Book Review - Sangati

This review appeared in the India Today

There is perhaps no perspective more powerful than that of the outsider and Tamil Dalit Christian writer Bama’s ‘Sangati’ testifies to this. If Art has hitherto reflected ‘high life’ rather than life, such ‘outcaste’ stories, literary cousins to the historical subaltern study can be extraordinarily powerful and provocative. They reveal a consciousness long suppressed, that is increasingly finding expression in a trenchant idiom that eschews traditional literary aesthetic. Dalit writers like Bama and Sharankumar Limbale (‘The Outcaste’translated from Marathi), and Lakshman Gaekwad (‘The Branded’) works’ are, in the remorseless violence of their stories as well as the anguished emotion of their narrative voices, a world away from other more pop ‘outsider ‘stories like Hollinghursts ‘The Line of Beauty’ and ‘The Nanny Diaries’ where a delightfully self conscious ironic narrator views an alien world. In Bama’s autobiography ‘Karukku’ (pub. in translation 2000) for instance, chronology and characterization come a poor second to the primacy of protest – the book is a disturbing blur of anguished impressions, questions and reflections.

In ‘Sangati’, written after ‘Karukku’, Bama takes us into the elemental, impoverished and most often violent world of the Dalit woman – Bama’s paati (grandmother) tells her of her aunt’s death, “I reared a parrot and then handed it over to be mauled by a cat. Your Periappan actually beat her to death …He killed her so outrageously, the bastard”. Later on in the book we witness the village trial of the aunts daughter Mariamma who has been accused of being together in secret in the pump set shed with another village boy by the landowner Kumarasami, to hide his own sexually predatory actions . The entire episode in cinematic in its description, almost surreal if it were not so totally tragic. When Manacchi, a village girl becomes ‘possessed with a pey’, Bama watches the whole violent sequence of exorcising the demon with a skeptical eye, analyzing later why it was always a woman who was possessed,” in the fields there is back-breaking work besides the harassment of the landlord…And once they have collected water and firewood, cooked a kanji and fed their hungry husband and children, even then they can’t go to bed in peace and sleep until dawn. Night after night they must give in to their husbands’ pleasure…The ones who don’t have the mental strength are totally oppressed; they succumb to mental ill health and act as if they are possessed by peys.”

Centuries of history , folklore and economic deprivation may conspire together to heap every imaginable burden on the woman and yet Bama finds herself amazed by the Darwin like survival capabilities of the Dalit women – their spirit and energy as illustrated in their loud quarrels (“If he shows his strength of muscle, she reveals the sharpness of her tongue”), their immense capacity for hard physical labor and appreciates their freedom to work outside the house ( as opposed to upper caste women), the absence of dowry in their social system and the right to remarry. The vignettes of the women in this book from Mariamma to the little girl Maikkanni who works in a match factory and Sammuga Kizhavi (who pissed into the landowners water pot because he beat up a small child whose hand brushed against the pot), are vivid and compelling and the stories heart rending – all told in a style that maybe straightforward but is hugely energetic and elemental.