Karukku || करुक्कू' In Hindi Best Summary In Hindi Autobiography By Bama First Women

Karukku’: An Autobiography By Bama Exploring Her Tamil, Dalit And Christian Identity
Karukku by Bama is an elegy to the community she grew up in and her intersecting identities as a Tamil, Dalit, and Christian woman.
Dear reader, this article is free to read and it will remain free - but it isn’t free to produce. If you want to support the work that goes behind publishing high-quality feminist media content, please consider becoming a FII member. Thank you!
Karukku is an autobiography that chronicles Bama’s life, from her childhood to her early adult life as a nun, and beyond. The book was originally written by her in Tamil in 1992 and translated into the English version that I read by Lakshmi Holmstrom in 2000. Karukku is one of the first autobiographies of a Dalit woman written in Tamil.
Karukku 2000
Author: Bama
Translator: Lakshmi Holmstrom
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 2012
Genre: Non-fiction
It was in 1992 that Bama left the convent that she had been a member of for seven years. As she writes, “That book was written as a means of healing my inward wounds; I had no other motive.” We see Bama, standing at this moment in her life, trying to make sense of her many identities; as a Dalit, as a Christian, as a woman.
Unlike most autobiographies, Bama’s narrative is not linear. She does not describe events only in terms of the impact they had on her later life, but writes of the experiences she had as moments of oppression that composed her daily lived reality. In the book, one sees Bama’s quest to understand and present how her multiple identities as Dalit, Christian and woman have impacted her oppression.
Karukku is an elegy to the community Bama grew up in. She writes of life there in all its vibrancy and colour, never making it seem like a place defined by a singular caste identity, yet a place that never forgets, and is never allowed to forget its caste identity. She writes simultaneously of humorous incidents she remembers from her childhood, the games she used to play with her friends, good meals with her family and the oppression of her community by the police, upper-castes, and the convent. In this manner, she presents the pervasiveness of caste oppression - how it not only punctuates everyday life, but is an integral part of it, even in the memory of a community.
As Ambedkar writes, “Caste is not just a division of labour, it is a division of labourers.” Bama’s work speaks to this statement as she describes the servitude with which her family members were bound to the upper-caste families they worked for, including the beseeching obedience they had to show to them. “All the time I went to work for the Naickers [upper-caste] I knew I should not touch their goods or chattels; I should never come close to where they were. I should always stand away to one side. These were their rules. I often felt pained and ashamed. But there was nothing that I could do,” she writes, of her experience working for a Naicker household in high school. “To this day, in my village, both men and women
can survive only through hard and incessant labour,” she notes.
Bama also speaks of the humiliation she experienced in high school, being Dalit and poorer than her classmates. What struck me, in particular, is the symbolic importance of clothing as a marker of social capital that she writes of. She describes a college party that she did not attend because she could not afford to buy a new saree, hiding in the bathroom until it was over. While education spaces are supposed to be emancipate, free of all markers of identity and privilege, equalising spaces, they are anything but. The same oppression that Bama faced outside, she faced in school and college, making it all even harder to pursue an education she could barely afford and that she had to fight hard for as a woman. Her narrative is nuanced in exploring her intersecting identities as Dalit and woman in detail. As Bama says in this interview with Githa Hariharan, Dalit women are exploited ‘thrice,’ on account of their caste, class and gender - ‘triple monsters.’
The book is also Bama’s story of looking for a sense of belonging and connection to something meaningful, which she finds lacking in her community at home. She leaves home to join the convent in her twenties, after working for a few years as a teacher, hoping to contribute to a cause larger than caste, class and identity. However, she finds the convent in not such a sanctuary and is just as oppressive as the spaces outside.

[@AARMBH-pi1bt]

Well done dear short summary and very informative

[@FlamingoLiterature]

Thank you so much 🙂

[@user-mk3kp2dj9o]

Thanks ❤

[@FlamingoLiterature]

💕💕💕💕