Viramma: Life of an Untouchable

by Jean-Luc Racine, Josiane Racine, John L. Varriano

Viramma tells her fascinating life story with the unsentimentality, humor and dramatic sense of a born 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.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, India, Memoir

320 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1997

Reviews

[Prabhjot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read. However, the focus on religious practice, although important, took away from other aspects of life and felt overemphasized in its level of detail and length.

[Madi Mae · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend this memoir

[Claire S]

Interesting - an excerpt of this is in the Granta book that I'm reading..