The Prisons We Broke

by Baby Kamble, Maya Pandit (Introduction)

Writing on the lives of the Mahars of Maharashtra, Baby Kamble reclaims memory to locate Mahar society before the impact of Babasaheb Ambedkar, and tells a powerful tale of redemption wrought by a fiery brand of individual and collective self-awareness. The Prisons We Broke is a graphic revelation of the inner world of Mahars, and the oppressive caste and patriarchal tenets of Indian society―but nowhere does the writing descend into self-pity. Kamble vividly and unapologetically brings to life the rituals and superstitions, the joys and sorrows, the hard lives and the hardier women of the Maharwada. Breaking the bounds of personal narrative, it is at once a sociological treatise, a historical and political record, a feminist critique, a protest against brahminical Hinduism, and the memoir of a cursed people. Jina Amucha, the original first published as a book in 1986, redefined autobiographical writing in Marathi, not only in terms of form and narration, but also in the selfhood and subjectivities articulated. The first autobiography by a Dalit woman in Marathi, Maya Pandit’s masterful English translation made it available to a wider readership for the first time in 2008. This second edition includes translations of Baby Kamble’s Prefaces to the first and second edition of Jina Amucha.

Genres: Nonfiction, India, Memoir, Feminism, History, Biography, Cultural

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Rupparna Datta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard hitting, raw and in your face as always - this book is a translation of 'Jina Amucha' a series of essays by Baby Kamble, a social activist and a Mahad movement supporter. This is the 1st amongst an entire gamut of Dalit literature that's waiting to be read and I am intrigued.

Mind you at no point, will the story let you appropriate the struggle of the characters or make you pity them but would urge you to take action against the ritual purity and pollution agenda propagated to keep secularism and integration at bay. I chanced upon this book while surfing Goodreads and boy, I am glad I bought this book. It is difficult to find on Amazon, there might be very few sellers but do buy and read it for yourself. It would help you understand that the narratives built around casteism are all tools of dominance to perpetuate dominance economically, culturally and above all in our country socially. With the recent Sabarimala verdict and other landmark judgments which are closing in the socio-economic inequity of women and Dalits, its time we open our bookshelves to narratives like this and take cognizance of the injustice around us. The other books in lieu of it - "ants among elephants" and "Mahad"

[Ananya Layek · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The prisons we broke" is an autobiography of one dalit woman, Baby Kamble and translated in english by Maya Pandit.

Written in simple words, it describes the rituals, customs, pain and struggle of everyday life of the "Mahar" community in Maharashtra. It is a graphic revelation of inner world of Mahars. The sufferings women went through during child birth, the oppressed women and their place in the family, the work men and women had to do for the whole day for meagre stale food, the superstitions they believed and how they ruined their lives.. And how one man(Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar) influenced them to get educated and start fighting for their rights.. It will bring you out of kilter while reading.

I was recommended this book by one of my friend and i recommend this to everyone who is interested in dalit literature.

[Zainab Qureshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal read. 10/10 recommend. She goes into excruciating detail regarding the customs and rituals, hardships and the overall oppression of lower castes by the uppercaste Hindus.

[isaac⁷ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*

honestly, i loved every time kamble directly addressed the mahar men or the upper-caste population. read this:

"when the mahar women labour in the fields, the corn gets wet with their sweat. the same corn goes to make your pure, rich dishes. and you feast on them with such evident relish! your palaces are built with the soil soaked with the sweat and blood of mahars. but does it rot your skin? you drink their blood and sleep comfortably on the bed of their misery. doesn't it pollute you then? just as the farmer pierces his bullock's nose and inserts a string through the nostrils to control it, you have pierced the mahar nose with the string of ignorance. and you have been flogging us with the whip of pollution. this is all that your selfish religion has given to us. but now we have learnt how utterly worthless your religion is. and the one who has taught us this, the one who has transformed us from beasts into human beings, is the architect of our constitution—that shining jewel of sheel and satwa, dr. babasaheb ambedkar."

it needs to be done more, whether that is in books, films, shows etc. my prof added on to this and said, "this text forces us to read oppositionally. it is not meant for privileged people who read from hegemonic spaces." this wasn't even written for us; it's an important act of ethnographic preservation of a very recent history. i am going to be thinking about this one for a long time (to the point where i might be doing my symposium conference paper for this course on this book).

there is so much history we don't know. we have so much to learn. this book taught me so much. i am going to continue to read and research on anti-caste movements and literature. learning begins with unlearning (and school failed me miserably there).

the very last sentence of the afterword summarises my thoughts on this book (and also what this book is about): "the prisons we broke produces not only a use value but a moral value for all of us, both for self-interrogation as well as the interrogation of the system that forced baby kamble to write her story."

i genuinely have such good readings this semester.

also, i am nobody to rate this but this deserves to be rated and boosted here because of the low number of reviews and ratings.

[Kushal · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's achievement and importance extends beyond its literary merit (which also is considerable, especially in its finely observed mundane drudgery) like any polemic emerging defiantly from a voiceless people.

[Kakoli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for any Dalit literature reader. Baby Kamble's memoir portrays the inhumane practices of the poverty-stricken Mahar community of Maharashtra, the pathetic living conditions of their women and children, and how Ambedkar is genuinely a God for them.

[Rohit Srivastava · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a book which sheds light on the depravity that the Mahar community has borne in the past. Unimaginable. Aptly titled book.

[Awrup Irfan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are books and then there are books.

The first kind you read, and you are touched, perhaps, in the moment, and then it descends to the bottom of the sea of your assimilations, and lies there as lump, amorphously. The second kinds are the ones that stir you, and change the very atoms you are made out of.

Baby Kamble's, "The Prisons We Broke" is a tempest. A seminal text.

That said, for me, it is more than that. A little detour then.

I was born into what would be a 'Brahmin' family. Though I have, thanks to my parents, always been taught to challenge the rites/ rituals/ entitlements, allowing me to be an anarchist (not in the sense of 'chaos') but in the sense of challenging the status quo of entitlement, privileges, and the violence of the my oppressor class. The more I got acquainted with what my class-caste have done for thousands of years it made it very clear for me that the fight to transform is as much individual as it is systemic. I had to start with the former, as I had a little more control over that. Wasn't easy. And, it is a diurnal fight. So deeply entrenched are the entitlements. So deeply embedded are the strains of Othering, and violence that goes with it. To fight that every day in my behaviour, interaction, language, and existence, is in itself a life-long project, and indeed I am still at it, and perhaps will be till my dying breath. In this process Dr. Ambedkar, Fanon, Freire, Baldwin, Malcolm X, Du Bois, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, and many, many others have helped shaped my critical thinking.

Now back to Baby Kamble's book. Despite all my life-long 'jihad' against my class-caste location, "The Prisons We Broke" delivered a sucker punch. A much needed one. The book lays bare the ugly underbelly of oppression of the Brahmanical and the Savarna class-caste against the Dalits and the Untouchables (sic) that has been going for thousands of years. Talk about systemic oppression—the Indian society is exemplary, uniquely evil. The white supremacists are greenhorns. The heinous part of the Upper Caste-Class oppression of the Dalits, and other Avarnas, is so deeply weaved into invisible social, cultural, economic, religious, and cultural mores, and the cunningness with which the Dalits and the Untouchables have been fenced out of living a life of human dignity is gut wrenching.

Lastly, I feel, as much as I have openly avowed and disowned my caste-class, the dirty strains of the class-caste markers (for example, in our 'surnames') don't leave you easily, and the casteist state of India doesn't make it easy for you to get out of it legally! As much as the Brahmanical and Savarnas have dehumanised the Dalits and Avarnas, they have, in that same process, dehumanised themselves—that is the lesson Baby Kamble teaches us unflinchingly, in this book. And, it must be said, if there is any pity that you might feel, after reading this brilliant tome, trust me, it will be towards my caste-class—the Brahmins and the Savarnas (upper caste-class).

So, do read, assimilate, use your critical thinking prowess, have the guts to fight your deeply entrenched oppressor-class reflexes, if you have it in you—if you want to humanise yourself again. And, don't just be non-caste, be ANTI-CASTE.

[Rahul Singh · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my MA, I had taken two courses where this book was prescribed but I never got around to reading it then. When my eyes, recently, fell on this book, I knew I had to read it and I wasted no time. This autobiography is not a recollection of Baby Kamble's personal life as one would expect. Rather, it's move to talk about the self in the collective sense, both as we and them, makes it distinct as Gopal Guru points out in the Afterword. Now, as for the 'we', it is evident that Kamble is writing about the Mahar community she comes from, so it encompasses the everyday, occasional religious fanfare she was a part of. She writes about this 'we' eloquently in Maya Pandit's translation, right from her observations of poverty, violence, trauma to deliriums of the sacred. She recounts her childhood days in colonial India when epidemic was rampant, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's activism had not entered their consciousness. She writes about, for the lack of a better term, the Mahar habitus which she possessed alongside her village. Coming to the curious term I mentioned, 'them', is something that comes to the fore from Kamble's writing. It's here, I feel, she really captures the truth of what being a Mahar, or a Dalit woman can be. Constantly, she also otherises the religiously fanatic Mahar, the Mahar men, the Mahar mothers-in-law, the Mahar possessed self. In doing so, she cracks open the violence that's fills the everyday lives of Mahar, especially, the young Mahar girls, the daughters-in-law, like Kamble herself who was married at 13, kept getting beaten by her husband but chose to stay in the marriage and not write about it in the book until the translator interviewed her and added as additions to Kamble's text. In otherising these 'them', in many ways, Kamble has also otherised her personal life in this searing account of Mahar tragedy and move toward the Ambedkarite activism. As the title itself suggests, it is an account of not one but of the variety of prisons the Mahar community has broken and I couldn't help but be reminded of Gramsci's writings complied in his 'Prison Notebooks'. Of course, there is no reference to western Marxism or any form of Marxism in Kamble's work itself but Ambedkar influence on her activism brings us eventually to Marxism that inspired him to lead the struggle. As I read the book, I was only in fond admiration of Baby Kamble herself. Such tragic happenings and yet with such humour and wit she captures making the read not sound like a pleading or rant (which the latter is in many ways, I guess) but a candid observation of what prisons her community had dealt and the work that's still left for the Dalit movement to do in the future. Needless to say, this should be an essential for all. Jai Bhim!

[Samantha Vijayakumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Prisons We Broke", as the author, Baby Kamble claims, is not an autobiography of one dalit woman, but of the her whole community, her people.

Through simple words, the author has painted a vivid picture, of the life of the Mahar community in the pre-independence era.
The book brutally portrays the oppression and exploitation experienced by the Mahars and other lower-castes at the hands of the higher-castes, the excrutiating details of their impoverished life, blemished with illiteracy and superstitions.

The author has also vivaciously narrated how Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar influenced her to be a social activist and her community to stress on education to uplift their quality of life, how this one man, through his words and deeds, urged the Mahars to fight for their rights.

This needs to be said that not at any point has Baby Tai Kamble attempted to garner the readers' sympathy. As evidenced by the book, the author wants the world to know of the struggles of the lower-castes and address the issues.

This book hits you on your face and in itself is a revelation.

[Farhana · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the very first page the simplicity of the words pull you in, and as soon as you start embracing the uncomfortable, they smack you right in the face. It is evident that the author wants to address the issues head on and doesn’t want to waste any time getting to the brutal facts. I thought this was more of a commentary than an autobiography because the author, very candidly paints the life of her people her clan and blends in the background while still lending a strong voice to the narrative.

I highly recommend reading the powerful interview with author towards the end of the book.

[Aliyah]

does anyone know where I could purchase the 2008 english version of this text?

[Easwar Balakrishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning insight into a community and people that have been ignored again and again by histories.

[Ariffa Jarena Banu · Rating 5 out of 5]

ALL are EQUAL Before LAW
- Ambedkar 🔥

[Pramod · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for all Gen X, millennials & Gen Z Dalits

[Shilpa Rao · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prisons We Broke is seminal work in caste literature. Baby Kamble has so easily and so well spoken about caste plays a role in everyday life. None of her writing seems voyeuristic or her trying to garner sympathy- also highlighting why stories about Dalits must come from Dalits themselves. Kamble also take about living in the times of Babasaheb Ambedkar and how his life and rise impacted Dalits in her community.

[Aditi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still reading it, haven't made it past the first two chapters. I guess its the readers that feel overwhelmed by the implications of the details she brings to note.

Finished it, loved it, still refer to it. Also a very nice piece by Gopal Guru at the end of the book.

[Prakruti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great stuff.

[Mills College Library]

305.568 K152 2009