Towards a Vision of the Whole Sky: Tracing the Changing Contours of Dalit Life in Baby Kamble’s Jinna Amucha and Urmila Pawar’s Aaydan

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 provided an alternative discourse that disrupted authorised 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 20th century Dalit Movement, its transformational nature and Dalit women's participation therein. This paper, through an analysis of two Dalit women's autobiography belonging to two different generations, assess 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 Kamble's Jinna Amucha/ 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 the date of its publication and records in vivid detail a Mahar village in the 1920s Maharashtra and the socio-cultural upsurge wrought by the Ambedkarite Movement that awakened not only a Dalit consciousness but also a Dalit Feminist consciousness. Pawar's text traces the contours of a multiply inflected Dalit female subjectivity and the changing connotations of caste in a modern urban setup.