The article outlines contemporary situation of Dalit women in India. It points out their most acute problems at social, economic and political level. It introduces four famous Dalit women – Ruth Manorama – a social worker, Kalpana Saroj – a businesswoman, Kumari Mayawati – a politician, and Bama – a writer, and brings their short biographies. As a kind of supplement it also brings an interview with the writer Bama made by the author in 2011.
The article deals with the phenomenon of dalit literature. It tries to define it, notices its main forms and topics, and pays attention to some problematic aspects of this rather recent literary stream. It follows the discussion on who can be considered dalit author and what are the arguments against inclusion of nondalits. Another internal discord among dalit writers, which the article briefly discusses, is that of the name and objective of dalit literature. It also outlines efforts to build aesthetics of dalit literature. Considerable space is dedicated to the efforts to evolve its own aesthetics for dalit literature as well as to its social and revolutionary aspect.
The paper brings and overview of the literary work of one of the most important Tamil Dalit writer Imayam. It highlights several aspects of his writing, namely the style and language. To a certain extent it compars his work with another important Tamil Dalit writer Bama. It takes notice of difference in their view on the role of Dalit literature.
The article deals with reduplication in Tamil. It arranges various types of reduplication into five groups, according to one formal criterion – what is reduplicated. Then it focuses on phonetic reduplication, i.e. partial reduplication where the second word (the reduplicate) copies the phonetic structure of the base word to produce a rhyming pair. It classifies the examples of phonetic reduplication into several subgroups. The first large group contains pairs of fully lexical words, which have been put together because they sound similar and produce a rhyming pair. Here, phonetic reduplication accompanies semantic reduplication. The second large group contains pairs of words in which the second word is a bound word and has no meaning by itself. The eminent example in this category is in relation to echo words. These pairs usually have some emotive connotation and speakers use them to express their attitude towards something. Here, phonetic reduplication can be considered the main formative principle. At the end, the author proposes that phonetic reduplication might have played a role n the formation of numerous onomatopoetic words.