Birth, Death, and Festivals
Viramma: A Pariah's Life
by Viramma & others (1997)

Alison Karasz

Viramma, Life of an Untouchable is an oral autobiography composed of conversations between a Tamil Indian woman of the paraiyar (pariah) caste and her friend Josianne Racine, a high caste Indian woman who is an anthropologist. The story is twice translated, first from Tamil into French by Racine and her husband and second from French into English. The English translator, Will Hobson, has chosen to draw on a slightly dated vocabulary in an attempt to reflect the "homely" character of Viramma's speech. The result is flowing and readable, and offers a sharp contrast to the self-conscious exoticism by which, for example, Arundhati Roy, in her recent novel The God of Small Things, attempts to create a local South Indian voice in English. Hobson, along with Racine and of course Viramma herself, has really succeeded in this task, producing a book that sounds both authentic and exotic.

The story begins with Viramma's memories of childhood in the untouchable quarter of her native village—a childhood, she explains, which passed "as if I was living in the kingdom of the gods on earth." It moves on to the events central to Viramma's sense of identity: her marriage, then her first menstrual period, her departure to her husband's village, the loss of her virginity, the birth of her first baby. Each of these events is brought to life with a rich accumulation of details, from ritual turmeric baths and foods, to prayers, brass utensils, sweet jasmine, and the unimaginable music of the local untouchable orchestra. The book then proceeds to more general descriptions of village life and culture: funerals, festivals, demon possession, sickness, in-laws, irrigation, and sexual intercourse untouchable style (Viramma describes her husband's penis appreciatively as a "sugar cane"). Also included is some beautiful poetry, along with prayers, anecdotes, curses, and a detailed explanation of how to make a life-sized baby out of rice paste.

Viramma's account of caste society and politics cannot help but horrify. The Vedic image of the caste system as a body, with brahmins as the head, the merchant castes as the hands, and untouchables as the feet, has been used by apologists to characterize it as a harmonious whole—something like a worker's cooperative crossed with a big happy family. But the elements of greed, coercion, and violence underlying the caste hierarchy discredit this image. Part of the fascination of Viramma's character, however, is that she herself subscribes to it. She makes the caste system seem psychologically, though hardly morally, plausible:

People from the political parties who want to change the lot of the pariahs and mix them up with other castes...will destroy everything, the peace and harmony we have here. Everyone does their trade: the one who cuts hair will be in the barber's caste; the one who washes linen will stay a launderer, the one who quarters dead cows will be a cobbler; the one who crushes sesame oil will be in the oil pressers' caste. And there will have to be a landowner to put 20 people to work. That's how castes are made...

A pariah's life is hemmed in by shame: shame comes from every social quarter. "There you are" says the landowner's wife, "always showing off your nipples to the men! Hide yourself! Show a little modesty! If you put on a blouse, your breasts wouldn't look as big and you'd be better off!" But putting on a blouse makes Viramma vulnerable to humiliation from old women among the untouchables, who wonder why she's getting so high and mighty. At the same time, pariah men who let themselves appear fully dressed before caste villagers are taunted, "Do you think you're as good as we are now, in your fine clothes?" Viramma, however, appears unaffected by such treatment. Shame is a great destroyer of pleasure, but she does not hesitate to declare the delicious joy of shameful things: dancing, cursing, pork, sex, and nakedness. Her story is variously strange, beautiful, and horrifying, but it makes its most powerful impression through her ability to pass, seemingly unscathed, through shame, like the high caste firewalkers in the village festivals who tread on coals without burning their feet. "Shameless," Viramma is mysteriously unashamed.
 

Alison Karasz is a clinical psychologist and a post-doctoral fellow at the Rutgers Institute of Health.

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