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Imag(in)ing the Dalit Woman

Body Image and Identity in Bama’s Sangati

NISHAT HAIDER

Introduction

Bama, the nom de plume of Faustina Mary Fatima Rani, is one of the first Tamil Dalit women writers to be translated into English.¹ Foregrounding Tamil Dalit women’s everyday and lived experiences of their bodies in Bama’s Sangati (2005), this chapter focuses on how Bama’s narrative imagines, frames, and enunciates the notion of body image in the making of Dalit women subjects. The setting of Bama’s narratives is Tamil Nadu, which is also the site of the first vigorous anticaste movement, known as the Self-Respect Movement (Suyamariyadai Iyakkam), led by E. V. Ramaswamy Periyar. Representing the Paraiyas, a subcaste within the Tamil Dalit community who converted to Christianity, Bama looks, among many other issues, at body image norms from caste and sociocultural perspectives in her feminist treatise, Sangati. Here Bama describes the plight of Dalit women who face the oppression by double patriarchies—discreet patriarchy of their own caste and an overlapping patriarchy of the upper caste. According to anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, “Body and society are reciprocal mirrors, each reflecting the consequences of the other’s conscious wishes and repressed desires. It is through the body image that human beings become not only self-aware but socially aware” (1994, xi). In this chapter, I provide an evaluation of the usefulness and relative merits of body image for a Dalit feminist project that seeks to understand and alleviate troubled embodied experiences. While looking at body image norms through the lens of a sociocultural framework, I then explore the alternative vocabularies of Dalit woman’s embodiment in Bama’s narratives to highlight the key elements of a potential new language for Dalit body image. The chapter consists of three parts: part one deconstructs the frame of body image as it intersects with the vectors of gender and caste while foregrounding Sangati; part two discusses the familial, social, psychological, and sexual aspects of Dalit body image; and part three addresses Bama’s subversion of the upper-caste semiotic codes and notions of propriety in order to reclaim an appropriate language or vocabulary to represent the Dalit women’s body image and embodied subjectivity. Throughout this chapter I refer to body image as a concept, as building blocks for discourse—not necessarily deterministic, but constitutive of discourse in complicated and potentially fluid ways. Here, body image is part of a broader sign of becoming a woman, a lexicon of the body that is usually used in association with examinations and arguments of beauty norms and ideals, body dissatisfaction or body shaming, sexual desirability, and femininity that emerge from psychology, language play, dialects, and linguistics.

Part I

Understanding Body Image: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives%

While Dalit women’s need to talk differently was framed as a response to “external factors (non-Dalit forces homogenizing the issue of Dalit women) and internal factors (the patriarchal domination within the Dalits)” (Guru 1995, 2548), Bama’s Sangati establishes that Dalit women’s spoken and written narratives tie in to represent the nuanced interplay between embodiment, body image, and the socio-historical context. As a point of departure from readings of Dalit narratives, I underscore some of the issues regarding the ways body image is framed and communicated, specifically its problematic relationship with gender and false universality. The general understanding of body image has been described as the “conscious perception of your body, how you see yourself and how you present yourself to the world” (Rathore 2019, 3–4). According to Cash and Smolak (2011), however, body image is complex and multidimensional and is made up of affective, behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive components of body experience. Rather than using the notion of body image as a reified, relatively fixed “schema-driven processing of information about, and self-evaluations of, one’s physical appearance” (Jarry 2012, 339), I argue that it is more useful to consider body imaging as an interplay between embodied experience, identity, and display—that is, a process and an activity that “the individual engages in to modify, ameliorate and come to terms with their body in specific temporal and cultural locations” (Gleeson and Frith 2006, 88). Since the 1980s, we have seen a significant shift in focus in favor of expanding the notion of body image into a multifaceted construct that includes a “person’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about his or her body” (Grogan [1999] 2008, 3). This includes the evolution in conceptualization of the female body in the sphere of psychoanalytical theory, which underscores the significance of ideas of “inner space,” or the inner sexual organs of the female anatomy (Kestenberg 1968, 465; Erikson 1964, 266–267). The existence of women’s inner space is “the matrix of femininity and motherhood,” which is of great interest to understand and unpack the ways “it is manifested in childhood, in adolescence, and in the personality of the adult women” (Hägglund 1981, 4). In globalized neoliberal India, the increasingly complex issues regarding the attitudes of women toward their own bodies, as well as the relationship of the female body with the social environment, have revealed that body image often reinforces notions that light-skinned, tall, able, young, and thin Eurocentric bodies are ideal, which often becomes synonymous with the upper-caste and upper-class Hindu body, and both ultimately contribute to a problematic Brahminization of female corporeal aesthetics.

Historical, social, and collective memories to a large extent are constituted by and through institutionalized sites of memory like literature. And narrative is often implicated in the functioning of memory. Owing to “the androcentric bias of most modern national imaginings,” specifically “the assumptions behind the masculinist, heterosexual economy hitherto governing the cultural matrix through which an Indian national identity has become intelligible” (Ray 2000, 3–4), there has been a silencing of the narratives of marginalized groups like the Dalit, which aids in the creation of a dominant Brahminical discourse. As Regina E. Spellers notes, “by studying personal stories, the tendency to naturalize one’s experiences of reality as a universal experience of reality becomes minimized and we come to understand that there are different ways of knowing” (1998, 72) and understanding body image. While Dalit narrative accounts range from the detection of their exclusion from reform projects under British rule (Chatterjee 1993; Rao 2003; Sarkar and Sarkar 2008) to Dalit feminists’ challenges to the Indian feminist movement’s normative upper-caste matrix and Dalit patriarchy (Guru 1995; Rege 2006), there is much that still awaits to be unearthed regarding Dalit women’s body image. Since there is incontrovertible evidence on the marginalization, exploitation, and powerlessness of Dalit women in the mainstream majoritarian history and in the present, it is imperative to explore the nexus among the making of women subjects, their body image, and the construction of their difference—largely through the analytics of caste—and resulting representations. Since women’s bodies are significant sites for inscription and reading (Reischer and Koo 2004, 299–300), it is important to scrutinize the ways embodied experiences and representations of Dalit women’s bodies are framed by a Dalit woman writer like Bama who breaks the silence imposed by upper-caste discourses and retrieves Dalit women’s voices to counter upper-caste oppressive historical and literary constructions.

In Sangati, Bama reinscribes and reencrypts Dalit womanhood as “the voice of a defiant subalternity committed to writing its own history” (Guha 1996, 12). The word Sangati implies events, and thus the novel narrativizes the events that take place in the life of women in the Paraiya community through individual stories, anecdotes, and memories. Emphasizing that caste structures the everyday interactions, conversations, songs, personhood, and personal relationships of Dalit women, Bama draws our attention to issues of body image that are often disguised, stereotyped, or subsumed into other discourses by virtue of their everydayness. In Sangati, the following major factors influence, inform, and affect body image: cultural beauty norms, experiences of sexism and casteism, parental influences, peer influences, and identity-construction processes. Foregrounding Dalit women’s consciousness and construction of body image, Sangati voices not only the Dalit and upper-caste or Christian divide but also intercaste contesting voices from different Dalit castes, including the Paraiyas, the Chaliyars, and the Pallars. While acknowledging the multilayered complexity of a rural Dalit community in India, this chapter offers a nuanced understanding of body image, stereotypes, and identity markers that highlights the question of the specificity and peculiarity of Tamil Dalit Paraiya women’s body experiences as represented in Bama’s Sangati.

Part II

Framing Sangati: (De)constructing Dalit Women’s Body Image%

Women’s bodies are a locus of inscribed social meaning (Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1977) that are marked by class, caste, gender, ethnicity, and culture. Addressing the aesthetic and discursive aporia regarding the complexity and multidimensionality of Dalit women’s body image, Bama reconfigures and repositions the Tamil Dalit woman in Sangati as a subject whose life is rife with contradictions that result from a tension between the Brahminical and Dalit notions of body image and cultural values deeply embedded in the individual. If one reads the narrative text in tandem with Carolyn Steedman’s opinion that “once a story is told, it ceases to be a story; it becomes a piece of history, an interpretative device” (1986, 143), Bama’s present-day enunciations of alterity offer a hermeneutical tool not only to understand the degree of Dalit women’s investment in their appearance and body image construction but also to unpack the socio-historical phenomenon of Brahminical aesthetics regarding body image as it applies to and complicates the life of Dalit woman in aspects such as hair, skin color, and physique that are some of the issues at the core of Sangati. Sometimes the adoption of Brahminical notions of beauty results in self-loathing that arises from the psychological effects of upper-caste hegemony.

Sangati, an autoethnography, weaves the narrative around several generations of Tamil Dalit women: the older women belonging to the narrator’s Paatti [grandmother] Vellaiyamma Kizhavi’s generation downward to the narrator’s own, as well as the generation coming after her as she grows up. In fact, a genuine understanding of Dalit women’s body image requires a deep appreciation for the diversity of their cultural and personal contexts of embodiment. The narrator is, in the earlier chapters at least, a young girl of about twelve years, and in the last three or four chapters, a young woman, but the thoughtful voice is that of an adult retrospectively meditating upon her lived experiences. The reflections that may seem instructive are a way of connecting experience and analysis, concluding with a practical call for action. The conversations among the generations map out the changing perspectives of women, their body image and experiences, their different needs, the different ways they are subject to oppression, and their coping strategies (Bama 2005, xix). These individual stories—anecdotes and memories of personal experience narrated in the first person—are then counterpointed by the generalizing comments of the grandmother and mother figures and later still by the author-narrator’s reflections. Through these alternate Dalit women’s narratives, Bama recuperates the silenced/occluded voices from the din of the monologic, authoritative, and hegemonic voice to highlight the question of the specificity and peculiarity of Dalit female body image and experiences, which include skin complexion, sex, sexuality, and reproduction; girls’ bodies as political, economic, and sociocultural constructs; and girls’ revolt against these constructs.

Body as Sites/Sights of Memory: Desire for the Fair and Lovely Body Image

Understanding Dalit women’s body image requires insight into the lineage of the ideal Indian woman’s body image construct. If one were to conceptualize and formulate the traditional Indian standards of women’s beauty, one of the most helpful sources is ancient art embodied in images of the Hindu pantheon of goddesses. For instance, the Hindu goddess Parvati is “a slender bodied maiden of comely hips and moon-like face” (Dehejia 1999, 18). Other facial features of Parvati are also described adoringly by Shiva: her “eyes [are] like lotus petals,” her eyebrows are like “the bows of Kama, her lower lip is like the bimba fruit,” and her nose is like “the beak of a parrot” (Dehejia 1999, 19–20). Thus inspired by the religious imagery of Hindu goddesses, the ideal body image of Indian woman that has endured for centuries and been bolstered by legacies of British colonialism is that she should be fair or medium complexioned with a narrow waist but wider hips and breasts and should possess large eyes, full red lips, and long black hair. In addition, the caste system, believed to have been introduced by the nomadic Caucasian Aryan group when they arrived in India around 1500 B.C.E., is often blamed for first creating color-based divisions in Indian society. While the top of the caste pyramid was assumed by “the fair-skinned priestly Brahmins, . . . the Shudras or laborers fell to the bottom of the hierarchy and were comprised mainly of the darker-skinned menial workers, such as the Dravidians” (Shevde 2008, 5). The preference for light skin was further reinforced by the British colonizers. The brief history of gendered body image in India reveals not only that women were subjected to hegemonically defined standards of beauty but also that our knowledge of history, and of women in general, privileges upper-caste or Brahmin body image norms. Light-skinned, Sanskritic, endogamous, and unchanging Brahmans were a discrete, endogamous, and pan-Indian group that kept their “blood free from any inter-mixture” and positioned themselves as the guardians of “an institution closely akin to caste . . . described in the Sanskrit books” of Vedic times (Ghurye [1932] 1969, 117–118).

The caste of a woman’s body thus had to make itself identifiable through “unambiguous visual markers—the style of clothing, the shape and position of the hair tuft, the differing styles and materials of ornaments permitted to be worn etc.” (Poduval 2016, 29). Describing the upper-caste women in Sangati, the narrator’s grandmother Paatti says, “When you look at them, each one of them is like a Mahalaksmi, a goddess” (Bama 2005, 12). Not surprisingly, the lightest-skinned women among the Paraiya women are praised and appreciated. Thaayi is one such very light-complexioned Dalit woman. When “women like that [Thaayi] smoothed their hair down, dressed well and made themselves up and all that, they looked like Nayakkar woman” (Bama 2005, 42), we are told. Naturally, Bama describes that how to pass off as an upper-caste Nayakkar woman is much aspired to by most Dalit women. Although appropriating the Nayakkar women’s beauty standards boosts the confidence of Thaayi, one also learns that “never did a day go by without her being beaten up” (Bama 2005, 42) and thus is reminded of all that is terribly wrong with Dalit women’s lives. Thaayi is forced into marrying a man who would “drag her along the street and flog her like an animal, with a stick or a belt” (Bama 2005, 42). The Brahmin women also add to the woes of the Dalit women, as the narrator in Sangati decries, “upper caste women show us no pity or kindness either, if only as women to women, but treat us with contempt, as if we are creatures of a different species, who have no sense of honour or self-respect” (Bama 2005, 66). Delineating the “intersectionality” of gender and class (Crenshaw 1991, 1245–1246) as it transects with caste, Bama shows that the bodies of Dalit women are palimpsests on which the upper-caste codes and edifications are coercively or discursively inscribed, which in turn devalue, degrade, and constrain the Dalit women’s self and body image.

Sangati further demonstrates that Dalit women’s body image is dependent not only on intrapersonal variables but also on oppressive cultural messages. Here, by alluding to Katherine McKittrick’s contention that “the site of memory is also the sight of memory” (2006, 33), it can be emphasized that Bama’s autoethnography as a locus of Dalit women’s memories and lived experiences shows the premium placed on body image, gender, body appearance, and skin color / complexion in the landscape of the caste configuration in India. As Saltzberg and Chrisler note, “Beauty cannot be quantified or objectively measured; it is the result of the judgements of others” (1997, 135), Bama, too, proves how external messages regarding the acceptability of only some bodies and in some ways are either resisted or internalized—and often reconstituted interpersonally. In India, since upper-class and upper-caste standards of beauty continue to be stringent and marginalizing, many Dalit women develop a distorted body image and become frustrated with not being able to obtain the ideal body size and shape. In Sangati, when the narrator is born, her mother is “a little disappointed that [she is] so dark, and didn’t have [her] sister’s or brother’s colour” (Bama 2005, 3). At this point, however, the Dalit woman Rendupalli philosophically proclaims, “Even if our children are dark-skinned, their features are good and there’s a liveliness about them. Black is strongest and best, like a diamond” (Bama 2005, 114). Through this character, Bama reminds Paraiya women that power lies within them, and the stories that Sangati depict reinforce the existence of such a power. Finding strength in one’s roots is a way of instilling self-respect and pride, and it is this pride that writers like Bama hope to invoke in Paraiya women. Bama also mentions how the Paraiyas (excluding other Dalit communities who remained Hindus) of her grandmother’s generation converted to Christianity, influenced by the missionaries’ promise of equality, free education, and a good life for their children. Much to the chagrin of Bama, the church itself is beset with the problem of biases of skin color, gender, and caste, which becomes evident during festivals when the church looks for “a fair-skinned boy to play Our Lady” and the most “light-coloured child” to play Baby Jesus (Bama 2005, 32–33).

Interpersonal and Familial Influences on Body Image

The development of a worldview always takes place in a context. In Sangati, Bama frames the interpersonal context as a significant factor in the development of the Dalit women’s body image(ry). As humans are fundamentally social or relational beings who strive for attachments and acceptance by others, primarily through relationships with parents and peers, these relationships are considered the core social connections or contexts that influence body image. Sangati shows that the accumulated interpersonal experiences reflect and shape individual behaviors and attitudes about body image of self and others. For instance, the narrator’s Paatti, Vellaiyamma Kizhavi, who attends every childbirth in the Perumaalpaatti village barring the upper castes, is loved and respected by all, and she has strong interpersonal relationships with most of the members of her community. Since she works as a kothachi, a person who organizes daily-wage Dalit women laborers for work and distributes them money on behalf of the upper-caste landowners, her suggestions and advice are very much heeded by the Paraiya community. When Paatti tells Sevathi, the narrator’s mother, to tell her child to wear half a sari, for “it doesn’t look good for her to be sitting in a class with boys when her breasts have grown as big as kilaikkai [fruit] pods,” the narrator retorts, “I won’t wear a davani [blouse with half-sari],” as the boys in her class would tease her terribly (Bama 2005, 9). At this Paatti is annoyed and says that even the schoolteacher, Lourdes Raj, looked at her from the corner of his eye instead of teaching the class. Later, Paatti reveals that Raj called her aside and asked her to send her granddaughter with a davani. The body policing and criticizing of girls embarrasses the narrator and makes her ashamed of her own body.

As the narrator along with her sister, Mariamma, and other Dalit girls of the Paraiya community grow and reach puberty, they begin not only to internalize the cultures objectification of women’s bodies but also to monitor their own bodies. We know that while “clothing, jewellery, hairstyle, naming, food—all these constitute an elaborate sign system that had as its basis the system of caste differentiation,” the movement of the Dalit woman’s body in public spaces has been “regulated through a system of distance pollution—the sacredness of the space and the purity of the body being dependent on restrictions of access to other bodies in terms of visibility, touch, hearing, and clearly specified distances” (Kumar 2011, 215). Furthermore, since this body surveillance is based on unrealistic ideals, the Dalit women end up feeling ashamed of their bodies. While the body image (dis)satisfaction is an individual’s evaluation of his or her physical size or shape, this subjective evaluation is an individual judgment based on internalized values and goals shaped by experiences with others in the social world. Thus, the behaviors, attitudes, and expectations of Paatti, Sevathi, and the other women—along with their families, siblings, peer group, and friends—play a formative role in teaching young girls that their bodies need to be hidden lest they catch the eyes of the boys and men who then get provoked to do shameful things. In other words, girls are instructed to make their decisions regarding clothing and appearance by adhering to the desires of the patriarchal community. The Dalit women therefore struggle to conform to these mainstream, upper-caste notions of aesthetics, which results in ambiguity as they contemplate the norms of femininity and beauty with which they have been raised and that are immanent to society. Predictably, this conflict or ambiguity leads to body dissatisfaction. While lack of conformity to upper-caste beauty aesthetics is viewed as unfeminine by self-doubting Dalit women themselves, Bama represents and celebrates those Dalit women who are in tune with their natural body-selves.

One of the most “vital aspects” of women’s beauty, identity, and body image is hair, which can “impact on a person’s psychosocial state, social interactions, and daily activities” (Hunt and McHale 2012, 482). Consequently, hair and its grooming in Sangati have an immense bearing on Dalit women’s consciousness of their body image. For Dalit women, hair is personal because it is a part of their body, yet it is also public because it is on display for others to see. Hair also confers other advantages. Since taking care of the hair becomes almost ritualistic and involves peer groups, family, and friends in Sangati, it becomes an important component in Dalit women’s acculturation and socialization, which also significantly influence the construct(ion) of femininity. The narrator’s grandmother endearingly combs her hair with a fine-toothed wooden lice comb, and while “she was about it, she’d give me all the gossip of the village” (Bama 2005, 6), claims the narrator, while bringing to light the intimacies and female bonding linked with women’s hair. The grooming of long black tresses is, then, intrinsic to the everyday life of Dalit women. Detailing the hair grooming of a pushpavati, or a girl who comes of age, Paatti sings:

Shake her hair dry and comb it with gold,

Toss her hair dry and comb it with silver,

Comb her hair dry with a golden comb,

And women, all together, raise a kulavai [ululation]. (Bama 2005, 17)

In the text, Paatti always sings and chats about all sorts of things during such occasions.

The binary opposites of good and bad hair have for centuries been an epistemological tool used to juxtapose the so-called ideal beauty and the purportedly ugly unfeminine. This binary reinforces mainstream upper-caste aesthetics as good hair suggests an idea(l) of Indian upper-class and upper-caste woman’s beauty, embodying pureness, sensuality, and feminine delicacy, while bad hair signifies low class and caste. Describing the upper-caste ladies from her village who go to the town every day, Paatti says, “Every time you look at them, their hair is sleek with oil and they are wearing fresh flowers. . . . It takes a whole hour to plait their hair, you know” (Bama 2005, 12). Here Paatti appears to be the voice of common sense where female beauty is concerned. Evidently, while grooming long black tresses is very much intrinsic to the identity of womanhood, Bama’s text shows that poor Dalit women are often under greater pressure to conform to beauty ideals for a good life and better marital opportunities.

Body Image, Menarche, and Puberty

Speaking of female body image, scholars claim that women underscore “the multi-faceted psychological experience of embodiment, especially but not exclusively to one’s physical appearance,” which emphasizes the acceptability of only some bodies and in some ways (Cash 2004, 2). And, notably, an important related aspect of body image for women involves perceptions and feelings regarding menarche and menstruation. While Sangati represents issues that highlight the question of the specificity and peculiarity of Dalit female body experiences vis-à-vis the key body image concerns—which include sex, sexuality, and reproduction—it also underscores the wide caste and class cultural differences and their effect on a girl’s first menstruation. As opposed to Brahmin girls, who are considered unclean and isolated during menstruation, the newly menstruating Dalit girls feel pride in their own bodies. Hence, while the Brahminic cultural messages facilitate shame and embarrassment about menstruation, Dalit ideals celebrate menarche, welcoming the girl into adult womanhood. Bama evocatively describes some of these events, which tell of rites of passage: a coming-of-age ceremony, a betrothal where gifts are offered by the groom to the bride, and a group wedding. On one such occasion, a song sung by Paatti at a girl’s coming-of-age ceremony, with a chorus of kulavai (ululation) at the end of every four lines, begins thus:

On a Friday morning, at earliest dawn

she became a pushpavati [the coming of age of a girl], so the elders said—

her mother was delighted, her father too,

the uncles arrived, all in a row—

(chorus of kulavai, ululation) (Bama 2005, 17)

Such empowering moments in Dalit women’s lives are hailed by Bama. And throughout Sangati Bama teases out events, stories, and incidents that explore Dalit women’s relationships to their own selves, their sexuality, and their sexual functioning and relate these to their body image.

Body Image, Self-Image, and Dalit Women’s Sexual Behavior/Functioning

As compared to general discourses on body image, appearance, and attractiveness, women’s narratives rarely represent body image related specifically to menstruation and to women’s anatomy and body parts, such as breasts. Owing to the obvious relevance of periods and breasts for sexual activities, it is important to map out the potential links between these specific aspects of body image and sexual functioning as one encounters in Bama’s narrative. Sangati explores Dalit women’s body image as a complex subjective construct that has a huge influence on their self-image through cognitive, affective, sexual, and behavioral means. Although sexual objectification is not confined solely to upper-caste and higher-class women who are closer to having socially constructed acceptable bodies, its impact on Dalit women has been underexplored. Sangati suggests that Tamil Dalit women are more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies and identity regarding specific body parts. Breasts, for example, are an important part of female identity; and the attitude of Dalit women toward their body image vis-à-vis breasts is a psychosocial process starting in early childhood and taking shape through their perceptions of bodily stimuli, cognitive functions, and the messages they receive from the environment and their home. In Sangati, during a conversation with Sevathi, Vellaiyamma Kizhavi notes, “Just see whether she [the narrator] doesn’t come of age in two, three months. Have you noticed the bloom on her face?” (Bama 2005, 9). She further suggests that as soon as the girl gets her periods, she should be dissuaded from studying further and handed over to a man to avoid any possible scandal. Paatti likewise appears worried that although Mariamma is old enough, “she hasn’t developed breasts,” and “people in the village gossiped about her and said that she would never menstruate” (Bama 2005, 9). Mariamma too is distressed about her marriage prospects and deeply dissatisfied with her body. Here, Sangati proves how in Indian society, where breasts are markers of femininity and sexuality, a so-called anomaly in this body part poses a massive threat to its bearer’s body image.

Challenging the under- and/or misrepresentation of poor Dalit women’s body image, Sangati represents the inenarrable oppression at the intersections of gender, class, and caste that, in turn, influences their body identities. In the popular imagination, Dalit women are ironically depicted as both hypersexual and submissive sexual objects, who become easy targets of caste-related teasing that marginalizes and denigrates caste-related bodily attributes (eye size or skin tone, for example). While women in general negotiate multiple contexts that shape how they are perceived and judged, in the case of Dalit women, as represented by Bama, it is the experiences of oppression that shape their body image beliefs. When the Dalit villager Arokkyam’s young granddaughter Paralokam’s breasts are squeezed by an upper-caste farm owner’s son as he pretends to help her, she does not report the incident as she fears that the blame would be on the Dalit girl and that she would be labeled a whore and punished instead. Mariamma, too, is dissuaded and warned by her friends that she should not report the rape attempt on her when the upper-caste landlord, Kumarasami Ayya, tries to pull her into a shed to molest her. This physical violation has a significant impact on how Mariamma perceives and interprets her own embodiment. Even before Mariamma can think of lodging her complaint, the landlord approaches the village elders and fabricates a story that he caught Mariamma in a sexual act with another boy. The naattaamai (the village headman) then finishes the proceedings to claim, “It is you female chicks who ought to be humble and modest. A man may do a hundred things. . . . You girls should consider what you are left with, in your bellies” (Bama 2005, 26). Mariamma’s father beats her up in public for being fined and bringing dishonor to the family. The compounding trauma of sexual violence and public humiliation breaks her down psychologically. Mariamma hereafter becomes a victim of body shame, depression, and body image dissatisfaction, and she loses interest in everything, including herself.

Part III

(Re)inscribing Dalit Women’s Body Image

Bama uses a new corporeal vocabulary in Sangati to (re)inscribe Dalit women’s body image. Body image and its constructions get reinforced time and again through the verbal interactions of individuals. Since an individual’s identity constituted by body imaging is a social construction, and does not have significance in isolation from where it is practiced, such constructive processes create a new “negotiated” space of contested and negotiated individual identities via subversion and transgression (Bhabha 1990, 216), which Homi Bhabha calls “interpellative practices” (1994, 22–23). Dalit women in Sangati indulge in inventive wordplay embedded in body image that may be read as “interpellative practices.” Describing Bama’s female characters’ instinctive ability to give appropriate nicknames to others as per their specific body image, K. A. Geetha notes that “Seyarani is called ‘maikanni’ because she has ensnaring eyes” and Gnanammaal is known as “‘dammatta maaadu’ because she goes round like a young bullock drugged and dazed without knowing what is going on” (2012, 423–24). Gnanammaal’s nickname in Tamil, “damaatta maadu,” signifies a young bullock that is garlanded, decorated, and taken around in villages by people who traditionally demand money. Akin to the poor bullock being dragged around unaware of what is happening, Gnanammaal unwittingly goes about her life without any perspective. Alluding to the theoretical assumptions of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992, 2003), it can be asserted that Sangati underscores not only the linguistic representation of body image norms but also the speakers’ discursive positioning in view of these norms, which expose the societal power asymmetries and hierarchies in terms of caste.

In Stories of Women, Elleke Boehmer argues that “women’s talk can be interpreted not only as a way of life but as a mode of self-making” (2005, 98). Some of the forms that Bama’s Dalit women characters engage in for self-making in Sangati include oral and gendered forms of speech along with conversational storytelling (experiential narrative); gossip; oral gestures; laughter as a “corporeal event”; speech acts of swearing, wordplay, and jokes; lexical, syntactic, or grammatical deviation and innovation; code-switching; layered and cultural discourses; pragmatic and functional contextualization; local language importations; and songs and rhymes. Through such tropes, Bama explores Dalit women’s dissatisfaction with their body image and embodied experiences that have not been articulated before. This is evident when Paatti questions, “Born as women, what good do we get? We only toil in the fields and in the home until our vaginas shrivel” (Bama 2005, 6–7). Further, the language of Sangati is full of expletives and profanities, quite often with obvious sexual references. Reading sexualized language as a specific language that is “a privileged area to study the culture” (Santaemilia 2008, 228), it can be argued that Bama uses dialectal Tamil full of profanities and invectives to undermine the sexist and caste-ridden body image vestiges present in traditional language. Hence, in Sangati, body image(ry) in bawdy vocabulary is used as a tool to fight physical violence and shame men. As the fight between Raakkamma, a poor Dalit woman from the Tamil village Kuppacchipatti, and her husband, Paakkiaraj, for instance, develops into a street fight, Raakkamma uses the following offensive words: “Disgusting man, only fit to drink a woman’s farts! Instead of drinking toddy every day, why don’t you drink your son’s urine? Why don’t you drink my monthly blood?” (Bama 2005, 61). After venting, Raakkamma lifts up her sari (lower garment) in front of the whole crowd. This scares her husband, and he moves away from her. Then Raakkamma retorts angrily, “If I hadn’t shamed him like this, he would surely have split my skull in two, the horrible man” (Bama 2005, 61–62). In a sense, such body/bawdy language appears to be the only means of communication for the excessively oppressed Dalit woman. The expletives and abusive terms—like “donkey,” “whore,” “cunt,” and munde—are often names of body parts, which evocatively suggest that “the body is the site of violence as well as the language of abuse” (Pai 2018, 95). Interestingly, Bama deploys the prism of body image vocabulary and turns it on its head to demonstrate what language can achieve while becoming more responsive to body violence and marginalization.

Conclusion

In Sangati, Bama frames Dalit women’s body image as the combination of not only embodied and psychological experiences but also feelings and attitudes that relate to the form, function, appearance, and desirability of one’s own body, which are, in turn, influenced by familial, interpersonal, class, and caste factors. Bama’s account of Dalit women’s embodied experiences, individual conversations, memories, and “speech as gossip, as private communication among women . . . works upon language anarchically, shattering everything” (Godard 1989, 44), including every assumption about body image, caste, and gender. The narrative addresses the making of women Dalit subjects and their body image in language(s) that can adequately describe not only embodied experience but also the existence of different, potentially competing vocabularies of the body that emerge from within and outside of body image discourses. Here, Bama accomplishes the rare creative feat of blending ethnography, autobiography, memory, fiction, polemics, and praxis and offers a new corporeal aesthetics that is fundamental to her ideological and identitarian politics. Bama’s narrative creates a discourse of Dalit women’s body image, of their body’s situatedness in the world, and of the materialization of their bodies in the midst of intersecting and interacting axes of caste, class, gender, language, power, culture, and history.

NOTES

1. The word “Dalit” comes from Marathi (an Indian language) and means oppressed or ground down. It was first used by B. R. Ambedkar in preference to his own earlier term, “Scheduled Castes.” The term began to be used by politically awakened ex-Untouchables in the early 1970s when the Dalit Panthers, a youthful group of activists and writers in Bombay, came on the scene to protest injustice (Michael 2007, 33). In Tamil Nadu, the term had been used intermittently along with taazhtappattor (those who have been put down) or odukkappattor (the oppressed) during the eighties, but it is only since the nineties that it has been used widely, not only by Tamil Dalit writers and ideologues in order to identify themselves but also by mainstream critics.

Although scholars like V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai point out that Tamil Dalit writing existed as early as the 1890s, the late twentieth century saw a resurgence of Dalit literature in Tamil that placed the Tamil Dalit woman’s subjectivity at the center of its narrative. Although writers like Faustina Mary Fatima Rani (Bama), Palanimuthu Sivakami, Sukirtharani, and Azhagiya Periyavan share a common ground with Dalit men as marginalized groups, their experiences as Dalit women are unique. The setting of Bama’s narratives is Tamil Nadu, also the site of the first vigorous anticaste movement, the Self-Respect Movement (Suyamariyadai Iyakkam), led by Erode Venkatappa Ramaswamy Periyar, Gail Omveldt (a historian of the Dalit movement), and Sivakami, a Tamil Dalit author and editor. The growing interest in Dalit writings is a result of the global alliances made by Dalits with other groups in the world who have suffered discrimination on the basis of work and heredity as addressed at the Durban World Conference against Racism in 2001.

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