Viramma: Life of an Untouchable / Edition 1

by Jean-Luc Racine, Josiane Racine, John L. Varriano, Will Hobson

Overview

Viramma tells her fascinating life story with the unsentimentality, humor and dramatic sense of a born storyteller: her carefree childhood; her marriage before puberty; giving birth to twelve children ‘very gently, like stroking a rose’; adult life as an agricultural worker ‘condemned to bake in the sun’; tales of gods and malign forces, like Irsi Katteri ‘the foetus-eater’, who cast their shadow over her daily life.

Told over ten years to Josiane and Jean-Luc Racine, this is an intensely personal and moving self-portrait, informed by a sense of profound social change in contemporary India. To emancipationists Viramma is a Dalit, one of the oppressed; to Gandhians she is a Harijan, a daughter of God; in her village she is still treated as an Untouchable, a Pariah. In this remarkable book she reveals the world of an extraordinary woman living at the very margins of Indian society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781859841488
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	02/17/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

Translator's note

Maps

1. A childhood in Velpakkam

2. The marriage is arranged

3. `Becoming a woman'

4. The wedding night

5. `He still desires me!'

6. A mother to twelve children

7. The destinies of children

8. Irsi Katteri, the foetus-eater

9. The god of Tirupati

10. Mariamman and Kali

11. The festival of Mariamman

12. The seven virgins

13. A family funeral

14. Demons and dharma

15. The caste of thieves

16. High and low castes in Karani

17. The Paraiyar

18. The blood sacrifice to Periyandavan

19. This kaliyugam

20. `Talking like they did in the old days'

21. Two stories

22. Spells and spirit possession

23. The Pongal of the Oxen and the festival of Draupadi

24. Sharing the harvest

25. The way of the world

Notes

Glossary

Gods

Castes

Routes to emancipation: A Dalit life story in context by Josiane and Jean-Luc Racine

Editorial Reviews

... a staggering book.”—Elle

From the Publisher

In this autobiography of an Untouchable, as told to two French researchers, Viramma discusses age-old traditions and encroaching modernism, life as an indentured agricultural worker and midwife, and a happy marriage that led to 12 children, only three of whom survive.

Library Journal