When Feminism Overpowers Caste Marginalisation: A Study of the Feminist Agenda of Female Paraiyar Writers

Writings on caste-based marginalization are highly experiential in nature, and are almost always written by those who are born as outcastes themselves. Objectivity, however, becomes a problematic issue where such writings are concerned, since narratives which are written on the basis of personal experience and memory tend to be intensely personal and emotional in nature, and generally exhibit traces of personal bias, as in the case of female Paraiyar writers in Tamil Nadu, who are better known in the literary world as Tamil Dalit writers. Although widely acknowledged as the mouthpiece of Paraiyar/Dalit aspirations in the media and in academic circles, female Paraiyar writers tend to exhibit a fixated inclination towards issues of female marginalisation alone, instead of representing the cause as a whole, thus creating an element of disunity among Paraiyar writers who are supposedly working together towards emancipating their people from the clutches of caste-based oppression. Driven by such concerns, this paper seeks to analyse the novel, Sangati, written by a leading Paraiyar writer cum activist, Bama Faustina who is said to have provided Dalit women with an authentic voice and affirmative presence, with the aim of investigating the stand female Paraiyar writers take on the issue of caste marginalization on the whole, and the reasons why they tend to prioritise the sufferings of Paraiyar women over that of the Paraiyar community on the whole.