“KARUKKU” THROUGH WRITER’S LENS: INCREDIBLE RESILIENCE IN BAMA’S LIFE AS A CHRISTIAN DALIT

Abstract

The genre of life writing was proliferated as a significant module of Dalit literature in India after the publication of few Dalit writers work in Marathi language. As an outset, Dalits chose the genre autobiography as a best literary tool to thunder their unfulfilled hopes. Ever then, the genre of life writing by marginalized writers became popular and witnessed the zenith of literary and linguistic agglomeration in many regional languages. Marginalized writers don’t tag on any meticulous literary conventions, they have their unique style of writing in demanding deliverance through Dalit literature. In fact, Bama’s Karukku has agitated the Tamil literary clique after her book publication. Naturally she has used idiomatic lexicon as a medium of narration by contravening the grammar rules and has set a different pattern of reading in the history of Tamil Dalit literature. Karukku’s translator Lakshmi Holmstrom found extremely difficult to translate the text into English because of its “agglutinative” structure. This paper repositions Bama’s Karukku as autoethnography and the narrative techniques which depicts the lifestyle of Christian Tamil Dalit from the southern Tamilnadu