Disciplinary power and practices of body politics: an evaluation of Dalit women in Bama’s Sangati and P. Sivakami’s The Grip of Change through Foucauldian discourse analysis

Through a Foucauldian reading of Bama’s Sangati (2005) and P. Sivakami’s The Grip of Change (2006a, 2006b), this paper attempts to delineate the permeation and maintenance of disciplinary power in the social structure and assertion of patriarchal politics in the subjugation of Dalit female bodies. The detrimental politics of patriarchal discourse, the paper argues, degrades the existence of Dalit women, and excludes them from the equation of power relations by delimiting their access to society’s productive resources and restricting their sexuality. Disciplinary power, which acts as a patriarchal tool, prescribes acceptable gestures and required behaviour, and through constant surveillance normalizes a dominant male order. It reduces Dalit women’s existence into an amorphous property, readily mutilated and moulded under the whims of a phallocentric order. Discursive practices further constitute practices of body politics, making the female body an object of active site of political struggle. The paper studies Sangati and The Grip of Change as literary exemplars to demonstrate how disciplinary power, as underscored by Foucault’s discourse analysis, intervenes and determines the life of Dalit women. It not only lays bare the covert body politics of patriarchy with the unfiltered depiction of women’s exploitation and atrocities, but also represents a paradigm shift by advocating ways of emancipation for Dalit women.