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Bama’s Sangati: A Traumatic Chain of

Gender Discrimination
Pal Singh, Kanwar
Bama’s Sangati: A Traumatic Chain of Gender Discrimination
The Creative launcher, vol. 6, no. 5, 2021
Perception Publishing, India
Available in: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=703873561009
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53032/tcl.2021.6.5.09

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 Research Articles

Bama’s Sangati: A Traumatic Chain of

Gender Discrimination
Kanwar Pal Singh ggkpsingh777@gmail.com
Mihir Bhoj P.G. College, Dadri, G.B. Nagar, U.P., India
hps://orcid.org/0000-0002-0046-066X

Abstract: Sangati (1994), a novel in translation from Tamil to English, is the second
work of Bama (b.1958) also known as Bama Faustina Soosairaj, a Dalit feminist. It is a
unique novel without any marked plot or central character, and it seeks to explore the
impact of a number of discriminations suffered by Dalit Christian women. is paper
is a realistic investigation into the text of the novel to find out the events of gender
discrimination resulting into subjugation and marginalization of women especially Dalit
women, like Velliaiyamma, Mariamma, ayi, Vasuki, Maikkani, Maikkani’s mother,
Esakki and the narrator herself. All of them are exploited by the male members of their
e Creative launcher, vol. 6, no. 5, 2021 family as well as society and bear the traumatic behaviour at every step of their pathetic
Perception Publishing, India
lives. In the broad light of day, they are entertained as the home servants and in darkness
of night; they are treated as an object of sexual satisfaction. Women have been declared
Published: 30 December 2021 as misbegotten and treated as animals, objects of sexual pleasure, and slaves of men who
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53032/ have their birthrights to exploit, to beat, to burn them alive and so on.
tcl.2021.6.5.09 Keywords: Gender discrimination, Dalit woman, Parriaya Community, Anecdote,
Redalyc: https://www.redalyc.org/
Casteism, Exploitation.
articulo.oa?id=703873561009

Literature is the analytical representation of society with all its

components - caste, religion, customs, traditions, man- woman
relationship and so on. From the very beginning, literature, be it in any
form, has been written with a patriarchal mind set. A number of religious
personalities have misogynistic attitude towards women. Saint Albertus
Magnus, Dominican theologian, 13th century, commented “Woman is
a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison
to his” (Web) omas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church, 13th century
held the view, “As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and
misbegotten” (web). John Dod, too, had a derogatory ideology regarding
the duties of women as he says, “e second duty of the wife is constant
obedience and subjection. (Web).
In India also women’s condition has been very pathetic. Since early
age a number of illogical trends such as Sati Pratha, Pradha Pratha,
Baal Vivah, Daasi pratha, have been imposed on women to exploit and
marginalize them under the dominance of men. It is more pathetic to
know that they had no right to protest or speak against their subjugators
and if speak, nobody pays attention to their miseries. In ‘Garuda Purana’
it is strictly ordered for women to “follow the laws of Vedas or else you
will wrath in hell” (Web). If a woman belongs to Dalit community, the
subjugation is double – by the upper caste men and by the man of her

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Kanwar Pal Singh. Bama’s Sangati: A Traumatic Chain of Gender Discrimination

own community. ey are misbehaved, exploited, subjugated, raped and

beaten till death as Bama shows in her novels. In Karakku (1992), her
debut and autobiographical novel, she depicts the curse of casticism and
gender discrimination in Southern Indian state Tamilnadu, where the
people of Paraiyya community had converted to Christian for the sake of
Education and equality to their children. She explores the misogynistic
attitude of the society for Dalit women who, like Bamma, have to drink
the poison of casteism and gender inequality at every step of their lives.
e novel Sangati, written in 1994 and translated from Tamil
to English by Lakshmi Holmstrom, is not the autobiography of an
individual rather it is the chronological record of the events of subjugation
and exploitation of women for three generations – the generation
of Vellaiyamma, the grandmother of the narrator, the generation of
narrator’s mother and that of the narrator. e novelist rigorously
explores the minute details of male hegemony and dominant attitude
towards women who are mistreated and exploited so many times in a
single day.
e word ‘Sangati’, in Tamil means ‘Events’ as the front cover page
of the novel indicates. e novel is divided into twelve chapters dealing
with a number of anecdotes replete with the pains, sufferings, miseries,
despair, hopes, and subjugation of Dalit women who are treated as games
like animals even in 20th century. e author herself declares the purpose
of penning down this novel in her acknowledgement as:
My mind is crowded with many anecdotes: stories not only about the sorrows and
tears of Dalit women, but also about their lively and rebellious culture…passion to
live life with vitality, truth, enjoyment; about their hard labour. I wanted to shout
out these stories. (ix).

In the preliminary chapters of the novel, the narrator is a young girl

who is shown to have a discussion with her grandmother about the real
experiences of the old lady and her contemporary women. Normally the
novel seems to have no dominant plot but the stories of exploitations
related to the female protagonists like Maariamma, Maikkani, ayi,
Essaki, Mukkama, Irulaggi, Rakkamma and the narrator, etc. are based
on human relationship physical, psychological and social to construct
a stronger plot of the novel. e novelist has exposed minutely when
and where a female has to face gender discrimination. She has to face
discrimination in:
e home of her own parents
Playing games
Earning wages
Choosing her husband outside her caste
e home of her husband
Having extra-marital affair or divorcing her cruel husband
Community Panchayat
Celebrating festivals etc.

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Bama very realistically, throws light on the ways how a Dalit girl child
suffers a lot and faces the derogatory process of growing as a woman.
Children have to go through the illogical and outdated traditions and
customs as per their gender, the basis of discrimination with them. ey
are tormented, deprived of certain basic needs and even the girls are sold
for the sake of money. e narrator recalls her early days and grieves to
remember the visit of the Christian churchmen, the representative of the
Christian religion, to the people of her community in her village named
Perumaalpatti to convert them from Hindu to Christian for getting
education and avoid the discriminations, they had to face due to their
untouchable caste. e boys start going to school but the girls are not
allowed for the same as “ey had enough to do at home anyway, carrying
the babies around and doing the housework” (7). e girls have to be
victim of discrimination even when they are breast-feeding babies. eir
mother, a woman herself, starts making a difference between a boy baby
and the girl baby. e narrative shows,
If a boy baby cries, he is instantly picked up and given milk. It is not so with the
girls. Even with breast-feeding, it is the same story; a boy is breast-fed longer. With
girls, they wean them quickly, making them forget the breast. If the boys catch an
illness or a fever, they will run around and nurse them with the greatest care. If it’s
a girl, they’ll do it half-heartedly. (7)

e narrator has a long experience of watching her grandmother, Patti

as she calls her, and other ladies in her community as to how they pay
much attention to the life style of the boys for providing them with proper
and timely food and other things they desired but, on the other hand,
the girls are given the leover food and fruits to survive while they have
to work from the time they start walking. She remembers the biased
behaviour of her grandmother, who always calls the grandsons first,

If she brought cucumbers….and gave them…

If she brought mangoes, we would only get
the skin, the stones and such; she gave the
best pieces of uits to the boys. Because we
had no other way out, we picked up and ate
the leover skins. (7-8).

In patriarchal society the boys are treated as the permanent members

of the family to take care of the parents in their old age and to perform
the rituals of funeral aer death while the girls are transient members or
Paraya Dhan who will be married to someone today or tomorrow and sent
to another family. So they have no important role to play in the family of
her own parents. is concept creates prejudice even in the mind of the
parents who, for the sake of false traditions and customs, discriminated
between their own flesh and blood. Simon de Beauvior in her book
‘e Second Sex’ (1949) rightly makes a comparison between the status
of male and female by saying, “She is the incidental, the inessential as
opposed to the essential. He is the ‘subject’, he is absolute – she is the
other.” (16) e girl child has to follow a number of social taboos and
etiquettes which compelled her to think of her status in the family and

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Kanwar Pal Singh. Bama’s Sangati: A Traumatic Chain of Gender Discrimination

society. Consequently, the girls became isolated, depressed and frustrated

and ask a number of questions as the narrator in the novel, asks her
grandmother,
Why can’t we be the same as boys? We aren’t allowed to talk loudly or laugh
noisily; even when we sleep we can’t stretch out on our backs nor lie face down on
our bellies. We always have to walk with our heads bow down, gazing at our toes
even when our stomachs are screaming with hunger, we mustn’t eat first. We are
allowed to eat only aer the men in the family have finished and gone what Patti
aren’t we also human beings? (Sangati 29).

Simone de Beauvoir, a feminist-author rightly states in her book

‘e Second Sex’ (1949), “One is not born a woman rather becomes
one.” (281). i.e. Woman is not born fully passive, secondary, nonessential,
submissive, frightened and compelled rather she is gradually shaped by her
situational upbringings. It is not only biology that determines what makes
a human a woman - a woman is trained to have a secondary and dependent
creature by her parents and others in her surroundings. Tahira.S. Khan,
in her book Beyond Honour: A Historical Materialist Explanation of
Honour-Related Violence rightly writes:
In patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal societies, women have always been
attached to the male members of the family. Women could never have class,
caste, creed, or language of their own other than that of the men of their family.
(2006:137-138).

e discrimination with a girl is started at her birth and does not end
even at her death. e writer opines that the male child is always given
preferences in each and every field of life
– be it feeding, eating, education, playing and marriage. ey can eat as
much as they need and play what they want and when they please but the
girls have to stay at home to work all the time “cleaning vessels, drawing
water, sweeping the house, gathering firewood, washing clothes.” (7)
Aer completing this, they are not free to play as per their will; rather
they are compelled to play only cooking and getting married, thattaangal
or thaayam. But if anyone of them tries to play boys’ games like “kabadi
or marbles or chellaangucchi”, she is mocked and abused as the narrative
witnesses the people saying, “She’s just like a donkey, look. Look the way
she plays boys’ games”. (7)
Bama highlights socialist-feminism, by speaking of the grievances of the
Paraiya women who are presented as wage earners. ey worked very hard
in fields, factories and building-sites for their livelihood. But it is shame on
male dominated society that they are paid less than men are for the same
work. Moreover, men are free to spend their earned money as they wish
while women have to spend it to fulfill the needs of the family throughout
their lives. Life for Dalit girls is not a bed of roses rather it is harder than
to commit suicide but
Bama makes her characters so strong and courageous that they suffer
their exploitation in hope of a shining line in clouds. ey have to become
labourer even in their homes where their childhood is snatched by their
own. ey cannot go for playing because it is their undisputed duty to take

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care of their younger siblings. Maikkanni is one of those children, who

have to start working from the day she “learnt to work… Her mother had
to go out to work in the fields. It was Maikkanni who looked aer all the
tasks at home.” (70) e narrator says that the mother of Maikkanni is
equal to the narrator in age but she eloped and married when she came of
age. Maikkanni was born unlucky because just aer her birth, her father
developed illicit relationship with another woman and he le to live
wither and never took care of his real wife who had to work hard to take
care of her seven children, because he came and seduced her to procreate
child aer child. Whenever her mother delivers a child, Maikkanni has
to go for a risky work in a match factory where a large number of Dalit
girls, below the age of fourteen, work to earn two times food and when her
mother starts working in the fields, she has to take care of the new born
baby along with working hard at home. She has lost her golden period of
childhood by working in the factory and at home. e write says,
From the time she woke up, she sprinkled the front yard with water and swept it,
and then carried on with all the housework: swept the rest of the house, scrubbed
the cooking pots, collected water, washed clothes, gathered firewood, went to the
shops, and cooked the Kanji. She did it all, one aer the other. (70)

Bama depicts the predicament of Dalit woman in such a realistic way

that we can have a glimpse of the exploitation and subjugation of the
women who faced physical violence like lynching, whipping and canning
by the male members of their own family. e male members can do
what they want, even go for polygamy to have more than one wives as
Maikkanni’s father have, but the woman is not allowed even to marry
someone of her own choice. If she tries to do so, she is cut into pieces by
her brothers and father for sake of their so called respect in society.
e writer recalls the anecdote of Esakki, the only sister of seven
brothers who loved her more than their lives. She was once a happy girl
with her parents and brothers but things change as she starts loving a boy
of Vanaan caste. Her brothers did not tolerate that their sister should earn
defame for family by loving another caste person so they, being angry,
threatened her not to have a relationship with that person. But she eloped
with her lover and settled somewhere in another town. According to male
dominant society, it was a big blot of shame on Esakky’s family. So, to
recover their lost respect in society, her brothers found her somehow
and by pretending to bring her back for the first delivery, they took her
home where, “they gagged her, ties her hand and foot, thrust her into a
covered cart so that nobody could see her, and drove her away into the
jungle.” (53) In the darkness of the night, they became cannibals and
villains. eir love for her sister turned into strong hatred to kill her very
brutally. e narrator’s grandmother is very horrified to explain the crime
of killing Esakki and baby in her stomach. “ey… with one sweep of a
sword separated her head from her body. ey sliced open her stomach,
took out the baby, twisted its neck, and killed it.” (53) is honour-killing
happened because she loved someone out of her caste. If she had been a
man, nothing would have happened to him rather he would have been
free to love and marry according to his will.

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Kanwar Pal Singh. Bama’s Sangati: A Traumatic Chain of Gender Discrimination

Dalit girls are exploited not only by members of their family but
also by the men of high caste who are supported indirectly by the head
(Naattaami) of the Dalit community. ey are not safe at home, in fields
and even in factories. Mariamma, a teen ager, was subjected to molestation
by Kumaraswami Ayya, an upper-caste landlord in his field where she
went to drink water. Somehow she saved herself from being raped and
ran away from there. He did not care of the girl’s psychological and
mental agony rather he was afraid of his own reputation and he, without
any delay, went to Naattaami to make a false claim that he witnessed
Mariamma and Mannikam, having some illicit activities in his field. He
called for a Panchayat which was also biased not to allow the women
to speak in their defense. She had to face humiliation and insult for the
mistake she had never committed and accepted. She was so much shocked
that she spoke nothing, not even a single word came out of her throat
as if she were dead. Her father also beat her and forced her to accept
the crime but she did not. e society degrades the existence of girls and
dehumanizes them. ese insults broke the women psychologically and
mentally into pieces and they committed suicide. “Mariamma didn’t sleep
a wink that night. She even thought that it might be best to hang her by a
rope. She sat and wept all the night long” (27). Within their community,
the power rests with men as the caste-courts and churches are male-
led. It was the height of discrimination that nobody asked Manikkam
who was also alleged to be engaged in the false crime. e Naattaamai
ordered Mariamma “to pay a fine of Rs. 200 and Manikkam only a fine of
Rs.100.” (26) Even the fine is gender biased. Nobody allowed the women,
standing at the back side of the Panchayat to defend her by analyzing the
situation and fact. e narrator who is filled with anger says, “If only they
had allowed the other women who had gone to collect firewood with her
to speak out at the assembly, all the lies and all the truth would have come
out.” (28) She was completely made a scapegoat whom the Parriaya people
watched silently because they were afraid of losing their labour job in the
fields of the upper-class persons.
e exploitation and humiliation of Mariamma does not stop here,
rather she has to pay the cost of saving herself from being raped
throughout her life. ere was nobody to marry such a girl who was
declared to be in sexual relationship with someone else. Even the women
did not show any mercy and compassion towards her. Mariamma’s father,
Samudrakani, was also doubtful of her character and said to Patti, “Is
there smoke without fire? Who’s going to marry her now that she’s
lost her reputation?” (41), so he decided to marry Mariamma with
Manikkam, a drunkard and gambler who is not a human being rather an
animal. e writer says, “It will be like raising a parrot and then handing
it over to a cat.” (41). Aer marriage her life became more pitiable and
full of blows, kicks and beating everyday without speaking even a single
word against subjugation.
ayi, the most beautiful lady in Paraya community, was also victim of
marital disharmony. Every day, her husband beat her mercilessly with a
leather belt leaving “red weals” (42) on her complete body. Just because

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of her beauty, he was doubtful of her character and called her a whore. It
is quite pathetic to be beautiful for woman in Dalit community. One day
when he was beating his wife ayi mercilessly in the street, a neighbor
named Karuthamuthu came out in protest but her husband became more
furious and said with authority, “she’s is my wife, I can beat her or kill
her if I wish. Go and mind your business.” He started abusing ayi
in more disgusting way, “You common whore… you mother fucker’s
daughter. You can go with ten men” (42). us with the help of a
number of characters’ anecdotes, the writer is successful enough to depict
the predicament of Dalit women who are ill-treated and beaten up and
exploited by different men in the society especially by their husbands.
Both the husband and wife worked hard in the fields. e husband went
straight to the Chavadi to have a talk and gossip with others and returned
only for having meal but the wife at home had to wash utensils, clean the
house, collect water, cook food, feed the husband and children before they
sleep, eat only what is le over and go to bed but could not “sleep until
dawn. Night aer night they must give in to their husbands’ pleasure.
Even if a woman’s body is wracked with pain, the husband is bothered
only with his own satisfaction.” (59)
Aer a minute reading and analysis of the novel Sangati, it can be
concluded that it describes a long chain of traumatic events which witness
the marginalization and exploitation of Dalit women in each and every
field of life as the novelist herself experienced in reality. Although the
novel Sangati is filled with the stories of women subjugation, exploitation
and domestic violence yet the sense of modernity is also reflected in this
novel. Bama, through the depiction of ‘Raakkamma’ and other women,
discusses the increasing awareness of women about their power to revolt
against domestic violence. Whenever, her husband tries his limit to
beat her, she protests and revolts in a language full of expletive with
sexual undertones. Bamma seems to make a comparison between the
women of her community and those of upper castes. She, through an old
woman ‘Sammuga Kizhavi’ ridicules the Upper-caste landlords and their
submissive women who are unable to enjoy the simple events of life like
working together, eating food, bathing, singing, and celebrating the ritual
attaining puberty, vivid description of marriage, singing songs, cooking
and sharing food. In rural areas, the Dalit women are self- dependent
to earn their livelihood and take care of family even without men like
Maikkani and her mother. Bama is much satisfied to discuss the system
of widow remarriage and wearing (tali) the sacred thread as a binding
symbol which is not found in other communities. rough this novel,
Bama visualizes the trauma of gender discrimination with all its inhuman
effects and makes a strong appeal for a positive change in different fields
of Dalit women’s life including identity, sexual status, and gender equality
on work place, educational and religious institutes.

References

Bama. Sangati. Trans. Lakshmi Holmstrom. Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Kanwar Pal Singh. Bama’s Sangati: A Traumatic Chain of Gender Discrimination

Beauvoir, Simone de. e Second Sex. Vintage Classics. UK. 1949.

Clarke, Sathi. Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and
Liberation eology in India. Oxford University Press,
1998. https://www.salon.com/2015/03/24/20_disgustingly_misogynist
_quotes_from_religious_leaders/ Accessed on January 10, 2022.
Prasara, V.P. “Modes of Resistance in Dalit Feminism: An Insight into Bama’s
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Issue VI, May – June 2013. Print.
Singh, Bijender. (Ed.) Dalit Women’s Autobiographies: A Critical Appraisal,
Kalpaz Publications, 2016.
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Honour Related Violence. OUP, 2006.

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