Women, Caste, and Resistance in Bama’s Sangati

Abstract

Bama’s Sangati is a major Dalit feminist text because it records the ordinary lives of Paraiyar women with anger, humour, memory, and political force. The novel does not follow a single plot in the conventional sense. It gathers incidents, conversations, village memories, work scenes, songs, quarrels, and moments of reflection. This structure gives the text the quality of collective testimony. The women in the novel face caste humiliation from the outside and male authority within their own homes and community. Their labour supports families, fields, rituals, and village life, yet their bodies and voices remain controlled by caste power, poverty, and patriarchy. This paper studies the marginalization of Dalit women in Sangati with attention to childhood discrimination, labour, wage inequality, sexual danger, domestic violence, social judgement, and the exclusion of women from public decision-making. It also studies the resistant energy in Bama’s writing. The women of Sangati speak sharply, laugh loudly, share stories, challenge men, and keep one another alive with practical care. Bama’s feminism grows from the everyday lives of Dalit women rather than from abstract theory. Her narrative insists that education, self-respect, collective speech, and equal freedom are necessary for change. Sangati becomes both a record of suffering and a call to remake social life.