Dalit Black Project

Forming a depressed class of their own, both Dalit and Black women have been ghettoized (bowed down and chained to patriarchy) owing to their caste and blackness respectively and due to their gender; but now as this paper seeks to reveal (as seen in Bama’s ‘Sangati’ and Naylor’s ‘The women of Brewster place’) they journey towards achieving selfhood and individuality by promoting a collective consciousness.
Bama’s, ‘Sangati’ and Gloria Naylor’s ‘The Women of Brewster Place’ and a comparative study of both these discourses from the margins reveal that the underlying differences between them are minimal. The novels aim at bringing about change, solidifying dreams for the future in which women are not walled out but become a part of mainstream society, with a voice of their own. The predicament of Dalit women is not different from that of Black women. Looking back in history Black women (slaves from Africa) were oppressed and to this day, following a trajectory, Dalit women (slaves in their own motherland) are trampled upon by the colossus (Caste and Patriarchy). According to Sircar, ‘Violent gang rapes, wife murders, child abuse...bride burning, infanticide, foeticide and abetted suicides plot the lives of innumerable unfortunate women in India and all other parts of the world’   ( 91, Narang ). Both Dalits and Blacks have a history of their own; a history in which they are bent down by the weight of oppression. But, even in these chronicles, the oppression of women remains unwritten as the major focus is laid on ‘his story’. Mary Hlen Washington in, ‘The Darkened Eye Restored: Notes Towards a Black Women’, questions: ‘Why is the fugitive slave, the fiery orator...always represented as a black man? Women are the disinherited’ (Narang,117).
  Naylor is an African American novelist and has obtained the national award for, ‘The Women of Brewster Place’. Described on the cover as a ‘novel of seven stories’, the novel chronicles the life of seven black women (Mattie...