THE VIOLENCE OF CASTE AND SEXUALITY: P. SIVAKAMI

The Tamil writer P. Sivakami’s sequential novels The Grip of Change (Pazhaiyana Kalithalum, 1989) and Gowri: Author’s Notes (Gowri: Aasiriyar Kurippu, 1999) were written in the wake of the Bodi caste riots in Tamil Nadu between Pallars (a Dalit caste group) and Thevars. Dalits mobilised themselves around a Dalit leader when she was raped and killed by upper caste landlords for demanding higher wages. At a protest meeting, a Dalit political leader is reported to have said, “What would happen if all Dalit men were to marry upper caste women?” This led to a violent backlash resulting in the loss of Dalit lives and property. The reasons for raping the Dalit leader lay in suppressing a Dalit woman who was overstepping her subordinate status by publicly demanding higher wages. Thus caste functioned in markedly gendered ways in public spaces. As a response to this event, Sivakami’s novels focused on the body of the Dalit woman as a fictional and rhetorical figure for the fraught relationship between caste, gender and sexuality. The novel centers on the exploited and supposedly violable body of the Dalit woman, which is inscribed with inter-caste struggles for power even as it is constituted as a site of resistance. Over the course of the narratives, it becomes impossible to articulate caste and gender and sexuality at once. Caste turns out to be the overarching structure that regulates gender and sexuality primarily through the body of the (Dalit) woman. There is no space in this structure to articulate questions of sexual violence, that are clearly elided by caste violence, which subordinates the Dalit woman to the male interests of the Dalit community. The second novel is the author’s reflection on the possibility of re-imagining the inter-sectionalities between caste, gender and sexuality.