Decolonising Literature: Postcolonial and Dalit Feminist Perspectives in Bama’s Karukku

Abstract

This paper discusses the way that Bama uses the stages of decolonisation intervention in postcolonial Indian literature by foregrounding the Dalit Christian womanhood as an area of epistemic, affective, and political struggle (Nayar, 2006; Singh, 2021). Ensuring that it grounds the work of close reading, the postcolonial, decolonial, and Dalit feminist theories, it posits Karukku as a witnessing of the afterlives of caste, church, and nation in the tools of autobiographical practice and one that can speak with the subaltern locations (Priyadharshini & N, 2025). The analysis follows the three lines of decolonising faith, decolonising the nation, and decolonising literary form and draws conclusions that the Bama narrative challenges Brahmanical and Christian hierarchies, the nationalist teleologies, and supports the Dalit speech, orality, and communal memory as providing theory (Singh, 2021). Focusing on a decolonial ethic of resistance, solidarity, and collective self-construction that challenges canonical postcolonial paradigms and requires a renovation of the very body and voice of Dalit women, the article of the book additionally refers to the concept of deconstructing what Dalit women write, what is meant by modernity, and what constitutes a liberation (Singh & Kumar, 2023). Through this, Dalit life writing is repositioned in the text as an important point on which the association between caste, religion, and the nation can be re-explored in the study of postcolonial (Hans et al., 2016).