Casteism and India’s Failing Democracy in Bama’s Karukku, Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke, and Baburao Bagul’s When IHid My Caste

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to discuss three representative works by Dalit writers—Bama’s Karukku (2014), the first autobiography by a Dalit woman, Baby Kamble’s memoir, The Prisons We Broke (2015), and Baburao Bagul’s collection of short stories, When I Hid My Caste (2018)—that reveal how, despite some improvements in their condition, the Dalit community continues to be subjected to various, at times, subtle, forms of discrimination in present-day India. The analysis of these works suggests that, while India is the most populous democracy in the world (1.3 billion), its democracy is tainted by a remnant of the past: its caste system. Although the practice of untouchability was legally abolished after India’s independence in 1947, and the overall living conditions of the lowest caste, the Dalits (25% of the population) have slowly improved over the years, the legal measures undertaken by the government have failed to guarantee their equality and inclusion in all social spheres. The three literary works reveal that casteist discrimination has not ceased but rather has changed its appearance, which is why, in the words of Urvashi Butalia, “there is still a long road to be travelled” before India overcomes its democratic deficit, its inherited casteism.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• Dalits
• Dalit literature
• casteism
• democracy

Notes

1. Gaikwad, Protective Discrimination Policy, 30; Rao, Development of Weaker Sections, 53–66; Singh, Reservation Policy for Backward Classes, 17; Ghurye, Preservation of Learned Tradition in India, 11–22.

2. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 49.

3. Ibid., 13–14, 79.

4. Bama, Karukku, 13, 32–36, 55.

5. Bagul, When I Hid My Caste, 116, 118.

6. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 104.

7. Bagul, When I Hid My Caste, 90–103.

8. Ibid., 90–103.

9. Bama, Karukku, 115.

10. Olwe, “Caste Hatred in India.”

11. Bama, Karukku, 7.

12. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 35.

13. Bagul, When I Hid My Caste, 19.

14. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India, 88.

15. Bagul, When I Hid My Caste, 116–35.

16. Bama, Karukku, 106.

17. Ibid., 47.

18. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 44.

19. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 77.

20. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 87.

21. Bama, Karukku, 74.

22. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 93.

23. Bagul, When I Hid My Caste, 71–72, 111.

24. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 75.

25. Bama, Karukku, 37.

26. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, 231.

27. Bama, Karukku, 28

28. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 210.

29. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 108–16.

30. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 12, 49.

31. Bama, Karukku, 16.

32. Brown, “Not Outside the Range,” 100–112.

33. Morris, “Social Suffering,” 25–45.

34. Brueck, Writing Resistance, 10–12; and Mukherjee, “The Exclusions of Postcolonial Theory,” 27–48.

35. Sivakami, Tamil Dalit Literature, 439.

36. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 56.

37. Ibid., 67.

38. Bama, Karukku, 80.

39. Pandian, “On a Dalit Woman’s Testimonio,” 129–35.

40. Guru, “Afterword,” 160.

41. Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, 32.

42. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 262.

43. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 259–422.

44. Beth, “Dalit Autobiographies in Hindi,” 5–6.

45. Bagul, When I Hid My Caste, 13.

46. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 162.

47. Rege, “Dalit Women Talk Differently,” 42.

48. Guru, “Dalit Women Talk Differently,” 2549.

49. Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 30, 93, 41, 54.

50. Bama, Karukku, 58, 119.

51. Rege, Writing Caste, Writing Gender, 13.

52. Manuel and Posluns, The Fourth World, 214–66.

53. ICF Team, “There is Worse in Store for Dalits.”

54. Navaria, cited in Buncome, “The Rise of ‘Dalit Lit,’” 2.

55. Ambedkar, BAWS, 230.

56. Butalia, “Her Story, I Told You So.”

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (code FFI2017-84258-P); and the Government of Aragón and the FSE 2020-2022 programme (code H03_20R), for their support writing of this essay.

Notes on contributors

Bianca Cherechés

Bianca Cherechés, MA, is a Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology, the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She is currently writing her PhD thesis on Indian Dalits and their representation in Indian literature in English. She is also a member of the national research project “Literature in the Transmodern Era,” sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science.