Viramma: Life of an Untouchable

Varriano, John L., Racine, Josiane, Racine, Jean-Luc

ISBN 10: 1859841481 / ISBN 13: 9781859841488

Published by Verso, 1998

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Viramma: Life of an Untouchable
• Publisher: Verso
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1859841481
• ISBN 13: 9781859841488
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Josiane Racine grew up in Tamil Nadu and researches popular culture in southern India. Jean-Luc Racine is a director of research at the Centre for Indian Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.