Abstract
Research in black South African and Indian Dalit women’s autobiographic writing is now an
established field, at least since the late 1980s, with the challenges posed by black and Dalit
women writers and scholars compelling a rethinking of received feminist assumptions about
the very subject of feminism, against the backdrop of what Anupama Rao calls “competing
inequalities.” It is against this background that this thesis endeavours to conduct a
comparative study of a selection of autobiographies by black South African and Indian Dalit
women, taking my cue from Gillian Whitlock’s call for a politics and an ethics of reading
across autobiographic works – in her case black South African and indigenous Australian
women’s – as “contact zones” characterised by similar political concerns and textual
strategies. It is this approach that I bring to my study of the autobiographies of black South
African and Indian Dalit women as resistance or counter-narratives, but also as opening up
new spaces for the imagination of equality that Rao refers to above. However, throughout my
discussion I remain mindful of what Whitlock calls “the local and contingent,” and, to this
end, I examine important lines of convergence and divergence between and across the six
autobiographies. To achieve this, I adopt an analytical strategy by means of which I
foreground both the spatial and conceptual locations in which the autobiographies circulate:
the rethinking of historiography in Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life and Ellen
Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman; prison and its metaphors in Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We
Broke and Emma Mashinini’s Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life; and the idea of Bildung
in Soosairaj Bama’s Karukku and Sindiwe Magona’s two-volume autobiography, To My
Children’s Children and Forced to Grow.