The Physiogamy of Resistance

Gods, Food and Spirits in Kaliyugam

Sailen Routray

Viramma is an autobiographical account of the life of a dalit woman from a village near Pondicherry in South India who belongs to the 'pariah' caste. It is the outcome and a part of an extensive ethnographic engagement by the scholars Josiane Racine and Jean-Luc Racine. 

Pariahs are a traditionally oppressed caste of predominantly landless agricultural laborers at the bottom of the Brahmanical hierarchy that is categorized by the Government of India as scheduled caste, and increasingly the pariahs see themselves as part of a larger pan-Indian political community of Dalits.

The text under review is a translation of a French text into English. The attempt seems to be not to render the narrative into cockney English in order to give ‘voice’ to Viramma, but to configure the flow of the narrative in as straightforward a manner as possible. Viramma’s evocation of the past are filled with a mixture of nostalgia and hardnosed realism. Through a series of devices the narrative creates a dynamic pariah identity from the perspective of a poor woman.

Food, sex and spirits permeate the narrative. Viramma’s childhood memories are suffused with food, both its lack and its periodic profusion. She remembers all the major festivals and occasions of her life in terms of food, and it gives her life a sense of continuity. 

Her earliest childhood memories are of going with her mother to the market, and eating a murku or a sweet. Food is thus a central preoccupation in Viramma’s narrative. The smell and taste of food, the way it marks off different festivals and social difference - all this suffuse the book with many tastes and flavors.

Of course food is seldom about eating. This is borne out, for example, the way she views eating beef. Contrary to popular belief, pariahs do not eat carrion. Quite a few festivals are marked with the sharing of beef, its cooking and eating, and she relishes talking about eating it. 

At the same time it is also used as a marker to create alterity; it’s eating beef that makes the pariahs ‘unclean’ in the eyes of many oppressor caste Hindus and she is aware of it. But there are times this alterity is inverted, and beef eating and talking about it become a part of the pariah identity, a marker of ‘ethnic’ difference as opposed to a stigma of impurity.

Viramma is deeply deferential to the cow as an animal to the extent that she can talk about two deaths happening in the ceri (the untouchable hamlet of a village in Tamilnadu that is generally outside the village at a certain distance from the principal habitation) at a certain point of time, one being that of a man, the other that of a cow. She has internalized the Brahmanical notions of the sacredness of the taboo; despite this she also glories in eating beef, and the way it marks her as a pariah. 

Thus, these sets of attitudes point at the deep ambiguity at the heart of the Dalit experience and this ambiguity operates at multiple levels; it exists due to the incomplete assimilation of Brahmanical norms and values, and the ways through which the process of construction of alterity is used as a resource for resistance.  

Contrasted to the conventional pictures of deprivation of the pariahs, Viramma paints an idyllic childhood, plagued with poverty but carefree nonetheless. She compares the joy and bonding that she shared with the playmates from the ceri with the mirthless childhood of girl children from the ur (the main habitation of the village inhabited by the upper castes of the Brahmanical hierarchy). She contrasts the greater freedoms enjoyed by pariah children and women as compared to those of the upper castes, especially those of the Reddys, and from the comparison pariahs come off far more favorably.

This view of the greater latitudes and freedoms that are traditionally enjoyed by pariah women is illustrated by the way in which Viramma takes great pleasure in playing the role of the 'dirty old woman'. She teases young girls and guys mercilessly with riddles and songs suffused with sexual innuendos. In fact, she is quite explicit when she talks about matters sexual, even when the subject relates to her own personal life.

The life in ceri and the life of the gods run parallel to each other and sometimes become enmeshed. This happens when a deceased man/woman becomes a deity, or one of the lesser and angrier gods inhabits the bodies of the people in the ceri. In fact, it’s the small gods that seem to dominate Viramma’s social world. The ‘bigger’ Hindu gods are distant and seem to mark the distance between pariahs and the larger Hindu community. 

This is not to deny a certain ‘integration’ though. It is the pariahs who traditionally played the drums at all the major village festivals of the Brahmanical deities. But with increasing political assertion of dalits, they do not perform these kinds of practices. 

Despite the changing times, Viramma’s world is still an essentially sacralized one. For her the world is populated by gods, spirits and other non-physical beings, and there is a constant intermingling between the realms, as when the anger of a god causes grievous physical harm or when a deceased ancestor becomes a minor god over a period of time.

But such a conception of the world need not be idealized. Changes are already evident from the ways in which her children view the world and are a pointer to the manner in which these conceptions of the sacrality or otherwise of the world are conditioned by, and are co-constitutive of, the broader life world. Viramma’s account, in this context, also points at the growing erosion of ‘pariah culture’ and its replacement by the Tamil mass culture. 

In fact, Viramma refers to caste Hindus in general as 'Tamils'. In this context, the erosion of ‘traditional’ practices like theatre performed in front of the gods, and the mastery over drums (that was a marker of pariah identity earlier) and the incorporation of the youth into ‘Tamil’ mass culture is doubly poignant. This points at the ambiguities that are inherent in the politics of alterity, and at the attendant difficulties in refashioning a subaltern identity that is relatively free from the markings of cultures of dominant social groups.

It is also important to note the ambiguous position that political modernity occupies in the narrative. Traditionally pariah women have played an important role in the social life of the caste. But with the onset of democratization and party-based politics, and the resultant superseding of the political over the social, pariah women’s voices seem to be increasingly marginalized, or at least the spheres in which their voices had salience seem to be increasingly shrinking.

Perhaps what comes across most strongly is the sophisticated understanding that Viramma has of her social world, and the counter-narrative that she offers to the dominant scholarly discourses of the day. The picture that emerges is that of an active social agent whose life is a valiant attempt at engaging with conditions that are not of their own making. 

Thus, this narrative that captures such a life offers a remarkable social document that attempts to restore the importance of the ‘unheroic’ subaltern in our public discourse. Viramma is an achievement. Although questions of voice and representation are inevitable while assessing such an account, what triumphs in the end is the story itself, which is simultaneously a striking personal account of a pariah woman and a piece of social commentary from the bottom of Indian society as well.  

Details About the Book: Viramma, Josiane Racine and Jean-Luc Racine. 1997. Viramma: Life of an Untouchable. Will Hobson (Translator). London and New York: Verso.