Listening To The Song Of Singamma
Shefali Jha
DEATH, BEAUTY, STRUGGLE¬: UNTOUCHABLE WOMEN CREATE THE WORLD by Margaret Trawick University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2018, 304 pp., $69.95
March 2018, volume 42, No 3

Enclosures and boundaries have a conflicted meaning for women. Enclosures are often not safe spaces for them and women have to constantly resist boundaries in order to live their lives. The book under review looks at how ‘conventional Tamil symbols—unbroken enclosures like bangles, pots, wedding halls, the kolam or doorstep design—signifying auspiciousness’ (p. 104), are reinterpreted in the songs of Tamil Paraiyar women as signs of deprivation and restriction. How do Tamil Dalit women gain their insights into the real meaning of women’s lives? Trawick tells us the origin story of the Tamil goddess, Mariamman, a Brahman woman named Renuka Paramesh-wari, who in trying to escape her husband’s command to kill her, ran into a Dalit hut and clung to the Dalit woman living there. Her axe wielding son beheaded both women; when he was granted a boon for obeying his father, he asked for his mother back; the Brahman woman was reborn with a Dalit body and the Dalit woman with a Brahman body (p. 40). Is this story trying to tell us that in patriarchal societies, all women share a caste, irrespective of their class and actual caste status? It is this status of domination, experienced similarly by all women, that Dalit women in Tamil Nadu lament in their songs.

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