Section: 8th Day Date:Sep 11,2006

Soft Cover: Beyond Caste

The Grip of Change P Sivakami Orient Longman pp.207, Rs 190

The Grip of Change is an English translation of Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum, considered to be the first full-length novel by a Dalit woman writer. The author, P Sivakami, is with the Indian Administrative Service and has so far written four novels and four collections of short stories in Tamil. Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum, published in 1989, was her first novel. The novel starts off with Thangam, a ‘low’-caste Parayar woman, who has been cheated out of her inheritance after her husband’s death by his brothers. Her circumstances force her to acquiesce to the overtures of Paranjothi Udayar, the ‘high’-caste landowner. Her affair with Paranjothi results in her getting beaten up by men from his caste. She goes to Kathamuthu’s house in desperation and cries for justice. Kathamuthu, a domineering man who used to be panchayat president, feels sympathetic towards her and mobilizes his friends to get justice for Thangam. In the process, the narrative moves through a series of plots and counter-plots that show how the upper castes try to bribe the police, boycott the services of the Parayas in order to break their movement and even burn down their settlement. Finally Thangam is compensated for her humiliation. The novel throws up a picture of a caste-riven society where the ‘lower’ castes are regularly discriminated against and humiliated. Yet this is not a novel about caste discrimination only - it goes out of its way to demonstrate that caste is only one axis along which power is exercised. Kathamuthu himself later ends up exploiting Thangam sexually. The Grip of Change is critical of Dalit patriarchy and portrays the change sweeping across society through the characters of Gowri, Kathamuthu’s daughter, and Chandran. This volume also carries an English translation of Asiriyar Kuripp, a sequel to Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum. The sequel sees Gowri, who assumes the persona of the writer of the first book, return to her village to re-examine the circumstances textualised. She thus serves as Sivakami’s mouthpiece for defending her stance; the sequel takes up for analysis various charges that could be leveled against the first book. While it analyses and rubbishes several such charges, it also acknowledges certain gaps in the original narrative and tries to compensate by problematising several things that seemed apparent in the first book. The sequel, as CS Lakshmi writes in her essay included in this volume, takes on the task of deconstructing the novel and is at the same time, an act of self-flagellation as well as one of creation. – Sayantan Dasgupta

(The reviewer is Lecturer, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University)

http://www.thestatesman.net/page.arcview.php?clid=30&id=157616&usrsess=1