Narrating a subaltern consciousness: Bamas Sanagti

Bama is one of the first dalit women writers whose work has been translated into English. While ‘Karukku’ was personal in nature, ‘Sangati’ deals with the community at large: the community of Dalit women who are marginalized both on grounds of caste as well as gender. This paper looks at Bama’s ‘Sangati’ as a narrative of resistance and voicing. Bama loosely strings voices that demonstrate how Dalit women's bodies are scarred by the many burdens of domestic, farm and sexual labour and yet how in ways they are better placed than caste-Hindu women. Touching upon Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’ the paper reads ‘Sangati’ as a work which gives voice to the doubly marginalized Dalit woman. The paper questions the hegemony of the non-Dalit women writers in claiming to speak for the Dalit women as well as that of the Dalit men who claim to speak for the women. The paper tries to explore how Bama has, through her narrative, especially the form of the autobiography, relocated herself and other Dalit women to the centre and regained their self-esteem and carved out an identity for them. The paper analyses the Dalit woman’s voice and questions whether it is clearly articulated and heard through a study of Bama’s non-conventional language.    Key words: Subaltern, Dalit woman, marginalization, consciousness, identity, caste and gender, voicing.