Bama’s Karukku (Translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom/ Edited by Mini Krishnan)

A beautiful village in southern Tamil Nadu, with mountains ranging around it with names to go by their looks, wells and ponds, where majority of the people are oppressed and agricultural labourers, unlike people from the better-off castes. When there was no call for work in the fields the oppressed people go up to the woods in the mountains and make a living by gathering firewood and selling it. At the entrance of the village is a small bus stand, which is the terminus. Beyond that is a stream. To the left is the settlement where Nadars live. They climb palmyra palms for a living. To the right there are koravars who sweep streets, and the leather working Chakkiliyar. The Paraya settlement is located next to the cemetery. 

The narrator was born in this village as a dalit girl, she grows up, studies, works for five years and enters a convent after learning about how the women there loved the poor and the lowly. But after joining the convent she becomes aware of the true state of affairs there. There was such arguments and dissensions, jealousies, competition, such arrogance, where people accused you of thinking thoughts that you had not thought, of speaking words that you had not spoken… They never asked questions like why do people suffer or what is the state of this country. Finally, she dares to leave the convent, returns to Madurai.

“I don’t know what kind of magic it is that they work upon us in the convent, but during these seven or eight years, my brain has become confused and dulled. In some ways, they actually change you into a different person. ..By being told all the time to repress this and renounce that thought, to act like this, to be like this, eventually we become strangers to ourselves.”

In the author's Afterword to the first edition, Bama notes: I have seen the brutal, frenzied, and ugly face of society and been enraged by it. But at the same time, I have danced with joy because of the sweetness and simplicity of a life that is in touch with nature. Even though I have walked hand in hand with anxieties, I have also recognized a strength and zest within myself, flowing like a forest stream, and this has refreshed me. So, there have been many healthy contradictions in my life."