Viramma, life of an untouchable

“I walked forward with my head
lowered, my heart heavy and my tears readyu to fall. But I was all alone
in feeling like this: 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 storyteller: 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.