Viramma

Viramma tells her fascinating life story with the unsentimentality humor and dramatic sense of a born storyteller: her carefree 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 shadow 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 a 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.