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.