Bama (Faustina Susairaj)
About the Author
Faustina Susairaj, who publishes under the pseudonym "Bama", was born in 1958 in Watrap Pudupatty. The village lies in the Virudhnagar district of Tamil Nadu, about 75 kilometres south-west of Madurai, near the Western Ghats. Around 80 percent of the population live from agriculture. Rice, cotton, pulses, fruit and vegetables are grown there.
In the village, different castes live in their own streets or quarters. Bama belongs to a sub-caste of the Dalits, the Parayars. Her grandfather had converted to Catholicism. Accordingly, she attended the school founded in 1914 by French missionaries and today run by the Archdiocese of Madurai. Bama's father was a professional soldier in the Indian army; her mother worked as an agricultural labourer.
Thanks to her father's regular income and an awareness of the value of education, she was able to attend school. Owing to her great talent, Bama made the leap to secondary school and from there to a teacher training institute. Coming from a poor Dalit household, she had to endure numerous humiliations and degradations on her educational and professional path. In order to help the poor and fight for justice, she decided in 1984 to join the religious congregation of the "Presentation Sisters". By that time she had already established a livelihood as a teacher. In the order, which had placed its focus on running secondary schools for the more affluent, she could not realise her ideals. When she was posted as a teacher in the city of Jammu (union territory of Jammu and Kashmir) in 1991, she left the order and returned to South India. She was facing the ruins of her life: an existence as an unmarried woman and failed member of a religious order is, at least in rural India, extremely unusual. In this life crisis, fortune favoured her with help: a Jesuit priest from her village organised a transitional job and accommodation for her in a women's hostel in Madurai (Tamil Nadu). To help her cope better with her crisis, this priest (who was himself active as a writer) suggested she write down her experiences. That the result of this therapeutic writing would become the foundation stone of a literary career, no one could foresee at the time. Her life story was published in 1992 under the title Karukku. "Karukku" refers to the leaf of the palmyra palm, a species of tree widespread in Tamil Nadu. The choice of this word also carries a political message: the serrations on both sides of the karukku stem resemble a double-edged sword. They stand for the multitude of injuries inflicted by an unjust society, but also represent the breaking of chains and shackles. Since this first publication, Faustina Susairaj has written under the pseudonym "Bama", which means "someone who radiates brilliance".
Karukku and the Later Work
In Karukku, Bama describes the situation of the Dalits in Watrap Pudupatty: they work in the fields of the higher castes to earn their living. Who calls the shots in village society is unambiguous. Bama also shows how deeply her own Catholic Church is permeated by caste thinking. That the Church was never able to free itself from the caste system is common knowledge. With Karukku, Bama describes how this concretely affects the people at the bottom of society. It is characteristic of all of Bama's books that the reality of caste society is addressed and nothing about it is glossed over or made taboo. The first publication of Karukku was through a small in-house press of the Jesuit order in Madurai and thus belonged to the grey literature. The Jesuit priest from her village made sure that the publication was offered for sale at events. Besides word of mouth, positive appraisals by well-known Tamil literary figures such as Sujatha, Prapanchan and Komal Swaminathan helped spread a work of which it would later be said that it marked "the birth of Dalit literature in the Tamil language".
The response that Karukku had evoked led Bama to continue writing in her free time. Further works appeared in quick succession, such as Sangati (1994), Kisumbukkaran (short stories; 1996) and Vanmam (2002). By the 1990s she had returned to her profession as a teacher. After an initial posting in the town of Oriyur, she worked permanently until her retirement at a primary school in Ongur, a village near Uthiramerur, about 80 kilometres west of Chennai. In the small town of Uthiramerur she lived – totally unusual by local standards – alone in her own little house. Later, in 2019, she was to reflect at length on the extreme challenge of this way of life in a contribution to the book "Single by Choice: Happily Unmarried Women!" (edited by the journalist Kalpana Sharma). Bama has been retired since 2015, and since 2022 she has been spending her retirement near her village of Watrap Pudupatty.
A great step beyond the Tamil-speaking world came with the translation of Karukku into English by Lakshmi Holmstrom, published in 2000 by Macmillan India Limited in Chennai. Instrumental in this was Mini Krishnan, who worked as an editor from 1992 to 2019, first for Macmillan and then for Oxford University Press India. How the collaboration with Bama came about is described in detail by Mini Krishnan in the book "Bama as a Writer and Activist", published by Routledge in 2024. The translation quickly led to Bama's first major national award: in 2001 Bama received the Crossword Book Award. Another Crossword prize went to the Karukku translator Lakshmi Holmstrom. Mini Krishnan writes about the effect of this award (op.cit.): "Karukku took off, lit a streak across the publishing firmament, propelling Bama and Dalit literary writing into a visibility rarely achieved in recent times by a single work." Since the Crossword award, new publications from Bama's pen have been reviewed by India's English-language newspapers. Further works by Bama were now also translated from Tamil into English: Sangati Events in 2005, harum-scarum saar & other stories (a translation of the short stories originally published under the title Kisumbukkaran) in 2006, and Vanmam Vendetta in 2008.
Publications
Works in the Tamil original:
- Karukku, IDEAS [Institute of Development, Education, Action and Studies] Madurai 1992
- Sangati, IDEAS Madurai 1994
- Kisumbukkaran, Mugil Publishers Madurai 1996
- Vanmam, Vidiyal Pathippagam Coimbatore 2002
- Oru Thathavum Erumayum, Vidiyal Pathippagam Coimbatore 2003
- Kondattam, Aazhi Publishers Chennai 2008
- Manusi, Vidiyal Pathippagam Coimbatore 2011
- Thavitu Kuruvi, Vidiyal Pathippagam Kovai 2015
- Oru Thathavum Erumayum, New Century Book House Chennai 2019
- Virutchangalagum Vithaigal, New Century Book House Chennai 2022
Works in English translation:
- Karukku, translated by Lakshmi Holmström, Macmillan India Limited Chennai 2000
- Sangati Events, translated by Lakshmi Holmström, Oxford University Press New Delhi 2005
- harum-scarum saar & other stories (translation of Kisumbukkaran), translated by N. Ravi Shanker, Women Unlimited (an associate of Kali for Women) New Delhi 2006
- Vanmam Vendetta, translated by Malini Seshadri, Oxford University Press New Delhi 2008
- Just One Word Short Stories, Oxford University Press New Delhi 2018
- The Ichi Tree Monkey and Other Stories. Speaking Tiger Books New Delhi 2021
Work in French translation: Sangati (L'assemblée), translated from Tamil by Josiane Racine, éditions de l'aube, 2002. In addition, numerous translations into Indian languages (e.g. Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Gujarati).
Story in German translation:
- Identität, short story from Kondattam (2008), in: Eveline Masilamani-Meyer, Nina Rageth (eds.): "Bananenblätter und Straßenstaub. Tamilische Kurzgeschichten aus Tamil Nadu und Sri Lanka", Draupadi Verlag Heidelberg, 2016
Awards (Selection)
- 1992: Kural Amaippu Award (Pondicherry) for Karukku
- 1998: Honorary doctorate "for literary contributions and engagement in programmes for the empowerment of Dalits" from the "Academy of Ecumenical Indian Theology and Church Administration", Chennai
- 2001: Crossword Award for Indian Language Fiction for Karukku
- 2001: Dalit Murasu Kalai Illakkiya Award (Dalit art and literature prize)
- 2011: Woman of Sangam Age Award, Central Institute of Classical Tamil, Chennai
- 2018: Golden Woman Award, presented by News7 Tamil (Tamil-language television channel)
- 2022: Aval Award, presented by Aval Niketan (Tamil-language women's magazine)
Secondary Literature
- Bama Writer as Activist. "Writer in Context" Series. Edited by Raj Kumar, S. Armstrong. Published on 31 July 2024 by Routledge India. Published 2025 by Routledge Abingdon-on-Thames, England and Routledge New York, USA
Reading Excerpt
One day I was walking through the street of the Pallas and came, my bag slung over my shoulder, into our street, the lane of the Parayas. At the opposite end a threshing floor had been set up. The Naicker was supervising the whole thing, sitting on a piece of sacking spread out on a stone ledge. Our people were working hard, driving the cattle, yoked in pairs, round in circles so that they would tread the grain out of the ears. The animals wore muzzles so that they could not eat any of the grain. I stood there for a while, watching the fun. Just then an elderly man from our street came towards us from the market. When I saw the way he was moving along, I could have doubled up with laughter. I could have screamed with laughter at the sight of such a tall man carrying a small packet in such an unusual way. Because the wrapping paper was stained with oil, I guessed that it might contain vadai or green banana bhaiji. He finally came to the threshing floor. He was holding the packet by a string – without touching it. I stood there asking myself: if he holds the packet like that, won't it fall apart, so that the vadais roll onto the ground? The elderly man went straight up to the Naicker, bowed low and held the packet out to him, supporting the hand holding the string with his other hand. The Naicker opened the packet and began to eat the vadais. After I had watched all this, I finally made my way home. My elder brother happened to be there. I told him the story with all its comical details. I could hardly contain my laughter as I pictured the tall man, an elder at that, who had made such a spectacle out of the mere carrying of a packet. Annan, however, did not find it funny at all. He gave me to understand that the man did not in fact want to appear funny at all when he carried the packet in that particular way. He said that the Naickers were counted among the higher castes and that they therefore must not come into contact with the Parayas. If this happened nevertheless, they would be polluted. That was the reason why the man had to carry the packet by a string. When I heard this, I no longer wanted to laugh and felt very sad. How could anyone believe that it would be abhorrent for a Paraya to hold this packet in his hands, even though the vadai had first been wrapped in a banana leaf and additionally in paper? I felt so provoked and angry that I wanted to go back to the place and touch those damned vadais myself there and then. Why should we have to run errands for these people, I asked myself. How was it possible: such a respected elder from our community humbly goes into a shop to buy something to eat and hands over this food with reverence, bowing and making himself small – to a fellow who does nothing but sit there and stuff the food into his mouth? The mere thought of it made me furious. How was it that these types were so full of themselves? Just because they had scraped together a mere four coins, should they lose all human feeling? What did it mean that they called us "Paraya"? Had this name become so offensive? We are human beings too. Our people should never run any errands for these persons. We should work in their fields, receive our wages for it, and leave it at that.
The story is an excerpt from Karukku, translated into English by Lakshmi Holmström, Macmillan India Limited Chennai 2000, p. 12f. German translation from the English: Hans Escher. First published in: MEINE WELT – Zeitschrift des Deutsch-Indischen Dialogs, December 2002. English rendering above based on the German version.
Glossary:
- Pallas: a community belonging to the Dalits, usually working as agricultural labourers
- Paraya: likewise a Dalit caste, working as agricultural labourers
- Naicker: the caste of landowners; the dominant caste in the author's village
- vadai: savoury lentils in the form of dumplings
- green banana bhaiji: savoury spiced, deep-fried pieces of green banana
Hans Escher
Further Links
📄 Download this author portrait as PDF (in German)