Ever since second-wave feminism articulated the importance of different forms of personal writing—diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, personal essays—for women’s activism, literature, and historiography, it has become a truism that such writing can powerfully demonstrate how the personal is political. It led to revaluation and, in some cases, republication of older writing by women from across the world, such as the Sarashina Diary written in eleventh-century Japan by Takasue no Musume (a family identification since her personal name is unknown), or the fifteenth-century English Book of Margery Kempe, or the nineteenth-century Amar Jiban (My Life) written by the Bengali housewife Rashsundari Debi. This revaluation prompted debates about the forms which housed or made possible such expressions of the self—all three women engaged with and appropriated religious discourse that, even if patriarchal, enabled the articulation of their personal selves. Not just women, but others with little access to dominant literary or social circles, such as nineteenth-century working-class English men, also turned to autobiographical writing because it resonated with oral forms such as the confession or the defense speech at legal trials.
But each religious tradition is internally heterogenous and unevenly available to different subjects. The confessional form used by Augustine could be appropriated by white working-class men in a way that it certainly could not by the Black enslaved people who wrote autobiographies. The process of remembering and the nature of memory are also variable in the same way. In their autobiographies or memoirs, formerly enslaved people do not offer a disquisition about memory or its fallibility; their premise is that “there is nothing doubtful or mysterious about memory: on the contrary, it is assumed to be a clear, unfailing record of events sharp and distinct that need only be transformed into descriptive language to become the sequential narrative of a life in slavery.”[1] A similar logic is at play in many of the memoirs from India which I will discuss shortly, those written in order to draw attention to personal as well as collective injustices. They do not reflect on the processes of memory, its fissures or omissions, but insist on the veracity of what they are remembering.
While the very form of the autobiography and memoir centered the individual speaking subject, in personal narratives from colonized or enslaved peoples, the “I” did not stand in opposition to the collective but was an expression of it. This was the subject of a huge controversy after the success of I, Rigoberta Menchú, in which Menchú describes the oppression and struggles of K’iche’ Guatemalans. As is well known, Menchú was accused of falsifying the facts of her own life, but she repeatedly underlined the organic connections between herself as an individual and the larger community: “My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people.” The testimonio—a form in which the voice of a person from a marginalized community is recorded and given shape by a literate interlocutor—was honed in the crucible of radical movements in Latin America. Similarly, the writings from India that I will discuss were all catalyzed and, in turn, shaped by political movements of different kinds. Like the testimonio, even as they give voice to the collectivities, they also challenge the colonial, racial, and upper-class assumptions that non-white people, or those from marginalized communities, lack individual consciousness.
In India, British colonists had attributed a lack of individual consciousness to the cultural weight of caste and religion—so mired were Indians in these structures, it was suggested, that they themselves had no desire to individuate themselves from their communities. For colonized elites, it was crucial to lay claim to Western forms of narration as well as to mark their distance from them. M. K. Gandhi begins his autobiography by observing:
“Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West. I know of nobody in the East having written one, except amongst those who have come under Western influence….” But it is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography.[2]
Gandhi cannily situates his own story both within and outside the Western form of the autobiography. His autobiography—like those of other anticolonial leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya—simultaneously lays claim to the full subjectivity of the colonized and to the authority of elite males in representing the entire nation.
Movements against caste oppression had long argued that their oppressors were upper-caste Hindus more so than the British. Groups such as the Dalit Panthers, which arose in the 1970s, challenged the right of the leaders of independent India to represent all Indians, and also exposed the neglect of caste issues by the Left and communist movements in the country. They were the inheritors of a long and distinguished intellectual and political lineage, but their movement (and others like it across the country) catalyzed an efflorescence of Dalit writing (not just autobiographies and memoirs, but also poetry and fiction). They detailed the quadruple yoke—of colonialism, of casteism, class oppression, and sexual violence—suffered by the so-called outcastes, but what is important is that they did so in affective terms, by taking readers into the trauma, wretchedness, and violence, as well as the resilience of their “life-worlds.” Dalit memoirs offer alternatives to ubiquitous mainstream representations of the lower castes as debased, filthy, lacking intelligence and sensitivity; they have the potential to disturb and shatter the continuing smugness of upper-caste Indians who can still claim that casteism was a thing of the past while remaining profoundly ignorant of the reality of Dalit lives and unreflective of their own complicity in their oppression. In other words, they turn the description of wretchedness and suffering into a political act.
Take the example of manual scavenging, which was and is an occupation assigned to Dalits, and one that reinforces the ideas of them as dirty or polluted. Gandhi, who doesn’t mention Dalits at all in his autobiography, had urged the upper castes to change their attitudes toward untouchability. He declared that he loved scavenging himself, and that scavengers born to the occupation must also love it: “You should realize you are cleaning Hindu society,” he told them. But as Gandhi’s greatest interlocutor, the Dalit intellectual and leader Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, pointed out, Gandhi refused to ask for the demolition of the caste order itself. Reform was to be a matter of upper-caste voluntarism. If a Brahmin cleaned human waste, he would not become an untouchable, Ambedkar bitterly noted: “For in India a man is not a scavenger because of his work. He is a scavenger because of his birth irrespective of the question whether he does scavenging or not…to preach that scavenging is good for the Untouchables and for none else and to make them accept these onerous impositions as voluntary purposes in life…is an outrage and a cruel joke on the helpless classes.”[3]
At the time Ambedkar was writing, in 1945, some provinces in India had “laws which make refusal by a scavenger to do scavenging a crime for which he can be tried and punished by a criminal court.” As Omprakash Valmiki recalls in his memoir, Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, eight years after India’s independence scavengers were still forced to work at menial jobs, and often without pay: “Untouchability was so rampant that while it was considered all right to touch dogs and cats or cows and buffaloes, if one [a higher-caste person] happened to touch a Chuhra [scavenger], one got contaminated or polluted. The Chuhras were not seen as human.”[4] The upper castes did not address them by name. Despite Gandhi’s exhortations, attitudes on the ground had not changed—Dalits had the legal right to schooling, but the headmaster of Valmiki’s school would ask the young Valmiki to sweep and clean the school, including the playgrounds, and threaten to “shove chilis up [his] ass and throw [him] out of school.” Traditionally, after an upper-caste wedding, scavengers would line up on the road to receive joothan, or the half-eaten scraps left on the guests’ plates. Once, Valmiki recalls, his mother asked the bridegroom’s father for more decent leftovers: “Sukhdev Singh pointed at the basket full of dirty leaf plates and said, ‘You are taking a basketful of joothan. And on top of that you want food for your children. Don’t forget your place, Chuhrhi. Pick up your basket and get going.’”[5]
Dalit autobiographies did not just detail endless oppression but also marked opposition. Valmiki’s mother stood up to Sukhdev Singh, emptying her basket of leftovers and advising him to “feed it to the bridegroom’s guests tomorrow morning.” After that day, she stopped taking joothan. Gandhi had renamed the untouchables as “Harijans,” or Children of God, a term rejected by anti-caste activists who renamed themselves Dalits (or broken people). In his autobiography, Growing up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography, Vasant Moon writes how he and other Dalit boys rejected the offer of a “Harijan scholarship” declaring that “none of us like to be called Harijans.… We are followers of Babasaheb Ambedkar.”[6]
In emphasizing that these memoirs blur the boundaries between themselves and the larger groups of which they are a part, we might forget that they nevertheless reclaim Dalit lives as fully individual, as more than simply representatives of a larger collectivity. One powerful example is Karukku by Bama, the pen name of a Dalit writer from a Roman Catholic family in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Readers in India know that casteism permeates non-Hindu communities in India, be they Muslim, Christian, or Sikh, but Bama’s writing forces readers to engage with what this might mean at a deep emotional and psychic level. Bama describes how she moved away from both family and community because of the pull of the Catholic faith. At first, she was told that as a lower-caste convert, she could not become a nun. When she eventually took vows, she found that the Church was as casteist and elitist as mainstream society, reviling the poor and the outcastes while speaking the language of equality and compassion. She was fed and clothed in a way that poor Dalits in the world outside were not, but she was still constantly reviled and degraded as a Dalit. Isolated from family, from community, broken by her years within the Church, she writes:
Convent life had changed me fundamentally. I who had once been bold had become an extremely timid person, fearful of everything, ready to burst into tears, and without any strength. I felt orphaned, as if I had no family.… Sometimes I even thought to myself that it would be better to be dead and gone rather than carry on living like this.[7]
As Karukku charts the lonely process through which Bama came to understand caste oppression, she forges a new language which, her translator writes, “overturns the decorum and aesthetics of received upper-class, upper-caste Tamil. She breaks the rules of written grammar and spelling throughout, elides words and joins them differently, demanding a new and different pattern of reading.”[8]
The process of writing has been important for Dalit writers to regain a sense of self-worth; as Bama says, writing
made me rediscover myself and my identity. Hope sprouted in me once again, and my shattered self was made whole. It transformed me. It freed me from the perplexing cultural crisis brought on by my life in the convent, that life that had eroded my identity. I sank my roots in my own culture once again. Deep within my alienated self, there welled up a sense of belonging to my people and my soil, and it flooded all over me. That is what healed me. That is what strengthened me. That is what merged me once again into the ebb and flow of social relationships.[9]
The writing did not simply express but enabled the connections between individual and community. For those who have been denied the right to write, the act of personal writing is a political process, not simply reflective of politics.
Dalit scholars and activists have extensively discussed the effects of the widespread market appeal of Dalit memoirs, especially after their translation into English and their usefulness or otherwise for the anti-caste movement. Do these narratives, by centering individual pain and experience, take away from a more structural understanding of caste? Worse, do they encourage a voyeurism among upper-caste readers? Do they help the communities who actually suffer from caste oppression? Is the popularity of Dalit memoirs a passing fad? Is it part of neoliberal containment strategies? In short, as Sharmila Rege puts it, “Are dalit [sic] narratives a moral source for political movements or reminders of a hateful past?”[10] As Rege goes on to argue, despite the danger of their appropriation by liberal politics, Dalit memoirs also “forge a right to speak for and beyond the individual and contest…the ‘official forgetting’ of histories of caste oppression, struggles and resistance.”
More importantly, Dalit memoirs have profoundly reshaped anti-caste movements. It has been suggested that sociological work on caste in fact “intellectualizes and thereby masks rather than explains” how caste really works in everyday life.[11] By contrast, autobiographical stories achieve what social scientific texts cannot, in that they “facilitate the re-imagination of the political.”[12] Dalit women’s memoirs detail their vulnerability to male domination and violence, both from upper-caste men and from within their own families. As Dalit feminist Urmila Pawar writes in her autobiography, The Weave of My Life, “One thing was, however, very clear to me. Women’s issues did not have any place on the agenda of the Dalit movement, and the women’s movement was indifferent to the issues in the Dalit movement. Even today things have not changed!”[13] By exposing both the caste-blindness of Indian feminists (those attached to political parties as well as those that are autonomous) and the masculinist bias of anti-caste movements, Dalit women’s autobiographical writing shapes a distinct Dalit form of feminist scholarship and activism.
In doing so these women also raise difficult and painful questions about internal hierarchies within any community and movement. To my mind, this is one of the most valuable but also tricky aspects of memoirs that emerge from not just Dalit but other marginalized or radical collectivities, or indeed political movements. Take, for example, the memoirs of hijras, or members of transgender and gender nonconforming communities. Hijras have been the object of voyeuristic fascination within India and globally, the subject of endless ethnographic writings, both scholarly and popular. New hijra autobiographies are enabled both by new Indian legislation on transgender rights and the proliferation of NGOs working on sexual health and sexual rights. These autobiographies appropriate the ethnographic method by detailing how hijra communities are organized, how they vary by region and class, and how they work both structurally and at a daily level. For example, A. Revathi’s The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story (2010) educates readers about how young hijras find their gurus who are like mothers to them, and acquire proxy sisters, grandmothers, and aunts in the process. It describes how hijras in Delhi are respected more than those in the South and can live largely by receiving badaii, or alms, while those in Bombay also engage in sex work, and how hijras move from one clan to another, or cannot. Revathi talks about the status that “the operation” (castration) brings to a hijra (it is also known as nirvaanam or reaching paradise) and describes the perils of such surgeries, which are often performed surreptitiously or illegally. She reflects upon how new NGOs engaged with hijra rights operate, and how rich hijras can live with comparative freedom while the poor are at the mercy of both everyday violence and police brutality. But what makes this memoir valuable is that such details are interlaced with a viscerally personal story about the desire and difficulty for Revathi to find an alternative family as well as sexual and romantic satisfaction. Hijra memoirs are characterized by differences not just of class or location but also of ideology—with some transgender activists embracing the right-wing Hindu majoritarianism that is hegemonic in India today, contributing to efforts at pinkwashing. In other words, far from being stock narratives, they warn us against essentializing an identity such as hijra.[14]
The detailing of internal contradictions and frictions and the complicated intersection of individual and collective consciousness are also evident in memoirs of women within radical political movements. In my recent book, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India, I explore the subjectivities of revolutionary and communist women from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root in India, to the 1960s, when it fractured. Communist women were the first to start organizing the working-class, peasant women, and tribal and indigenous women. Some of them were themselves from working class or peasant communities, or uneducated and poor women. Many were among the first generation of women to perform theater and dance and sing in public as part of raising political consciousness. They broke many barriers, radically reimagining the public sphere as well as family lives, all in the face of hostility or sheer incomprehension. Within their organizations, they also faced patriarchal attitudes, even as these organizations also gave them the space to live these radically different lives.
The voices of such women were first documented in a landmark 1989 book, We Were Making History, in which members of a feminist collective recorded women’s memories of their participation in the famous Telangana uprising of 1946–51, in which peasants and landless laborers, led by the Communist Party, revolted against extreme feudal oppression in the countryside. The interviews recorded both women’s nostalgia for “that magic time” when they perceived themselves to be central to remaking the social order, as well as their deep resentment that, after the movement was called off, they were caused to retreat into the very roles that the movement had allowed them to transgress. I was more interested in exploring memoirs that would illuminate the everyday experiences of revolutionary women of different class and regional backgrounds. Although the upper-class educated women associated with the mainstream Gandhian anticolonial movement did write autobiographies, this was not the case with women in these radical political parties, partly because the lives they led were precarious. Even those women who came from educated backgrounds lived in conditions not conducive to writing. Moreover, like their male counterparts, and like Western communist women, those who did write memoirs tended to be extremely reticent about their personal lives, especially their romantic or sexual relationships, but also their difficulties within the organizations. To talk about their personal lives would be simply out of place, and to critique the organization would be to betray the cause. That is why we have very little knowledge about how women experienced their lives within revolutionary underground groups, and later, the communist parties.
When I was writing the book, many young students and activists encouraged my efforts because they felt that questions of gender and sexuality needed to be more frankly discussed within Left organizations today. Others, usually those who had been part of these organizations, disapproved: was this not akin to discrediting the movements themselves? But what I learned most in reading these memoirs and trying to resurrect the lives of these women was not just that the movements were restrictive, or patriarchal; I also learned how important, how utterly exciting, it was for them to be part of the movements, to dream of a new India, and to also feel part of struggles for socialism across the world.
I found two particularly remarkable autobiographies, both written by union organizers of Bombay mill workers, with which I want to conclude. These are rare and important documents, especially because neither woman had more than very rudimentary education. What makes them especially valuable is that both women frankly detail the crosshatching of their intimacies—love, cohabitation, child-rearing, and familial relations—and their political consciousness and the class dynamics that obtained within the trade unions and Communist Party. Such confessions make the tone as well as the substance of these memoirs quite different from those written by women who were Party leaders, who were extremely circumspect about their emotions and domesticities. Both demand a reckoning of radical thought and action not just in the public sphere but also within the confines of existing forms of domesticity. Both provoke a rethinking of the contours and place of the family for a politically active woman.
The first is Ushabai Dange’s autobiography, Pan Aikta Kaun (Who Listens to Me), written in Marathi and published first in 1970. It recounts her dramatic journey from child widow to a leader of workers in Bombay’s textile mills and dwells on her marriage, motherhood, her desires, and fears. For this reason, histories of the women’s movement in India refer to this book, but they never deal with its details, which make it hard to assimilate the book into a laudatory account of political movements. In many ways, Ushabai’s narrative follows the conventions of other autobiographies written by women who were married to nationalist leaders. Those autobiographies often describe how their husbands helped them escape the confines of orthodox domesticity, but nevertheless imposed upon them their own patriarchal restrictions. But Ushabai’s text departs from them in two significant ways. First, it details what it was like to lead a huge working-class movement, one in which men and women were both participant and yet often at odds with one another. Second, Ushabai is extremely outspoken about the costs of her life with S. A. Dange, a fiery young socialist, who later became one of the key figures in the Indian trade union movement.
As a child widow, Ushabai faced a life of servitude in her marital home, but then she met Dange, who hatched an elaborate subterfuge and helped Usha escape to a school set up by social activist Ramabai Ranade. Eventually she married Dange and, exposed to daily trade union activities through him, she became part of the mill workers’ union. She eventually began to lead the movement because Dange was so often jailed by the British colonial authorities. She describes how in many strike actions, women were at the front of the picket lines, daring the police to step over them. The men dawdled, playing cards, resenting women’s leadership. Ushabai organized women’s meetings to address male attitudes to female militancy. Women marched to the chawls (workers’ tenements) to burn the playing cards. Led by her, the union devised innovative ways to reach women workers effectively—they would go to their neighborhoods and beat upon a metal dinner plate to summon them to meetings that “never lasted more than half an hour. Then women went back to their work. We never gave long speeches; women didn’t have the time for those. These quick meetings proved very effective.”[15] Women workers became her extended family, helping her raise her daughters during the difficult days when Dange was in prison and Ushabai constantly busy with the movement.
At the same time, Ushabai is frank about the personal costs of political participation. We get extraordinarily detailed confessions about her loneliness, about her craving for more companionship from Dange, complaints that he abandoned her at key moments of her life, and worry that he would have affairs when he traveled abroad or with sophisticated women in the Party. Within the Party, she felt marginalized by her lack of education and sophistication. She was sharply conscious of her difference from “middle-class women cadres and leaders” and felt herself to be much closer to, and even a part of, the working classes within the movement, although she wasn’t a mill worker herself. Particularly painful was an experience in jail in 1940, when she was arrested during a strike. The situation was terrible. There was no milk for her two-year-old daughter Shaila who she was allowed to take with her: “Terrible food, cold dark barracks, guards who shouted night and day and hearing whom Shaila woke up screaming in fright. In the end, it seemed as if she would die.” The other women leaders in jail with her did not come forward to help: “they insisted on trying to educate me about all the political mistakes they thought D[ange] had made.… Their main suggestion was that I should leave the party and stay at home to look after the children.”[16] The title of Usha’s book is also its recurring refrain: “Who listens to me?” “Often,” she writes, “I would speak up and express my thoughts. But who would listen? I didn’t know English. In essence, I was uneducated. People would ignore me, thinking, this woman who lives among us, she hasn’t read any books of philosophy.”[17]
Perhaps this is why Ushabai was skeptical of the communes set up by the Party, extraordinary spaces that allowed men and women to live and work together in ways that were unheard of in India at that time. But perhaps because she had experienced the miseries of large patriarchal clans, for Ushabai the nuclear family was a space of refuge, for nurture, and allowed freedom of a kind unthinkable within the conventional extended Indian family. She writes:
I do not like these communes etc. at all. There should be a husband and wife in a family. Both should do the housework together. Look after the children. Eat their own food, live happily in their own way. I also took up employment when D[ange] was in jail, looked after the entire household. When he was around, he would do the housework.… Our house was no commune. But we always had 20-25 rotis, dal and vegetables on hand. Any political worker who came would go only after eating. Our house was everybody’s.[18]
At the same time, Ushabai was also conscious such an open house was not run on “everybody’s” labor and money. She acutely felt the lack of money to run such an open home and provide for her family. Her larger political collectivity and the smaller nuclear unit within it did not always fit easily, and her book constantly highlights the tensions between them.
The fissures between the two are even more evident in Parvatibai Bhore’s extraordinary memoir, Eka Rannaraginichi Hakikata (The Story of a Fighter), also written in Marathi and published in 1977. Whereas Ushabai hailed from a Brahmin family, Parvatibai came from the low nai (barber) caste. Ushabai’s political engagement was enabled by marriage, but Parvatibai’s was constantly impeded by it. Parvatibai went to school for only two years, against the wishes of her mother, who thought education was only for upper-caste girls. At nine, she was to be married to Shankar, a family servant who was ten years older. She writes, “Now-a-days if you tell any girl that your marriage has been fixed she will not ask with whom? She will ask who decided this? Did you ask me? We could not dare to ask such questions.… We played games with dolls. But do dolls have any rights?”[19] Parvatibai was to discover that marriage indeed placed her firmly inside a doll’s house, ruled by an insanely jealous husband. The memoir details how she constantly fought with him for more freedom, not to go out to meet friends or to dress how she wanted, but rather to fight against the British, to join the worker’s movements as well as the Communist Party. For Parvatibai, the home and the world require different but simultaneous actions: “There was a war at home and a world war outside the home.” She told her husband: “You are a jailor. This is a jail. I know what you are afraid of. You are suspicious because I am a woman.”[20] Appropriating Gandhi’s tactics and vocabulary, she went on a hunger strike. Finally, she was permitted to start political work on the condition that she first finished all her household tasks. She was twenty-one years old.
Even with her second-grade education, she had been struggling to read political materials, sending her young son out to buy a new biography of Lenin she had seen advertised in a newspaper. She then made contact with communists who lived in the workers’ tenements and began to read books with them. Eventually, she acted as a courier for them, swallowing the letters if she was followed by the colonial police. Parvatibai admired their camaraderie with one another, as well as their simple lives: “They had let go of their desire for a job. Had given up on material pleasures of life. They survived often merely eating puffed rice. Tea was their only luxury.”[21] They had also given up on “normal married lives.” From her vantage point, complete dedication to a political cause lets an activist lead an enviable life, free of domestic entanglements. So whereas Ushabai wanted more intimacy with a husband that she had chosen, Parvatibai wanted more freedom from one she had not.
But, like Ushabai, Parvatibai was always conscious of class differences within the Party. Like Ushabai, she too was harassed by middle-class comrades while in jail because of the factional wars within the Party. They banned her from party meetings, she writes, reviled her, throwing water and even trash on her. But she had gained a political confidence that allowed her to transcend the ideology of caste and class which was so deeply honed in her from birth. To be fair, upper- and middle-class communist women willingly relinquished many privileges upon entering the Party. They fought for an expansion of the women’s movement into new constituencies, breaking with liberal women’s groups and also putting some pressure on the male leadership of the Party. Nevertheless, within the Party, the differences between them and women like Ushabai and, even more so, Parvatibai remained.
Whereas middle-class communist women were at pains to dress simply, in order to identify with poorer folk and “de-class” themselves, Parvatibai thought it was absolutely fine for working-class people to aspire to better things. She writes:
There was a women’s meeting in Hindu colony. Hansa Mehta [a Gandhian reformer] was presiding it. One woman had accused workers of wanting to live in luxury: “They prefer to watch films sitting in…[expensive seats], and want to wear nice clothes. They don’t know who they are.” I was enraged upon hearing this. I said, “a worker is a human like you. Why can’t he sit in the box?” I pointed at Hansa Mehta and said, “if a labouring woman feels like she should drape a sari like this [the one draped by Mehta], what’s wrong?” I said this and atmosphere at the meeting transformed.[22]
In other words, Parvatibai had no time for the stifling morality attached to the cult of simplicity, and to the cult of morality to which many communists began to subscribe. The working-class women she describes were not ascetics at all: they drank alcohol and were firebrands. But alcohol was considered a no-no for middle-class women virtually all over the country. Even though the more educated women in the Party drank, the idea of alcohol as taboo for women pervaded the lower rungs of the organization.
Some of the personal and public fights Ushabai and Parvatibai engaged in are today understood as feminist: the struggle for education, for the right to work, to marry after being widowed, to participate in politics, to be taken seriously as a political actor by one’s family. Others, such as the battle for the right to strike, the right to dissent from a repressive political order, the right to better wages, and the right to lead men as well as women in these struggles, are too often bracketed away from the sphere of feminism. But, as their stories attest, these were integrated battles, and gender relations were the prism that refracted the entire spectrum of radical and communist women’s activities in India. Memoirs don’t have to be either entirely personal or reflective of a community or political movement. If the personal is political, the political is also intensely, deeply personal. Memoirs from the margins invite us to consider that the boundary between the two is a rather artificial one.
There are many other stories of this sort, waiting to be read, shared, and discussed. All the ones I have considered were written without the mediation of an interlocutor, scholar, or reporter; those which involved mediation of that sort have often been criticized as inauthentic, as was the case with Latin American testimonios. In that case, the defense rested on critiquing the idea of a singular subject. But similar critiques have also been used to silence or marginalize stories that have emerged from the fight against dominant expectations. As one South African scholar puts it:
Has the theoretical “turn” made 30 years ago or more compounded discrimination against women by deflating the authorial voice and by insisting that the coherence of the life-story is an illusion?… How do authors who have been historically and geographically relegated to the periphery succeed in making claims against the “centre” or in “writing back” in a register that the centre is bound to recognize if the very integrity of their authorship is questionable? [23]
Precisely because personal writings have been celebrated for opening up the lives, struggles, and subjectivities of marginalized peoples, we may sometimes forget that the majority of autobiographies and memoirs that flood the market are still written by privileged individuals who assume the importance of both their own lives for understanding the wider society of which they are a part and their own uniqueness as individuals. This being the case, we should insistently celebrate memoirs from the margins for appropriating these privileged positions while offering radical and revisionary understandings of both self and society.
Notes:
[1] James Olney, “’I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” Callaloo 20 (Winter 1984), 49.
[2] M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 44-45, original italics.
[3] B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, accessed August 25 2021, http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/41L.What%20Congress%20and%20Gandhi%20CHAPTER%20XI.htm.
[4] Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life, trans. Arun Prabha Mukherjee (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 3. First addition is in the original, second addition is the author’s.
[5] Valmiki, Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life, 12.
[6] Vasant Moon, Growing up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography, trans. Gail Omvedt (Rowman and Littlefield) 37.
[7] Bama, Karukku, trans. Lakshmi Holmström, (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2012), 78.
[8] Holmström, “Introduction”, Karukku, xix.
[9] Bama, “Dalit Literature: My Own Experience” in Dalit Literature: My Own Experience, ed. and trans. David C. Buck and Kannan M. (Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry 2011), 73.
[10] Sharmila Rege, “Introduction,” in Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Reading Dalit Women’s Testimonios (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2006), 12.
[11] Uma Chakravarti, Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens (Kolkata: Stree, 2003), 6–7, quoted Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 14, original italics.
[12] M S S Pandian, “Writing Ordinary Lives,” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 38 (2008): 35.
[13] Urmila Pawar, The Weave of My life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs, trans. Maya Pandit (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 216.
[14] Rovel Sequeira, “Show and Tell: Life History and Hijra Activism in India,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 47, no. 2 (forthcoming Winter 2022).
[15] Ushabai Dange, Pan Aikta Kaun (Bombay: Apoorva Prakashan, 1970), 163.
[16] Dange, Pan Aikta Kaun, 175.
[17] Dange, Pan Aikta Kaun, 124.
[18] This is from the second edition of the book. See Ushabai Dange, Ushakaal (Bombay: Ganthali Publications, 1998), 208.
[19] Parvatibai Bhore, Eka Rannaraginichi Hakikata (Mumbai: Lok Vangmaya Griha, 1977), 11.
[20] Bhore, Eka Rannaraginichi Hakikata, 38.
[21] Bhore, Eka Rannaraginichi Hakikata, 64.
[22] Bhore, Eka Rannaraginichi Hakikata, 91.
[23] Cynthia Kros, “Lives in the Making: The Possibilities and Impossibilities of Autobiography with Reference to the Case of Amina Cachalia,” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 2 (2012): 238.