Negotiating Caste, Gender, and Resistance: A Comparative Study of Bama’s Sangati and Vanmam

Abstract
This paper offers a comparative study of Bama’s Sangati (1994) and Vanmam (2002), two landmark works in Tamil Dalit women’s writing. While Sangati emerges as an episodic, oral-history style narrative that foregrounds the everyday struggles, resilience, and collective agency of Dalit women, Vanmam is a politically charged novel that interrogates intra-community conflicts, caste hostilities, and the challenges of building solidarities in a fractured socio-political landscape. Through an exploration of narrative structure, thematic concerns, and linguistic strategies, the study traces Bama’s evolving political vision—from

intimate documentation of lived experience to a broader engagement with structural caste politics. It examines how both works articulate the intersection of caste, class, and gender oppression while envisioning spaces of resistance. The paper also considers the works’ critical reception, their intervention in Tamil literary politics, and their contribution to Dalit feminist discourse.

Keywords: Dalit literature, Bama, caste, gender, resistance, Tamil literature, subaltern narratives