Dalit Women and the Paradox of Freedom: A Comparative Reading of Caste and Gender in Bama’s Sangati

Abstract

Bama’s Sangati has garnered critical acclaim for its vivid documentation of the lived realities of Dalit women in Tamil Nadu, serving as both a narrative and a social testimony. While the work is often celebrated for its unflinching portrayal of systemic caste and gender-based oppression, this paper contends that its most compelling contribution lies in its nuanced articulation of paradoxical freedoms—a form of agency that emerges not in spite of marginalisation, but through it. Drawing upon episodes of labour, physical mobility, childbirth, remarriage, linguistic autonomy, and acts of resistance, Sangati foregrounds how Dalit women forge spaces of empowerment within the harsh constraints imposed by a deeply patriarchal and caste-bound society. In contrast to upper-caste constructions of femininity rooted in ideals of purity, domesticity, and social respectability, Dalit women in Sangati display a distinct autonomy that manifests through their resilience, irreverent humour, collective solidarity, and unapologetic defiance. Their lives, as depicted by Bama, challenge normative definitions of freedom that equate liberation with protection or privilege. Instead, freedom is reimagined as active participation in community life, the capacity to endure hardship without surrendering dignity, and the audacity to rebel against inherited injustices. By centring subaltern female voices and their embodied experiences, this study argues that Sangati subverts dominant narratives of victimhood and foregrounds a radical vision of liberation that is grounded in everyday acts of survival and self-assertion. Ultimately, Bama’s narrative framework compels a rethinking of both agency and freedom—not as the absence of struggle, but as a dynamic interplay of endurance, identity, and insurgent hope within structures of systemic exclusion.