Volume II Issue IV October-December 2022

Name of Author : Dr. Gils M. George

Title of the paper : Negotiating the Cultural Hegemony: An Analysis of Dalit Autobiographies of Urmila Pawar and Baby Kamble

Abstract: Cultural Hegemony, as developed by Antonio Gramsci denotes a cultural domination of society by a privileged group thereby influencing and controlling the ideology and value systems. The value systems of the dominant sections become a manipulated misrepresentation as the established norms of society. The caste and religious system in India have a hegemonic dominance over the Indian society. The caste or Varna system in India has treated different people in different ways according to their rank and category to which they are born into. Backward castes or Dalits have been at the suffering end of this cultural hegemony of caste system in India. Hinduism for centuries had been clutching the under privileged sections into suffering and humiliation. After centuries of suppression, the Dalits came in the struggle for emancipation under the liberation movement established by B.R. Ambedkar who believed that only education and conversion could bring about a change in the oppressed lives of the Dalits. Dalit sections have used religious conversion as a subversive tool to transform or contradict the established orders of society. Subversion thus becomes a process by which the set values and principles are questioned and reversed in an attempt to transform the established orders of hierarchy and social norms. The subversion found by the Dalit was to turn away from that clutches and take refuge in religions like Buddhism or Christianity. This paper examines religious conversion as a subversion tool to tackle the cultural hegemony of Indian caste system, by analysing the autobiographies of female Dalit writers Urmila Pawar in The Weave of My Life and Baby Kamble in Prisons We Broke.

Keywords : Subversion, Hegemony, Dalit, Religious Conversion

DOI :

Page No. : 52-55