Ethnographic Tradition of Positive Hailing: Dalit Women, Caste-gaze Inversions and Celebrations of Body and Identity in Viramma: Life of an Untouchable, India

This article engages Viramma: Life of an Untouchable (1995), one of the earliest ethnographies to foreground a Dalit woman’s voice, marking thirty years since its publication. Viramma’s oral testimonies in this work continue to influence Dalit women by fostering positive body image, participatory knowledge production, and self-love. Ethnomusicologist Josiane Racine and anthropologist Jean-Luc Racine present Viramma’s life through affirmative stories that invert the caste-gaze that has traditionally cast Dalit women as passive victims marked for sexual violation. This article argues that through her narrative, Viramma inaugurates an ethnographic tradition of “positive hailing” calling attention to Dalit women’s embodied self-understanding and agency as vital to Dalit feminist ethnography. Her life stories enunciate Dalit women’s values, beliefs, and political agency, as countering both casteist and caste-neutral feminist frameworks, and redefining knowledge production as solidarity, healing and shared life. Viramma’s deliberate linguistic and narrative choices become acts of resistance that challenge casteist tropes attached to Dalit womanhood. In meticulously constructing her life narrative, Viramma establishes a tradition of self-chosen visibility that resists caste-imposed invisibility and stigma; she affirms Dalit female-focused ritual practices as necessary for life-sustenance.