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AbstractAutobiographies /self narratives by Dalit women havebrought to the centre-stage a gendered marginalizedself by re-writing the self in a genre which is masculinein its orientation. Articulation of collective experiencesof hurt and humiliation challenges the hegemonic castestructure and gendered oppression and the text istransformed into a vibrant literary space, where newregisters of aesthetic and literary are formulated. Thispaper focuses on Baby Kambles The Prisons WeBroke (2008) and Urmila Pawars The Weave of My Life(2008) in translation as narratives, which navigate therealm of Dalit autobiography and womensautobiographies to emerge as socio-biographies. Thewriting of gendered marginalised self results in thewriting of resistance and the text emerges as the siteof re-claiming lost histories.

Gendering the AutobiographyThe genre of autobiography in literature has beenimplicitly masculine and middle-class. As a criticalnarrative form, autobiographies point to a truth, whichis shared and endorsed by everyone and in the processthe narrator establishes a particular view of theindividual transcending both social and historicaldifference. Starting with Saint Augustines Confessions(A.D 398-400) which is often thought of as thebeginning of modern Western autobiography, this textalso heralded the beginning of what Georg Gusdorfdefines as a cultural space, which is both Western andChristian. Rousseaus Confessions, which werepublished posthumously between 1781 and 1789, brokeaway from the spiritual model and ushered in the secularmodel located within Romantic era. Confessions heraldthe assertion of the individuals own singularity: I haveresolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, andwhich, once complete, will have no imitator. Mypurpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every waytrue to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself(Rousseau quoted in Anderson 1988: 44).However in the 20 th century, with the advent ofpsychoanalysis and deconstruction, the concept of a

Faculty, S.N.D.T. College of Arts and S.C.B. College of Commerce and Science for Women, Mumbai

Ethnography of the Marginalised Self: Reading ofDalit Womens Autobiographies

PUTUL SATHE*

universal complete model of subjectivity is replacedwith multiple subjectivities. Now the autobiographicalsubject is no longer the essentialized subject. Thisideological construct will be challenged by many andin this context Roland Barthess autobiography RolandBarthes by Roland Bathes (1977) is probably one ofthe most powerful attempt to write an autobiographyagainst the grain: What I write about myself is neverthe last word : ........ the more sincere I am, the moreinterpretable I am, under the eye of other examples thanthose of the old authors, who believed they wererequired to submit themselves to but one law:authenticity (Barthes quoted in Anderson, 71).Jacques Derrida in his commentary on RousseausConfessions in On Grammatology has pointed to theimpossibility of an unified autobiographical I and hasproblematized this understanding with the introductionof new space in which the autobiography operates: ForDerrida the point is - once one problematizes theborder, once the life and the work become difficult toseparate and the status of empirical facts as they applyto the authors life or his corpus, his works, is throwninto question, then the autobiographical also has to beredistributed or restructured (Anderson, 80).

This trajectory of restructuring the genre had manyramifications in the hegemonic understanding of theautobiographical space and the autobiography will nowbe a performance, where there will be seamlesscollision of the conscious and the unconscious selves.Within this field, womens autobiographies drewattention to the absence of womens texts within thiscanon. Womens autobiographies were defined byfeminist critics as texts with reference to life.Difference becomes an important term to situate theconcept of gendered narrative with reference towomens autobiographies and subject position.Difference was confined not just to sexual differencebut there was pluralisation of difference (Anderson,117) across race, gender, ethnicity, class andsexuality. Autobiography has been one of the mostimportant sites of feminist debates because itdemonstrated that there are different ways of writing

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the subject that are often experimental and challengedthe existing critical boundaries (Anderson, 87). VirginiaWoolfs unfinished and unpublished autobiographySketch of the Past is a narrative where conventionalmodes of representation were unsuited to representmultiplicity of selves and displaced the masculinediscourse of singular I. Deconstructing autobiographyas a genre which privileged Western, masculinesubjectivity also gave way to the political use ofautobiographical form by marginalised subjects. Theradical potential of this form was a political strategywhich resulted in autobiographies emerging as text ofthe oppressed, where articulation of experiences of anindividual testified to the oppression of the groupmoving beyond the personal and forging link betweenthe self and material conditions. As a conjuncturaldocument (Elspeth Probyn quoted in Anderson, 91)autobiography now has the potential to be the text ofthe oppressed and the culturally displaced, forging aright to speak both for and beyond the individual. Peoplein a position of powerlessness- women, black people,working class people- have more than begun to insertthemselves into the culture via autobiography, via theassertion of a personal voice, which speaks beyonditself (Swindells quoted in Anderson, 104).

The present paper attempts to analyse two Dalitwomens autobiographies in translation, where thepersonal has been revisited to testify to the humiliationand hurt experienced by marginalized community tocreate enabling cultures (V. Geeta 2012: 252) and inthe process engage in a subversive appropriation ofliterary institution and tools that had marked them asother. The texts are Baby Kambles The Prisons WeBroke (2008) and Urmila Pawars The Weave of My Life(2008).Writing the Dalit SelfIn the Indian context autobiography representing aunified self appeared on the literary scene as part ofemerging modernity resulting from colonial encounter.However there was a tradition of self-reflexive writingin the autobiographical mode (Ramaswamy andSharma, 2009) and autobiography representing areflective individual can be read as a resolutely publicutterance (Udayakumar, 2008: 419). A large numberof autobiographies written by men during the 19th and20th century were occupied with the subject of historicalchange. Therefore autobiographies as self-narrativesare sites where there is an intersection of autobiographyand history (Udayakumar, 2008).

With reference to womens writing in India, women couldwrite about only a few things in the absence of asustained high level of formal education. Beginning inthe 19th century it was the high caste Hindu women,who started writing autobiographies, which were locatedin the new emerging material and social conditionresulting from reforms and legislative innovation in thepublic sphere (Sarkar, 1999). Womens autobiographiesthen become a cultural site, where tensions werearticulated resulting from colonial modernity. Thedominant ideology of 19th century cultural nationalismcelebrated Indias spiritual superiority over materialWest but remained silent over caste/gender basedhumiliation. The autobiographies of upper caste womenhave to be located within this framework. The questionof caste was invisible in their writings. Sharmile Regehas drawn attention to this erasure: ..........Brahminwomens autobiographies have been narratives of uppercaste women, their struggles with tradition and theirdesire to be modern. It is this self that claims to beuniversal, modern unmarked by caste through itsjourneys of companionate marriage, modern institutionsand marital discord. This claims of the upper castewomens autobiography to represent modern Marathi/Indian women serves, on the other hand, to renderinvisible their complicity in privileges of brahminicalpatriarchy; and on the other, it classifies the narrativesof women whose self-definition is located explicitly incaste as a relational identity, as if it were the otherof modern and feminist (Rege 2006:50)Dalit autobiographies were part of Dalit literature, whosearrival on the scene of Indian literature caused muchanxiety among the gatekeepers of literaryestablishments resulting in a shift in existing literaryparadigms. G.N. Devy has identified Dalit writing asone of the forces, which has challenged the bourgeoisnationalist perspective in Indian literary historiography.Dalit literature is not merely a collection of texts, butmark the emergence of a new self consciousnessinfluenced by the philosophy of Dr. Ambedkar and thewriters in this movement show a clear awareness ofbelonging to a distinct literary culture and society(Devy, 2006: 126). Within Dalit literature, autobiographyas a literary and cultural expression has created apraxis, which has challenged existing literary structuresthrough their articulation of cultural and castediscrimination: It focuses on the question of otherness,difference, marginality, canon and the categories ofaesthetics. In order to voice the protest of themarginalised, Dalit literature often follows the subversive

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historiographic path of personalizing history .It istherefore, perhaps, that autobiography is the mostpotent and often exercised form of fiction produced inDalit literature (Devy, 272).Autobiographies by Dalit writers governed bysubversive historiographic path of personalizinghistory become a political gesture in the in the contextof Indian literary historiography to focus upon a sort ofepistemic mutations (Mohanty, 1998: 120) not onlyin cultural criticism but in social and historiography aswell (ibid, 120) and point to the need to create culturalparadigms, which will challenge the notion ofessentialism prevailing in Indian nationalisthistoriography. This will bring to the centre stage theissue of marginality resulting from caste fractured Hinduidentity.Central to these narratives is the articulation of hiddenhistories of hurt and humiliation (Rao, 2003: 3) and thecaste body is the site where the inequalities of thecaste system in terms of purity and pollution arereproduced. Each life narrative addresses the veryhegemonic structure of the caste system(Ramakrishnan, 2011: 67) which appears natural byappealing to the moral corruption of the society whichlegitimizes caste oppression (ibid, 67). Subject toconstant humiliation a profound crisis besets the self,a crisis which Cornel West has described asontological wounding (Geeta, 2009:93). In Dalitautobiographies by male authors like Sharan KumarLimbales Akkarmashi, Kishore Gaikwads Uchalayaand Om Prakash Valmikis Joothan the narration ofcaste based humiliation is a political act of resistance(Ramakrishnan, 67). This has resulted in a shift fromhero-centric world to anti-hero position according to SisirKumar Das. Dalit literary representations havechallenged the writings of upper caste writers locatedwithin the discourse of pity (Limbale, 2004) and theneat binary of postcolonial literature, Dalit subalternityis not located within the colonial structure of thecolonizer and the colonized, but in a caste basedsocial, economic and cultural structures. Dalits are theupper caste Hindus other, but the other is notethnocultural, religious and linguistic other. This otheris a part of the Hindu society. The other is not onlyspatial but also normative. As a counterhegemonicdiscourse, which sought representation for caste basedsubalternity, Arjun Dangle has coined the termdifferentness to understand the larger literary paradigmof Dalit autobiographies. This has given rise to different

register, where the rules of literary are different:.........Dalit literature is deeply immersed in lifesstruggle. The Dalit world is filled with dreadful, terrible,humiliating events. Dalit writers cannot escape beingtied physically and mentally to this world. Dalit writersare doing the difficult work of portraying this life, throughpersonal experience and empathy, absorbing it from allsided in their sensibility. To live this life is painfulenough; it can be equally painful to recreate it on themental level. Dalit writers are deeply involved in thisprocess (Jadhav, 1992: 303)Autobiography as SociobiographyDalit womens self-narratives traverse the realm of Dalitautobiographies and womens autobiographical writings.Articulated along the multiple axis of gender, class,caste and identity and not a given demographic orsociological condition (Pandey, 2010), the texts underconsideration can be historically located within theAmbedkarite movement and point to alternative modesof conducting politics and part of alternative archivesince conventional archive have refused to record theiractivities (Pawar and Moon, 2008). Situated within theAmbedkarite, the narratives are not only anengagement with a gendered subaltern history, but theyentail a process of listening to historical voices ofpoliticized activist Dalit women. This methodunderscores the epistemological disadvantages ofunmarked feminism (Anand, 2007). Dalit womenthrough their literary representatives of their struggleshave questioned the geneology of Indian feminism,where the position of caste has not been articulated.Articulation of gendered marginality with the emergenceof autonomous Dalit womens organization drewattention to the complex relationship between feminismand a castes complex history. Anupama Rao hasprobed the specificity of this position: Dalit feminismposes anew the position of how we might understandcastes complex history as a form of identification andas a structure of disenfranchisement and exploitation,how we revisit an forgotten and repressed histories thatilluminate the criticism of feminism by its mostvulnerable and exploited constituency (Rao, 2003: 3).Baby Kambles text can be located within the existingoeuvre of protest writing in Marathi. According to MayaPandit the translator of Baby Kambles autobiography,this autobiography is probably the first autobiographyby a Dalit woman in Marathi. Most of the Dalitautobiographies written by men were for a mixedreadership of Dalit and non-Dalit readership. This

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narrative on the other hand is not only representativeof the Dalit community but is also an engagement withthe history of Dalit oppression (Pandit in herintroduction to Kamble, 2008: IX) and is located in thetradition of direct self-assertion (ibid, IX). Located onthe margins of social imaginary, the representation ofmarginality emerges as a tremendous transformativepotential for oppressed people ( ibid, XI). Thisperformance is not an individual act but is collectivein nature: I wrote about what my communityexperienced. The suffering of my people became myown suffering. Their experiences became mine. So Ireally find it very difficult to think of myself outside mycommunity (ibid, 136). The autobiography as a socio-biography creates a subject position which is atcollective and individual. The autobiographer issimultaneously the author of an individual act of truth-telling and the subject of a shared historical memory(Udayakumar, 421). The act of articulation in the publicdomain becomes a mode of understanding the politicaleconomy of graded inequality embedded in the castesystem from the point of view of a gendereduntouchable identity. The narrator while mapping thesemantics of caste/gender exploitation is a witnessspeaking for the entire community and points to thehistoricity of Dalit womens struggle, whose featuresare located within the writings of Phule and Ambedkar:When the Mahar women labour in the fields, the corngets wet with their sweat. The same corn goes to makeyour pure, rich dishes. And you feast on them withsuch evident relish! Your palaces are built with thesweat and blood of Mahars. But does it rot your skin?You drink their blood and sleep comfortably on the bedof their misery. Doesnt it pollute you then? ........... andyou have been flogging us with the whip of pollution.This is all that your selfish religion has given to us.But now we have learnt how utterly worthless yourreligion is ........... (Kamble, 56).The kind of experiences narrated in the text drawsattention to the production and reproduction of thecaste body and the text resurrects the history ofexperience to reflect and to contemplate upon andthereby use the experience radically to annihilate thestructures which renew and underlie this experience(Guru, 2012): .............. We obeyed every diktat ofyour Hindu religion; we followed all your traditions........why did you single us out for your contempt? We werethe people who lived in your house, yet we dared notto drink even a drop of water there. We never dared tocross your path. We dedicated ourselves to the service

of the civilization and culture that was so precious toyou, in spite of the fact that, it was always unkind andunjust to us (ibid, 38).The autobiography narrates the manner in whichBrahminical hegemony turned untouchable body intoa cultural space (Guru 86). Kambles fathers bodydefined the mutually connected but culturally exclusivespaces, namely the agrahara (the main village) and theDalit ghetto. Whenever he would visit the village hischest would deflate like a balloon and he would shufflearound inconspicuously as possible so as not to offendanyone of the higher castes(75). His speech power wasreplaced by the noise of the bells that were tied to thetop of the stick that the Mahars were to carry with themwhenever they entered the village. However when hewould enter Maharwadi, the Dalit ghetto he would twirlhis moustache and clear his throat as if he was aimportant man (ibid, 75) and the stick would betransformed to the royal staff and the blanket on hisshoulder would become the coat of a barrister.Humiliation as Gopal Guru has pointed out is anindividual, collective, social and political phenomenon.The articulation of Dalit womens experience of castebased violence results in the visibility of caste, whichthen scripts a polemical attack on gender and castestructures of Brahminical patriarchy. Within thisparadigm, the Dalit woman is also located within Dalitpatriarchy and experiences the worst form ofexploitation, when Dalit men do not hesitate in choppingoff the nose of Dalit women, who fail to confirm to Dalitpatriarchal norms (Kamble, 98). The body of theviolated Dalit woman provide a critique of Dalitpatriarchy and destroys the myth of Dalit patriarchy asdemocratic. Dalit women negotiate not with multiplepatriarchies but with what Uma Chakravarti has termedas graded patriarchies operating within the grid ofBrahminical patriarchy. The events which populate thetext are ordinary and belong to everyday realm anduntouchability and caste reproduce themselves byrepetition (Pandhian, 2008).Located within the Ambedkarite movement the textmaps the emergence of an early female Dalit politicalsubjectivity attentive to caste injustice. This agencyis not an autonomous one and is part of the emergingDalit counter public sphere. At this point the textdocuments the impact of Dr Ambedkars political ideason the community and traces the rise of modern Dalitself : Otherwise , we were merely skeletons, withoutany life in us! The flame of Bhim started burning in our

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hearts. We began to walk and talk. We becameconscious that we too are human beings. Our eyesbegan to see and our ears to listen. Blood started toflow through our veins. We got ready to fight as Bhimssoldiers. The struggle yielded us three jewels -humanity, education and the religion of Buddha (Kamble122). The chawdi in the text emerges as the culturalspace, where Ambedkars ideas were constantlydiscussed and those discussions generated moreideas. One such idea was to celebrate Babas birthanniversary on 14th April(ibid, 111). The decision tocelebrate 14th April as Babas first birth anniversarymarks the struggle within the community to gain aprincipled distance from the views and practices of thecommunity (Alam quoted in Rege, 58).

The text opens up as a site of articulation ofAmbedkarite tenants, which brought to the centre stageof Indian political modernity the stigmatized Dalitcommunity as a political community, which questionedthe liberal, unified, humanist vision of a nationcontrolled by elites, who tried to control and regulatethe unchartered spaces of living communities(Ramakrishnan 71). The autobiography maps thejourney of Dalit community to seek and create acrucial space of alterity (Rao, 2003: 108) informed byliberal spirit of inquiry and self-doubt to question theirposition in a hierarchical society and develop a newvocabulary of emancipation (Guru, 2012: 79).

Urmila Pawars autobiography has been categorized asA Dalit Womans Memoirs and the metaphor of wovenelements runs throughout the narrative. The narrativeis made up of several texts and inscribes a complexnotion of the margin. The trajectory of Urmila Pawar isvery different from Baby Kamble in terms of moderneducation, modern education, salaried employment andinvolvement in womens movement and opened up newspaces and takes her away from the world of physicallabour and struggle for livelihood. One perceives theemergence of an individual identity, which was incontrast to ones identification with the community andrepresented success stories resulting from affirmativeaction of the state and the onset of neo-liberalprogrammes during the 1980s and 1990s. NarendraJadhavs autobiography is representative of the lifestory of a de-caste Dalit (Pandit in Pawar, 2008: XVI).However atrocities against Dalits still continue. Pawarsnarrative traverses a range of positions, gradedmarginalities and the text can be read as a complexnarrative of a gendered individual who looks at the world

initially from her location within the caste but who alsogoes on to transcend the caste identity from a feministperspective(ibid, XVII). The narrative is a continuationof the tradition of Kambles narrative in portraying theinhuman condition of the community, but it movesforward, where caste identities morph into a largerhuman identity influenced by Buddhist philosophy. Thedialectics between self and community finds a largerarticulation with Pawar re-defining the category Dalitto include a radical human agency: Dalit! How arewe Dalit now? They asked angrily. We had to makean elaborate explanation: Dalit does not mean sociallyoppressed or oppressed people. It also signals rational,secular people who have discarded the oppressivesystem and concepts like God, fate and caste system(ibid, 275). Pawars re-definition of Dalit as a liberatoryagency promotes greater historical sensitivity (Regein Pawar, 325) to Dalit identity lost in the grandnarrative of the nation.This re-casting of the Dalit identity can also be relatedto an important theoretical development in theunderstanding of caste, where the concept of caste isno longer confined to an objective structure asrepresented in the caste system or census details.Caste emerges as the subjectively effective identityof a social group (Tharu, 2011: 12) and moves out ofstigmatized caste identity associated withuntouchables, depressed classes, Harijans orScheduled Castes. In Pawars self narrative, Dalit casteidentity acquires a new meaning as the social,economic and cultural capital of the community (ibid,13). Caste as a political identity enables thesubordinated caste identity to affirm the solidarity ofa community, regain the world and affirm self-possession and confidence (ibid, 13) and changeexisting equations of power.The text articulates the aspiration to achieve fullcitizenship but is also aware about the impossibilityof this fulfilment because of past historical legacy.Therefore the quest for personhood in a liberaldemocracy is addressing the singular nature of Dalitpain in the form of testimonio by the narrator in the firstperson, who is also the protagonist or witness of theevents or a significant life experience (ibid, 146).Introduced by the Latin American historian JohnBeverley in 1992 as a type of literary genre, testimonioenables a certain aesthetics of witness, where artbecomes witness to that which real victims cannot,for they have been obliterated (ibid, 146) and hence

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makes explicit the process of recognition and redress.In the text the articulation of humiliation is the moment,when the narrator inscribes her identity as a memberof low caste and brings to the centre stage a subalterntract and calls for new cultural consciousness. Thereare several such episodes in the text. One suchepisode is when Pawar goes to deliver the basketswoven by her mother to her customers house and shewould be made to stand outside their houses on thethreshold. Pawar would put the baskets down and thecustomers would sprinkle water on them to wash awaythe pollution, and only then would they touch them(Pawar, 65) and would drop coins in my hands fromabove, avoiding contact as if their hands would haveburnt had they touched me (ibid, 65). Later whenPawar would move to Ratnagiri with her husband, thecouple would be told by their landlady to look for anotheraccommodation on account of their caste location: Myearlier landlady was a maidservant and this landladywas a municipal councillor. Yet the maid and thehonourable councillor were united on one point: caste(ibid, 206).As has been mentioned, both the narratives map theemergence of a politicized Dalit feministconsciousness situated within the philosophy of DrAmbedkar. Baby Kambles representation of the Dalitmovement focusing on the creation of Dalit counterpublic, but Pawars critique of this movement from afeminist viewpoint initiates the process of creating whatNancy Fraser has termed as intrapublic sphere withinDalit counter public: The people from the Dalitmovement, however treated women in the samediscriminatory manner as if they were inferior species(ibid, 235). Within this sphere, the inscription of genderpoints to the fractured modernity of Dalit movement andsimultaneously the contours of Dalit feminism is beingdefined by recovering womens agency in Ambedaritemovement: The women in the movement left anindelible print on the history through their indefatigablework. ......... And yet their history now lay forgotten.Some women had themselves forgotten the work theyhad done. We awakened their memories and madethem talk. Many women like Lakshmibai Kakade andGeetabai Pawar had tears in their eyes when we metthem. They were overwhelmed to know that their workhad been acknowledged (ibid, 294-95).The critique of Dalit movement coupled with the critiqueof invisibility of caste within the Indian feministmovement argues for the need of Dalit women to speak

differently and brings to the forefront new discourseson caste and gender: One thing was, however, veryclear to me. Womens issues did not have any placeon the agenda of the Dalit movement and womensmovement was indifferent to the issues in the Dalitmovement (ibid, 260). Gopal Guru argues that thisdiscourse of dissent has brought forward three issues,namely that it is important to take into account genderidentity along with class and caste identity, secondlyDalit men were reproducing the same mechanisms towhich they were subjected to by upper caste and finallyit was important to show local resistance (Guru, 2003:83) within the community. The writing of resistanceresults in Dalit women emerging as the defining pointsof a simultaneous recovery of a space for language ofcaste and the womens question on its own terms(Rege, 2006: 58).Understanding the Dalit Literary SpaceCentral to both the narratives is the creation of a literaryspace, where the production of autobiographies callsfor recovery of Dalit voices and mobilization of Dalitwomen from epistemological standpoint Defining thisspace along the lines elucidated by Rege in her essayA Dalit Feminist Standpoint would be to understandthe politics of knowledge generation when marginalisedvoices begin to gain public voices. This in turn providesa critique of the failure of the dominant group tointerrogate their privileged position since the subjectof its knowledge is embodied and visible (i.e. thethought begins from the lives of Dalit women and theselives are present and visible in the results of thethought) (Rege, 2003: 98). As sites of recovery of Dalitdiscourse, the texts represent what Gauthaman hasdefined as antipodal culture, a culture which theopposite of the order of the hegemonic order(Gauthaman, 2011) and the aesthetic dimension isgoverned by painful and difficult task of portraying theDalit world which is filled with dreadful, terrible andhumiliating events(Jadhav, 1992: 303). By inscribingsubaltern past, the texts call for an understanding ofsubalternity which pushes the limits of literature andliterary produced at the institutional site of university.The texts represent the complex relationship of sociallocation, experience and history (Rege, 2006: 72) andthe category literature will now include literature, historyand politics (Belsey, 1988) and the texts emerge asone of the places to begin to assemble the politicalhistory of the present (Belsey, 1988:408). Thistransformative potential of the texts have been

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represented by the role of memory, initiating a processof translation and recovery. Bell hooks observationabout the role of memory in the context of Blackliterature is apt here. She believes that the role ofmemory expresses an effort to remember that isexpressive of the need to create legacies of pain,suffering and triumph in ways that transform presentreality (Hooks, 1996:50). Here fragments of memoryhave not been flatly reproduced as documentary buthave been constructed to give a new take on the old,constructed to move ........ into a different mode ofarticulation (ibid, 50). As transformative site, the textrepresent a culture where respatalization of the centreand the margin happen with the articulation ofmarginality with interlocking oppressive social relationspoint to multiplicity of meanings (Lorraine Code quotedin Heckmann, 2004: 236) .Finally to conclude, a mode of negotiating, which theessay seeks to postulate calls for an understanding ofliterature based on what Marathe Nussbaum calls thecompassionate imagination, which result in not onlyacknowledging the excluded but listening to a languagethat may not be considered literary any result in re-visiting received institutional literary sensibilities.However, this is not a move in the direction of suddenshift in ideological gear but initiates a process wherebyan engagement with Dalit womens life-narratives canmove in the radical direction of reading literaryrepresentations as metaphors of revision, rewriting andreclamation (Waugh, 1997: 59) to produce newliberatory revisions of history.Works Cited Anand, S. Studies in Constrast Biblio May-June

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Jadhav, R. Dalit Feelings and AestheticDetachment. Poisoned Bread: Translations fromModern Marathi Dalit Literature. Ed. A. Dangle.Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1992. 298-304

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More women being sterilized in Delhi

The number of tubectomy (female sterilisation) cases has gone up from 18,505 in 2009-10 to 25,228 in2012-13. However, in the same period vasectomies (male sterilisation) have come down to 1,892 from4,386, according to an RTI plea. Experts are of the view that despite governments population policy andtheir concerns about gender equality, the burden of birth control continues to rest with the women. Wevefiled a case in the Supreme Court against several government sterilisation camps, which violates the NationalPopulation Policy. These camps promote tubectomy, while vasectomy takes a back seat. In several cases,when women go to hospitals for delivery or abortion they are made to undergo tubectomy without informedconsent, said Sanjay Sharma, director, Health Rights Initiative, Human Rights Law Network. According todoctors, the rise in the number of tubectomy cases reflects the attitude of society towards women. Butthey hasten to add that this might also reflect the growing awareness among women about birth control.The gradual rise in the cases of tubectomy proves that women are taking over control of their fertility.They are becoming independent and better informed. Its a woman who has to undergo pregnancy or abortionand face the related complications, said Dr Ranjana Sharma, senior consultant, gynaecology & obstetrics,Indraprastha Apollo Hospital. It is very difficult to convince men to go for vasectomy. It is perceived thatafter the procedure they would lose their sexual vigour or potency. Hence, they force their wives to go fortubectomy, she added. The procedure of sterilisation for women is more complicated than that for men,say doctors. Vasectomy is a safer option than tubectomy for permanent sterilisation. Vasectomy is doneunder sedation and local anaesthesia, it rarely needs general anaesthesia. Tubectomy is a more invasiveprocedure. It usually requires general anaesthesia and a laparoscope is inserted inside the abdomen. Itscomplication includes risk of anaesthesia, bowel and vessel injury. However, the overall risks andcomplication of tubectomy is less than 1%.The risks of vasectomy are much lower (0.5%), said Dr KaberiBanerjee, senior consultant, gynaecology and infertility, Nova Speciality Surgery. Men may feel that thissurgery will lead to sexual problems in men. This is, however, a myth and sexual dysfunction is not acomplication of this procedure, she added. According to an NDMC health officer, awareness programmesabout family planning and sterilization are rare in the city. Married couples should be counseled and educatedabout the outcome of sterilization, he said. (Hindustan Times 11/8/13)