Beyond the “Grip”: Reclaiming
the Dalit Female Body in P. Sivakami’s The Grip of Change
Dr. Sanchaita Tripathy
ABSTRACT
Autobiographies, written by Dalits, have given a
new orientation to the discourses of the marginalized writings and
emerged as a distinct genre. Within Dalit literature the form of
Autobiography as a literary and cultural expression, challenges the
existing literary structures through their articulations of cultural
and caste discriminations. But the autobiographies of Dalit men
would eclipse the picture of the Dalit women completely, either as
suppressed and oppressed or as a portrait of the ideal, sacrificing
woman. To protest such a demeaning scenario, Dalit women took the
initiative of writing their own stories that convey every breath of
toil that a Dalit woman goes through. The present paper attempts to
analyze one such narrative of oppression and exploitation- The Grip
of Change by P. Sivakami. This paper explores critically the
autobiographical narrative from a female perspective with the
purpose of comparing the narrative strategies of responses to the
forces of these oppressions that exist in a gendered society and to
show how the silenced and subjugated Dalit woman has articulated her
‘self’ and protested against patriarchal structure pertaining to the
issues of caste, class and gender. The major defining part of this
novel was entirely played out on a Dalit woman, Thangam’s body. The
objectification of Dalit female body by both upper caste and Dalit
men is reflected in Sivakami’s writing. She questioned the
vulnerability of Dalit women and explores inter-caste sexual
relations by exposing the cruel face of Dalit patriarchy in her
writing.
Keywords: Dalit feminism, Dalit patriarchy, selfhood, resistance,
intersectionality, gender politics.
