Viramma: Life of an Untouchable

by Jean-Luc Racine, Josianne Racine

“I walked forward with my head lowered, my heart heavy and my tears readyu to fall. But I was all alone in feeling like around me it was a holiday, the streets were swept and strewn with coconut leaves, the sky was blue and cloudless ... As if I was in a trance, I felt hands putting the tali around my neck and tying three knots in the string. Without thinking I prostrated myself before the burning camphor. We were married.” Viramma recalls her marriage at the age of 11 .

Virrama tells her fascinating life story with the unsentimentality, humour and dramatic sense of a born her care free 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 shadows 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 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.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, India, Memoir

320 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1997

Reviews

[Prabhjot]

Interesting read. However, the focus on religious practice, although important, took away from other aspects of life and felt overemphasized in its level of detail and length.

[Madi Mae]

Highly recommend this memoir

[Claire S]

Interesting - an excerpt of this is in the Granta book that I'm reading..