An Analytical Exploration of Existential Violence in Bama’s Autobiographical Work, Karukku

Abstract

Existential violence is that form of violence in which the ‘essence’ or ‘being’ of anyone is decided according to the pre-established norms, rules, ideas, traditions and rituals with a view to suppress the intrinsic nature of the subject. Fixation of ‘being’ has been a matter of controversy across disciplines since centuries; therefore, a great effort is made from every power center to decide the beings of others. They are taught how they need to behave if they want to prove their potential in various spheres of human life. Karukku is an autobiographical work of Fausthina Mary Fathima Rani alias Bama who records various events of her life as the testimonials of Dalits’ lives in general and Dalit women’s lives in particular in rural Tamil Nadu. She describes here how dalits become the victims of many layered violence in caste-based societies. This work also records how the identities of dalits are manufactured and their beings are decided and readymade meanings are imposed upon them with the sole purpose of their exploitation. She states that higher castes Christians in India misbehave with Dalit Christians in the same way in which Hindus have misbehaved with them. There, according to her, is no respite for Dalits in merely changing the religion because higher castes Christians have lent caste-system together with its prejudices from their ancestors who usually had been Hindus. Bama has strongly opposed many traditional notions about dalits with her hard work and proved that a person’s worth must not be judged on the basis of mere birth. The present research paper would be a sincere effort to analyze the politics of controlling and deciding ‘being’ or ‘essence’ of dalits and forcing them to fall prey to ‘bad faith’ of Jean Paul Sartre.