Embodied Resistance: Dalit and Indigenous Life-Writing in Gita Ramaswamy and Rigoberta Menchú

• In Event: Life Writing from India and Latin America

Abstract

This study brings into dialogue two groundbreaking works of life-writing from the Global South: Gita Ramaswamy's Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary (India, 2022) and Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Guatemala, 1983). Through analysis informed by life-writing theories and comparative subaltern studies, the paper examines how these narratives transform autobiography into radical resistance, blending personal testimony with collective struggle against systemic oppression.
Ramaswamy's account of her involvement in Dalit land struggles in Telangana, offers a nuanced examination of caste violence, Brahminical privilege, and the silences within Indian Left movements. Her self-reflexive narrative not only documents Dalit women's resistance but also interrogates the complexities of allyship in anti-caste struggles. Similarly, Menchú's testimonio preserves Indigenous Maya experiences of genocide during Guatemala's civil war, while challenging both state violence and the limitations of revolutionary movements.
What emerges from reading these texts together is a powerful reimagining of life-writing as a form of decolonial praxis. Both works function as living archives that document state violence while asserting alternative histories of resistance. They reveal how marginalized communities reclaim narrative agency through embodied storytelling where personal experience becomes inseparable from political consciousness. The paper ultimately demonstrates how these narratives from India and Guatemala, though rooted in distinct contexts, share a common project of transforming autobiography into a tool for liberation, offering new ways to conceptualize solidarity across Global South movements.

Author

• Shalini Supriya, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai Campus