Published Paper Details:

By placing the Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki and Karukku by Bama in the frameworks of intersection among trauma, memory, and citizenship, this paper examines how the process of untouchability is represented in these Dalit autobiographies. The two readings indicate that caste violence does not merely exist in the form of blatant discrimination but it also takes place in the form of day-to-day social activities in which long-lasting psychological and physical injuries are inflicted. The paper states that through these daily experiences of humiliation at school, in the religious venue, and the village community, it makes the experience of being humiliated a constant form of trauma instead of a suffering instance. Memory consequently becomes a vital tool of narrative whereby these authors re-write their childhood experience and their early adulthood with critical consciousness informed by their subsequent political awareness. With an account of untouchability presented through the prism of lived experience, Joothan and Karukku challenge the mainstream nationalist discourse which glorifies citizenship as an unproblematic and universal legal category. Rather, these writings reveal the disjunction between the constitutional principles and the social facts and show how Dalits are constantly denied a status of full citizenship even when they are formally equal. Even the process of writing about oneself turns into an assertion of agency and personal suffering is made into a people-wide reproach against caste-based exclusion. As argued in this paper, Dalit life writing would redefine citizenship not as the ability to be included under the law but the right to dignity, voice and social presence. By predicting trauma as an individual and a political state, the paper underlines the way Dalit autobiographies represent the counter-narratives, which rebuke hegemonic histories and require a more inclusive interpretation of postcolonial Indian democracy.