African American Womanism Speaks to Dalit Feminism: Special Reference to Telugu Dalit Women’s Literature

 African American Womanism Speaks to Dalit Feminism: Special Reference to Telugu Dalit Women’s Literature 

-D. Jyothirmai & K. Sree Ramesh

•Mainstream feminism’ in India remained substantially elitist in its concerns carrying the legacy of 'western feminism'

•Dalit women are forced to lead a separate movemen

•Dalit feminism as a more inclusive kind of feminism that challenge oppression of any form for women in India or elsewhere

•Thus originated, nascent Dalit Feminism could not derive any theoretical and representational sustenance from the mainstream Indian Feminism.However it can derive roots from the African American womanist/feminist experiences as both share a similar socio-historical environment. 

•Whereas white female activists were concerned with the rights of married woman to own property, for example, black women were concerned with the basic human right not to be literally owned as chattel. As white women lobbied to change divorce laws, black women lobbied to change the laws that prohibited slaves from marrying. While white women sought definition outside the roles of wife and mother, black women sought the freedom to live within traditional gender roles, to claim the luxury of loving their own men and mothering their own children.

• In the Indian context, upper caste women sought liberty from oppressive patriarchy which entangled their lives, while Dalit women sought freedom from the stigma of pollution,untouchability and poverty

•Swaroopa Rani (2013: 707) writes dalit women remain confused in choosing between elitist feminism and male centered ‘Dalitism’ that make them scapegoats in their movements. 

•. Even during the freedom struggle, when pioneering male feminist like Raja Ramohan Roy in Bengal (against Sati) or Veerasalingam (in favour of widow remarriages) in Andhra Pradesh led a movement for the liberation of women it was aimed at the liberation of the upper caste women

•Dalit women have to face the almost routine violence that shaped their lives cutting across the intersecting categories of caste, gender and class. Hence, their voices became vibrant from the later years of 20th century.

•  Swaroopa Rani puts it succinctly: “If other women are victims of gender-related oppression, dalit women are the victims of caste and class exploitation also.

•M.M. Vinodini is a dalit short story writer who believes that feminist concerns take on a totally different color in the Dalit context as they are concerned not with the issues of gender,desire, realization of the individual self and sexual freedom but are very particular about the issues of hate and pollution that perpetuate a sort of ‘self contempt’ among Dalit women. 

•The writer adopted the biblical ‘parable of lost son’ metaphorically to relate how Suvarthavani (word of good news) becomes oblivious of her ‘Dalit identity’ infatuated with brahmanical ways of living, and at last regains it to declare her ‘true identity.’ If the ‘lost son’ runs away from his father physically, Suvarthavani abandons her parents/community emotionally.

• Suvarthavani develops ‘contempt’ towards ‘Dalitness’, her own people, locality and the house in which she was brought up. 

•Vani longs for ‘sanctification’ of all Dalits. She even shortens her name as S. Vani, stops eating beef and refines her speech with an additional ‘h’ while articulating each word to conceal her 'Dalit Identity

•His stereotypical talk about Dalit/Christian women presenting them as lax unlike elite brahmin women disturbs her. His talk reveals the licentiousness of upper caste men and their desire to have sexual pleasures from a ‘polluted’ Dalit woman as if their bodies are accessible to them. 

•Thus, the ‘lost daughter’ regains her 'dalit identity',turns strong and sensible for her community and thus the story reveals the emancipation of dalit women with education though not wholly liberated from the stigma.

•Avtar Brah suggests in the context of black and white feminism, is true with dalit feminism and ‘mainstream’ Indian feminism and they should not be seen as essentially fixed, oppositional categories, but rather as historically contingent fields of contestation within discursive and material practices (1993: 95).

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