Aishwarya M

17HCMA08

Swathy Margaret

1st August 2017.

The renowned writer R. K. Narayan who wrote about small town life in Southern India

was subtle about caste in his autobiography by using refined words, phrases like strictly

vegetarian atmosphere, had to have a place outside the house to have her meat cooked and

mentions just two instances that tells us, readers about his caste from his 186 pages

autobiography. M S S Pandian says that the reason for R. K. Narayan not writing about his own

caste in his autobiography is because caste somehow confines a person into close communities,

which belongs elsewhere, a place found within upper castes and while trying to describe it in

such a way it becomes an act of admitting and denying caste both at once. But when observing

the lower caste autobiographies, its quite opposite of the upper caste autobiographies, the writers

like Bama and Imayam in Tamil use their caste identity as their own social identity; the well-

known fact is when a lower caste person writes autobiographies or about social relevant issues,

he or she is going to talk and engage the readers about the basic issue of caste in their life and the

peoples lives of the same caste. To simply put, one talks of caste in a distant manner and the

other talks of caste in his or her own experience.

In the colonial story, according to the author when self-rule is dominated over

colonization would result as the major domination of various subaltern groups within the nation;

the place where we can find the two competing sources of speaking caste is where there is

powerlessness to implement authority over the lives of people. On the other hand, P S Sivaswami

Iyer kept his place in this modernized Colonial community in terms of his Western avant-gardism
by having his life around watches, regulating every little thing; his life revolved around Ruskins

Sesame and Lilies and Bhagavata Purana which comes as an agitation to colonialism in the

colonized Tamil Nadu.

Then again the piece focuses on how court had its way of making people following the

Western etiquettes, excluded lesser groups of people but the Indian elites had the authority to

participate in the colonial organizations. This act of domination to encourage elite upper caste

people as the culture of the nation became more of a habit rather than a norm. Caste always had

his way of seeping into public domain and it happened in Pollachi during 1933 with some upper

caste people separating the room for other caste people inside hotels. The second chapter is

concluded by saying that the ways of talking caste, one on their own terms was founded on the

divide between the lines of spiritual and material public sphere, the second of all those who get

to choose the language of caste by crossing the lines of spiritual and material in the public

territory by inscribing the language of caste as unlawful.