TOWARDS A VISION OF THE WHOLE SKY: TRACING THE CHANGING CONTOURS OF DALIT LIFEIN BABY KAMBLE’SJINNAAMUCHA ANDURMILAPAWAR’SAAYDAN

Abstract

Autobiographical writing was one of the genres employed by Dalit women in India to explore new possibilities for constructing, confirming, and subverting their caste based gendered subjectivity. These writings are a literary and historical corpus for both the Dalit Movement and Dalit Feminism through their unmediated version of experiential history and providedan alternative discourse that disrupted authorized representations of history/ reality. Dalit women’s autobiographies have come into print only from the beginning of the 1980s, yet they are a testimonial record of the 20^th century Dalit Movement, its transformational nature and Dalit women’s participation therein. By writing it into existence they bring into focus the specific socio-cultural location of the Dalit women. This paper, through an analyses of two Dalit women’s autobiography belonging to three different generations, assesses how collective activism and consciousness has affected Dalit women’s subjectivity; also, how modernisation, urbanisation, industrialisation and social mobility has affected a redefinition of the identity contents of the ‘I’. The texts chosen for study are Baby KondibaKamble’sJinnaAmucha/ The Prisons We Broke (1985) and Urmila Pawar’s Aaydan/ The Weave of My Life(2003; Baby Kamble’s autobiography, though published in 1985, was written at least twenty years before its actual date of publication and records in vivid detail life a Mahar village in the 1920s Maharashtra and after, and the socio-cultural upsurge wrought by the Ambedkarite Movementthat awakened not only a Dalit consciousness but also a Dalit Feminist consciousness. Pawar’s Aaydan in 2003 traces the contours of a multiply inflected Dalit female subjectivity and the changing connotations of caste in a modern urban setup.