Repertoires of Anti-caste Sentiments in the Everyday Performance: Narratives of a Dalit Woman Singer

Abstract

Understanding Dalit women through their lifeworld and life-narratives enables one to understand the caste relations that they negotiate with in their everyday life. Resistance in the everyday life of Dalit women includes how they challenge the existing public spaces, cultural norms, and practices through the creation of a ‘subaltern counterpublics’ space. This space involves collective actions like popular writing, singing, theatrics, etc., to confront the ‘normalised’ caste relationship that prevails within Indian society. The cultural performance becomes the narrative of this counterpublics space in which they intend to reassert their lost identity and dignity. The emergence of alternative public spaces is ‘significant and a necessary condition for democracy’. For Dalit women cultural performers, the everyday resistance practices are deeply embedded in the creation of an alternative worldview, a counterpublics, that both represent their ‘world of (caste) experience’ as well as becomes a space to ‘talk-back’ about their exclusion and humiliation. This article through an ethnographic account, has engaged with a Dalit woman cultural performer and her lifeworld. The article aims to explore the meanings, practices, and challenges that she faces in her anti-caste resistance.