Repression and Resistance in Dalit Feminist Literature

Abstract

Feminist movements and Dalit feminist movement in India are mainly based on the experience of Repression and gender discrimination. Patriarchy, gender disparity and sexual violence are the basic reasons for these movements and they also find place prominently in the writings of Dalit women as they have come forward to write their experiences from women's point of view around 1980s. Baby Kamble, Urmila Pawar in Marathi, Geeta Nagabhushan in Kannada, P. Shivakami, Bama in Tamil have got national level consideration. Dalit women were raped; insulted and abused by the upper caste people. They are insecure in the society as they have been exploited on the various levels. This feeling of insecurity of the Dalit women is the central theme of their writings. These women writers have come forward to express their ideas, their experiences in social violence as well as in domestic violence and thus they protest their traditional existence with anger and anguish. Geeta Nagabhushan’s dalit novels, Barna’s Sangati (2005), P. Shivakani's Grip of Change (2006) are initial important writings of dalit feminism; Datit feminism writing is different from the conventional way of Feminist writing. Their experiences, expression, method of narration are extremely different from the upper caste women writers. It is found that every woman in the world has been degraded to second grade citizenship. The Dalit women in India suffer more due to their Dalit identity.