Barking at the Sun

Bama herself doesn8217;t shout or shriek, but her quiet, matter of fact narration of the violence that circumscribes the lives of the women on her street is all the more shocking for it. 8220;I can8217;t even begin to enter the experiences of the women in Sangati,8221; she has said, women she grew up seeing battered, bruised and broken by their own men, upper caste men, panchayat men, landlords, sons of landlords 8212; the whole damn breed.

She8217;s a little girl, listening to her grandmother explaining the world to her. Paatti comes alive as one of the most memorable figures in recent Indian literature, animating the events in her granddaughter8217;s narrative with her wisdom and careless disregard for logic. She8217;s a survivor, too, who picks up the broken fragments of her life and makes a mosaic for her grandchildren to decipher. Bama presents these fragments to us as vignettes that dismantle all our comfortable assumptions about Hindu society, exposing the brutality of its very structure. Its deceits and discrimination, and its relentless grinding down of the ultimate underdog, the dalit woman.

So deep-seated are its prejudices that they permeate dalit practice too. Menstrual and other taboos regarding untouchability are reit-erated in inter-dalit proscriptions. Couples who cross low-caste boundaries are mercilessly hounded; women are subjected to the same humiliating degradation.

I have seldom read an account so shot through with violence, and yet it sparkles. Paatti breaks into joyous song whenever she tires of straightforward telling. Her age and status in the village 8212; widowed midwife of extraordinary skill 8212; allow her a fearless freedom that she manages to communicate to her granddaughter.

I suspect she8217;s also managed to convey the art of storytelling to her. In a way many of the events in Sangati are a retelling of Paatti8217;s stories to Bama. Mariamma, the motherless cousin who goes straight from drunken father to rapist husband; Esakki, the woman possessed; Raakhamma almost beaten to death 8212; the young girl watches all this but it is Paatti who unravels it for her.

Much later Bama does her own unravelling, of form and language, of literary expectations. Dalit dialect, abuse, argumentation, turns of phrase like 8220;the fart that comes before shit8221; thumb their nose at decorum and propriety, and break the distinction between what8217;s spoken and written.

8220;I never wanted to create great literature,8221; she says. 8220;When literary circles called the language vulgar and obscene, I was all the more convinced that it was my language, our language.8221; In the same way, her narrative moves easily between recounting and reflecting, storytelling and documenting, biography and politics.

And so Bama8217;s significant contribution is that, through the act of writing, she not only transgresses caste boundaries, she also demolishes the conventional exclusions of language and genre. And of course, gender. In Sangati all three are full-blown.

It is common to commend the translator, and Lakshmi Holmstrom must be congratulated for a fine job. But Bama8217;s other literary editor, Mini Krishnan, surely deserves our appreciation for having first made her writing available to an English-reading audience.