Authors: Anup Kumar Bali
Author Affiliation: Pursuing PhD in Literary Art at the School of Culture and Creative Expression, Ambedkar University Delhi
Abstract: Tribeness (tribal-as-her-essence) of tribal or indigenous society illuminates itself in its own specificity. In accordance to variations of tribal societies spread all over the Indian subcontinent, the specificity of tribal society demarcates and highlights itself in a spatial, temporal and in a socio-cultural structures of respective tribal society. Santhal tribal women poet Nirmala Putul, through her poems unveil the politics of tribal image-formation in postcolonial discourses and at the same time subaltern consciousness of her poetry also renders the exploitation of tribal women labour and her pain of migration by demarcating the specificity of tribal women while questioning the upper caste, upper class tendencies of feminism. Through this research paper I intend to reveal the politics of these ‘mainstream’ and dominant discourses in reference to poetic endeavors of Santhal women’s poet Nirmala Putul. In addition to this, this paper will reflect upon the limits of identity politics in context to Putul’s Poetry.
Keywords: Tribeness, Tribal images, Women’s writing, Specificity, Antagonism, Feminist Standpoint.