The Prisons of Poverty, Untouchability and Da...

The Prisons of Poverty, Untouchability and Dalit Patriarchy in Baby Kamble’s ‘The Prisons We Broke’

Author Name : Fathimath Suhara.V

ABSTRACT

Dalit Literature is an uprising genre of literature in India. It explores and internalise the harsh realities of the ‘voiceless’ and marginalized Dalit community. This paper attempts to contextualize the physical and psychological violence against the Dalit women in both public and private spheres. Baby Kamble is one among the Dalit writers and her autobiography ‘The Prison We Broke' is widely accepted. This paper also deals with the issues of marginalization of Dalit women as reflected in Baby Kamble’s autobiography. Her work is the result of double consciousness that how the Dalit women have been treated and what their roles have been in their social context. Baby Kamble’s engagement is with the history of Dalit oppression. She doesn’t glorify the life of the Dalit community, rather she explicitly states that her intention is to subject the life of her community to critical scrutiny in order to demonstrate how Brahmanical domination had turned the Mahars into slaves, forcing them to live in condition worse than animals. This article analyses the way the author presented the live pictures of Mahars' life in the past 50 years living in Western Maharastra.

Key Words: Autobiography, Brahminical, Dalit Oppression,Marginalization,Mahar