileges of having it. It provides an aid in reconfiguring the life of a collective group as these standpoints are peculiar points of view which are available to those marginal people of this group who hold certain locations in the society due to various ideologies. This collective group is particularly destitute due to various social, political and psychological reasons. The group can be turmed as Subaltern as it is thwarted and hegemonized by various power structures. The particular subaltern group upon which the present research focuses is the Dalit female group. It further talks about the particular location that affects the Dalit women group in various ways and constructs their knowledge regarding it. It provides them an objective knowledge due to their situatedness in it. It also denotes the self-referentiality of Dalit women which is another factor responsible for their claim of being an outsider-insider. This claim indicates the potential of their standpoint which enables them to look at both sides of a situation. This is an aspect of their Dalit standpoint which has been born out of their well speculated experiences. Further the study focuses upon the narratives written by these women which emerge as a site that contemplates the subject spirit of these women that is exclusively an outcome of their culturally embedded identities. It will be observed that these standpoints are not just the corollary of certain events but an upshot of the experiences gained by those events, when a group is located at a certain place in the society. The study also explores the phenomenon of difference that makes the Dalit women divergent from the mainstream of the society as their oppressions are intersectional in nature. It covertly connotes to the different understanding of the prejudice and domination which enables them to map their position in the social space using the known points. The charting of these known points denote the myriad possibilities for the emancipation of self and the collective group, one is concerned with. In addition, the study also considers the possibilities that can be helpful in highlighting these differences and clearly articulating the vision of the Dalit women. It also seeks to understand the oppositional consciousness driven by the procurement of Dalit Standpoint. Finally the study identifies that the standpoints signify the radical possibility that is intrinsic in the knowledge gained by the myriad experiences. ii In order to achieve the proposed objectives, the study relies upon textual analysis of the above mentioned novels using critical theorists and Dalit thinkers in the area of Standpoint feminism and Dalit literature respectively, such as, Sarmila Rege, Gopal Guru, Uma Chakravarti, Uma Narayan, Anand Teltumbde, Anupama Rao, Dorothy Smith, Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Donna Haraway etc. The study also draws upon the theories of Michel Foucault to understand the power dynamics and matrix of subjugation in the context of the Dalit Women. The study also acknowledges the contributions of Black female standpoint theorists and scholars to facilitating understanding of the composition of the Dalit female psyche as evinced in the novels selected for the study