MANY MOMENTS OF DISQUIET

For a second time, I read this first autobiography by a Dalit woman writer from south India and I was reminded, yet again, of all that I had never questioned when I was growing up.

KARUKKU was written by Bama Faustina Soosairaj, translated by the late Lakshmi Holmström and published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

The author of Karukku is a woman named Bama born in 1958 whose full name is Bama Faustina Soosairaj. A Dalit feminist, Bama is a teacher and novelist from Tamil Nadu in south India. The word “dalit” refers to a member of the lowest class in the traditional Hindu social hierarchy “having, in traditional Hindu belief, the quality of defiling by contact a member of a higher caste”, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Bama’s autobiographical novel chronicles the joys and sorrows that she experienced as a Dalit Christian women in a village in Tamil Nadu. Karukku is a powerful account of Bama’s metamorphosis—from a woman who accepted the fact of her birth into this community of “untouchables” to her resurgence in the larger community as an iconoclast. If readers can spare a little time, it’s absolutely worth watching this video interview of Bama by writer Githa Hariharan.

Ever since I was born I’d inferred, by osmosis, that the people who worked in my home in India—Kannamma, our maid of 18 years, and Marimuthu, our gardener of many decades—had been assigned a certain position in their lives by dint of birth. In the Madras of then (now called Chennai), the caste system was so deeply entrenched that children like me who were born into the system didn’t even think to ask questions. I believe I understood early on that asking questions would make me uncomfortable about the fact of my own privilege. The subjugation of one caste by another was thus implicit, handed down from parent to child, with power in the hands of the “upper” castes.

It’s this silent and, often, overt subjugation that Bama describes in a matter-of-fact tone in her memoir. When she delineates the layout of her village, she takes us through the hierarchy of the groups that called her village home. While most of the lands surrounding her village belonged to the wealthy Naicker community, the village itself was home to several groups of the laborer class: it was full of Nadars who climbed palmyra palms for a living; Koravars who swept streets; Kusavars who made terracotta pots; and, finally, right next to the cemetery, lived Bama’s own kind, housed in what was called the Paraya settlement. The upper-caste communities and the lower caste communities were stratified thus, while living in different parts of the same village. Interaction between them was minimal.

But they kept themselves to their part of the village, and we stayed in ours. We only went to their side if we had work to do there. But they never, ever, came to our parts. The post office, the panchayat board, the milk-depot, the big shops, the church, the schools—all these stood in their streets. So why would they need to come to our area? Besides there was a big school in the Naicker street which was meant only for the upper-caste children.

Karukku is a quiet, introspective work which tells it all like it is, while emphasizing the hurt and sadness that results from one human’s denigration of another. There are many delightful moments in the work because Bama often delves into the beauty of the Tamil Nadu hinterland and its folklore. We get a sense that the back roads of Tamil Nadu described in Karukku juxtapose the beauty of the land against the ugliness of human demeanor.

At dawn and at dusk, the eastern and western skies are splendid to see. When we used to go out in the early morning to relieve ourselves, a bright red sun, huge and round, would wake up in the east and climb into the sky. It would make its way, peering between the trees, glowing, its light spilling and sparkling. And in the same way, at evening time, when it went and dropped through the mountains, all the fields round about would be luminous with a yellow light. A cool southern breeze would blow through the fields. The crops glowing, swaying in the breeze, filled the heart with delight. To look at the light in the western sky was like looking upon a vision of God. And at that very moment herons and crows and all the other birds would wing their way home to their nests.

Reading Karukku allowed me a peek into the lives of people who have been invisible in Indian society for centuries. The invisible became visible to me one day as a child. In the early sixties, before modern sanitation became part of our lives in my grandparent’s village home in Palakkad, we used an open “L-shaped toilet” situated in the far end of our homes. These were structures where we went and did our thing.

Women and men from this community of people visited the backyard of each home in our village through an alley that was used for this purpose by these laborers. They cleaned out the L-shaped toilets, carrying the turd they gathered from each home on their heads. On one of the mornings during my short summer stay in Palakkad, I was walking away from the toilet in the back when I spotted a woman with a broom and a basket atop her head. I could not have been more than 4 old; it’s a sight that is still vivid in my memory. It is convenient, however, to close and throw away the key to the door of that memory.

Reading Karukku unlocked several memories from my annual summer visits to the village in Kerala. I saw it all as an outsider during my first two decades in India. With this book, Bama leads us in.

We follow her into classrooms all the way from elementary school into life in high school when teachers call out, in class, the names of those from the Paraya community. A similar thing happens in college, too, says Bama. Her community is ostracized even in the hallowed halls of education, even when Bama is an outstanding student. She is judged and vilified even before she can show her mettle. Among the most cruel vignettes is one in which Bama’s grandmother (Paatti) is given water to drink by a woman from the upper caste.

Even the way they were given their drinking water was disquieting to watch. The Naicker women would pour out the water from a height of four feet, while Paatti and the others received and drank it with cupped hands held to their mouths. I always felt terrible when I watched this.

Bama tells us how the caste system is so deeply entrenched in her village that even the religion that claimed it would be her savior, Christianity, fails her and makes a mockery of all the values it holds so dear. What is telling, however, is Bama’s disenchantment, after choosing to enter a convent. None of this surprised me, however. For years I have known that in many corners of India, Muslims and Christians still wave their caste card when it is a matter of convenience, such as arranging their child’s marriage. In a book called Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast, author Samanth Subramanian throws light on just how insidious this caste consciousness is across Indian society.

When published, Karukku broke barriers of tradition. It was considered a classic in subaltern literature and a gritty personal tale of life outside mainstream India. For me, what makes Karukku eminently readable and moving, even on a second iteration, is its tone which is neither blistering nor reproachful. It portrays succinctly the tension between a human being and the community, and leads us through a woman’s betrayal and disillusionment. Systemic wrong is meted out to Bama—by society, by the institutions dedicated to higher learning and by the establishment which promises solace to all, the Catholic church. In the end, Bama realizes that she will have to leave her the convent. She will blaze her own trail only if she is true to herself.

In that school, attended by pupils from very wealthy households, people of my community were looking after all the jobs like sweeping the premises, swabbing and washing the classrooms, and cleaning out the lavatories. And in the convent, as well, they spoke very insultingly about low-caste people. They spoke as if they didn’t even consider low-caste people as human beings. They did not know that I was a low-caste nun. I was filled with anger towards them, yet I did not have the courage to retort sharply that I too was a low-caste woman. I swallowed the very words that came into my mouth; never said anything out aloud but battled within myself.

This English translation of Bama’s Karukku, first published in 2000 and “recognized as a new alphabet of experience”, was one of the first pieces of Dalit writing to appear in south India. The translator of Karukku and other works by Bama, the late Lakshmi Holmström, was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2011 for her services to literature. After Karukku, Bama wrote two novels, Sangati (1994) and Vanmam (2002) along with three collections of short stories: Kusumbukkaran (1996) and Oru Tattvum Erumaiyum (2003), 'Kandattam (2009). In addition, she has published twenty short stories.

In Tamil, Karukku alludes to the serrated edges of a Palmyra leaf that evokes the image of the double-edged sword. It’s not hard to imagine that whichever way we choose to grasp the leaf, it hurts and draws blood. I read this book six years ago and I remember feeling very small as the book wound to a close. Books like Karukku saw through a reader’s heart. We feel shame and guilt, as well as a sense of overwhelming helplessness.