The Aesthetics of Testimony: A Comparative Study of Caste, Spatial Violence, and Subaltern Agency in Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan and Bama’s Karukku
Abstract
The present research paper provides a comparative textual and sociological analysis of Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (1997) and Bama’s Karukku (1992) to examine how Dalit autobiographical narratives undermine canonical aesthetics and construct a politics of subaltern resistance. Set in disparate linguistic, geographical and cultural settings–a Valmiki (Chuhra) community in rural Western Uttar Pradesh and a Paraiyar Catholic community in Tamil Nadu–both texts eschew individualistic Western autobiographical conventions, and instead function as collective testimonies of institutionalised humiliation. Dalit literature highlights the intense suffering and marginalisation of Dalits in a feudal society based on caste which outcasts an entire community of people by birth. The shocking tradition of upper caste oppression of the Dalits, raping their womenfolk, burning their houses, whipping them at will, throwing stones at their houses to ‘teach them a lesson’, humiliating them and forbidding their presence in public places is the sorry truth of Indian society even today. By analysing the intersections of caste, religion and institutional pedagogy, the paper demonstrates how the school and the church operate not as neutral spaces of social mobility, but as apparatuses of systemic exclusion. Furthermore, the paper compares the gendered aspect of caste violence in Karukku with the occupational and physical indignities in Joothan, pointing out Bama’s navigation of the ‘double marginality’ of being Dalit and female within institutional religion. Using theories of B.R. Ambedkar, Pierre Bourdieu (cultural capital and symbolic violence), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (subaltern agency), this study claims that the reclamation of non-standard, vernacular registers and the documentation of bodily trauma are radical epistemic breaks from mainstream literary forms, reconfiguring life writing as an archive of counter-hegemonic assertion