Tamil Dalit Feminist Poetics: Resistance, Power and Solidarity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024). ISBN 978-1-66692-132-8 193 pp
Fundamental to our understanding of Dalit feminist poetics in Tamil Nadu is our recognition of the influence of Periyar, Iyothee Thass, and Ambedkar on Dalit writing. Periyar’s strident voice decrying untouchability and espousing a radical feminism and atheist philosophy continues to influence Dalit thought. Periyar, a feminist before his time, was radical in his articulation of women’s rights. He launched the Self Respect movement in 1925, which grew out of his belief that men and women need to own their dignity and rights, and that caste, religion, superstition, and customs should not oppress any human being. He believed in an egalitarianism that countered any kind of domination, even language and regional supremacy, such as the dominance of Hindi and the rule of the central government. His outspoken ideas regarding women’s freedom, his espousal of atheism, and his critique of caste was, and still is, radical for his time. Periyar’s iconoclasm earned him an important place in Tamil Nadu politics and literature. He demolished norms of polite society and advanced his radical philosophy, prodding people to wake up to injustices. His voice was reformist, advocating for women’s choice in marriage, re-marrying when widowed, and asserting their reproductive domesticity and urged them to pursue their dreams. Interestingly, he also advocated for women’s choice to be childless. The rule of chastity held so dear in Tamil society, he declared, was a double standard not applied to men. In his final chapter in Why Were Women Enslaved?, he writes, “if women have to attain true liberation, it is essential to destroy the concept of godliness that is responsible for the god-created ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’” (64).
Because of the radical ways in which Dalit Tamil poets use syntax, form, image, wit, and metaphor, the subjects which they deal with, such as male-female relationships, politics, society, nature, and spirituality, which are filled with energy and insight, differ from mainstream poetry. Sukirtharani, Meena Kandasamy, Arangamallika, Umadevi, Thenmozhi Das, and Dalit allies such as Malathi Maithri, Kutti Revathy, and Leela Manimekalai, employ realism that comes to life with their use of poetic devices such as irony, wit, metaphor, and satire in their interrogation of injustices meted out to Dalits. Thus, they depict generational and present day trauma, which become a catalyst for their spiritual insight into their corporeal selves and nature. The experience, enactment, and witnessing of suffering, transformed through their poetic devices of metaphor, satire, and wit, are the raw materials for their poems. They write about upper caste policing of beef consumption, prevention of access to public places, lack of justice, sexual taboos, restrictions on choice of worship, and work. As Roja Singh describes, in contemporary India, added to the lack of access to public places are dietary restrictions, such as the rule against beef eating and the preponderance of daily injustices against Dalits, labor violations such as using Dalits to carry human waste or enter manholes to repair city plumbing which are hazardous and sometimes suffocate workers with poisonous gases (85-86). These become the subjects for Dalit poets, in addition to the violence against Dalit women, which has become more visible because of increased reporting through the spread of technology and social media.
Dalit poets portray their reality, their experience of daily humiliations; they break down the caste wall and show their audience their lives as they are lived day-to-day. If a Dalit poet like Arangamallika had not written a poem titled “Uthapuram” (“Caste Wall”), many would not know that there is literally a caste wall in many villages that separates the upper castes from Dalits. In “Uttapuram,” Arangamallika describes the condition of the slum, with its declivities on an unpaved road and feces at the gates of the elderly. She writes, “kalathorum cherikalin / moochu kattrai / kuduththunirukkirathu / thinnavil mithakkum uthaapuram” (daily, the very breath of the slum dwellers / is stopped by the rippling reflection of the caste wall) [my trans.] (Panaiyenave Nirkiraal 65). The trauma of the caste wall is played out in the physical reality of breath that is literally suffocated by a wall, a daily reminder of caste taboos. In the final lines of the poem, she compares the uthapuram to the Berlin wall, so that we wonder why the caste wall cannot be dismantled if the Berlin wall could—not just the concrete structure but the systemic wall of rejection. The literal caste wall continues to exist in the relationships between Dalits and non-Dalits which eschews easy mingling and true friendships. . . .
Food in Dalit poetry is the point of contention that separates Dalits from dominant castes; caste superiority, righteous indignation born of judgements based on orthodox Brahmin rules, and pollution rules linking food and caste play into food choice or the lack thereof. In fact, the humiliation of Dalits’ food culture by vegetarians is a trauma that has intensified today with the murderous rage of Hindu nationalists over beef consumption. In a poem, “A Faint Smell of Meat,” Sukirtharani describes herself as “smell[ing] faintly of meat,” and living in a “house where bones hang.” Even the street she lives on has the identifying marks of her caste, since young men wander about “making loud noise from coconut shells / strung with skin.” The two final lines ending the poem are a sharp retort from the poet, that although she may live on “the extreme end of town,” literally and metaphorically, marginalized from the life of the nation,
I keep assuring them
we stand at the forefront. (Holmstrom, Wild Girls, Wicked Words 199)
We can read this poem as feminist, where the speaker is defiant in acknowledging her identity and bravely asserts her voice for the collective who are traumatized by caste. The autobiographical “I” becomes the collective “we” in the final line. In the poem, the smell of meat is literally and symbolically the physical experience of the trauma of rejection. But the poet, owing to her awakening caste and feminist consciousness, does not internalize this rejection. . . . If anyone stops to ask her caste identity, she would not hesitate anymore to identify herself as paraya: “pallichchendru cholli vidugiren / parachi endru” (I speak bluntly / I am a parachi) [my trans.] (Sukirtharani Kavdaigal 87). Similarly, in “A Faint Smell of Meat,” she asserts herself despite being cast out to the edge of town, thus becoming the voice for Dalit women and men. She is confident that Dalits who are 25% of India’s population are indeed a sector with which the country has to reckon.
Pramila Venkateswaran
