LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 25:12 December 2025
ISSN 1930-2940

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Margins Rewritten: A Comparative Exploration of Gender, Caste and Identity in Joothan and Karukku

Dr. Anshu Sailpar

Keywords:autobiography, Dalit writers, gender, caste, identity

Introduction

An autobiography is a glimpse into a person's life. The term 'autobiography' consist of three words-'autos', 'Bios' and 'Graphe' which means – 'self', 'life' and 'to write' respectively. In other words, the term 'autobiography' refers to self-life writing/narrative. Until twentieth century commonly used term was memoir. It typically tells the chronological story of an author's life-from birth to the present. Autobiographies are infused with the author's personality and perception of himself/herself and the world. Though autobiography paired well with theories such as structuralism, post-structuralism seemed to be a fertile ground for reconsidering the divide between fact & fiction, challenging the possibility of presenting a life objectively. Autobiography attracts the writers and readers, for it reveals the “hidden forms of inwardness” and the writer's self succeeds in establishing the writer's portrait in the public eye (Sodhi 123).

The main problem discussed in this paper is the reduction in formal writing skills and the capability to write clear, coherent, grammatically correct, and properly styled prose needed in high-stakes situations such as college essays, research papers, and professional correspondence. Such a decline is a direct result of the perpetual reinforcement of habits related to social media's endemic informal language, abbreviations, and emojis. On these sites, speed and emotional impact take precedence over grammatical accuracy and structural coherence, and users are tacitly encouraged to dispense with the conventions of Standard English. The resulting habits intrude into formal assignments, characterized by errors such as missing punctuation, phonetic spellings, and sentence fragmentation. These errors are a source of increasing concern to teachers internationally.

After centuries of silence, when the Dalit writers felt the need to express themselves, they could only turn inward and talk about their own experiences. Autobiography thus became a fitting vehicle for this expression. The portrayal of the life of the Dalit individuals was representative of the entire community. In this sense, a private gesture 'me-ism' gives way to 'our-ism' and superficial concerns about 'individual subject' usually give way to 'the collective subjection' of the group. Thus autobiography obliterated the distinction between the private and the public. That was why after setting up of the Dalit Panthers Party, a number of autobiographies were written in Marathi followed by Kannada. Autobiography, for many reasons, has been a favourite genre of Dalit writers. It is this literary genre where they can demonstrate their pain, anguish and humiliation. It helps them to search for their selfhood. Moreover, they want to bring up social reformation by demonstrating their own miseries. For social enlightenment too, they adopt autobiography as a suitable device. They want to enlighten the oppressed and at the same time by delineating their pitiable condition they want to bring change in the hearts of non-dalit readers. In other words, Dalits want to sensitize non-Dalits through projecting their own life stories. Thus the aesthetics of Dalit's autobiographies is linked with their politics. On the one hand, they make an assertion for equal rights and equal status in the society and on the other hand, they protest against inequality and inhumanity and suggest the ways to eradicate it. Thus Dalit aesthetics encapsulates the 'I-we' dialectics, intertwining of individual, community and nation, a transformation of the public sphere through expression of agitation and interrogative rhetoric. It involves as much of speaking, as speaking to, speaking up and speaking for.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. Anshu Sailpar
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Dept. of English & Foreign Languages
Chaudhary Bansi Lal University, Bhiwani (127021)
anshu.english@cblu.ac.in

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