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Viramma’s understanding of the world is much related to her upbringing. According to Mines and Lamb, this woman appears in the context of cultural differences between social classes in South India (190). Viramma’s understanding of the world can be seen through her understanding of the past, present, and future, as well as men, women, and family, faith, belief, and spirits, good and evil, body and health, work and survival, and caste, democracy, and state; her perception of the world through the understanding of these concepts would have explained much her views on some changes that have taken place in India recently.
First of all, past, present, and future are interrelated in Viramma’s understanding of the world. Viramma and her people believe that the past and present actions of a person have an inevitable effect on the individual’s future. This suggests an idea that the greatest emphasis was placed on the present which guaranteed a person successful life and even afterlife. Quite interesting was Viramma’s understanding of men, women, and family.
Viramma seems to take the distribution of roles in the family for granted: “The men would be in the fields, the women doing housework, and the ceri would be quiet” (Viramma, Racine, and Racine 4). Her society is patriarchal and the man has the right to make decisions for the entire family, including the marriage of his children. Thus, women possess little rights and freedoms, especially in the choice of their husbands, which presents Viramma’s society as gender discriminating. Nevertheless, this is not how Viramma understands this feature of her people’s life. Instead, such discrimination is viewed as a part of society’s beliefs.
These beliefs, together with Viramma’s people’s faith and spirits also contribute to her understanding of the world. According to her society’s beliefs, all people had the power to cast spells, and spirit possession was a common phenomenon (Viramma et al. 213). In this way, everything unknown in Viramma’s world was regarded as supernatural since this was the only explanation for diseases, misfortunes, and even deaths. Besides, this accounted for people’s ideas regarding good and evil. Viramma’s understanding of good and evil is much related to her perception of magic: the spirits are evil and one must be afraid of the evil eye.
At the same time, certain rituals can bring a person good luck, as well as the good consists in following the customs and leading a decent life. The condition of body and health of a person, in general, depends much on these beliefs because, under the influence of the evil eye, a person may be spelled and fall ill after this. This proves that Viramma’s understanding of the world is rather primitive if judged from the perspective of modern people. Due to lack of knowledge, everything that cannot be explained is related to magic; if something good happens, then this is a reward, but if the evil takes place, this means that the higher powers punish the person for disobedience or inattentiveness.
Finally, work and survival are presented in the environment of the caste division, democracy, and the state as they appear for low caste people. Work is the obligation of the people of the low cast. At this, the division into casts is regarded as natural. This means that Viramma, as well as her people raised in the environment of obedience to old laws, customs, and traditions, could never question why someone is richer, while the others have to work hard to feed their families.
In Viramma’s world, people of lower casts are treated as mere working force, or even as slaves, but they never object to this and continue working diligently for their landowners, because they and their families have grown on the idea that this is right and that their labor is necessary for the welfare of the state. Such understanding of these concepts shaped Viramma’s perception of the world; and again, as in the case with the distribution of the roles in the family, no objections regarding possible injustice or inequity were even thought of, although they perfectly realized that they were treated unfairly.
Taking into account Viramma’s understanding of these concepts, it is interesting to hypothesize what her understanding of some modern changes in the life of her country would have been. How, for instance, would Viramma view the Rise of India discussed by Gurcharan Das? Viramma would have linked this rise to the hard work of the poor who work in the fields because, as mentioned by Das, agriculture is India’s competitive advantage (Das 9).
As far as Jaswant Singh’s nuclear apartment is concerned, this issue would be beyond Viramma’s comprehension because too much politics is involved in it and, as she admitted, she did not “understand very much about that” (Viramma et al 257).
In contrast, the issues discussed by Roy would be closer and more understandable for Viramma who would support the idea that giving the farmers cash to compensate for the land taken from them is unfair (Roy n.p.). Lastly, Viramma would have agreed with Human Rights Watch that gave people like her a status of the “broken people” (Human Rights Watch n.p.) for, though she was pleased with her life, she could not but notice certain discrimination in it, which, nevertheless, she never tried to fight because of loyalty to traditions.
In sum, Viramma’s understanding of the world is closer to that of primal people who rely on their traditions and the experiences of their ancestors. Her understanding of the world was constructed by beliefs in supernatural powers, spirits, and spells that explained the unknown in her world. Such understanding of the world would make it impossible for her to comprehend and explain some modern changes in India, though she would have supported the ideas of the researchers arguing about the injustice of the government towards the poor.
Works Cited
Das, Gurcharan. “The India Model.” Foreign Affairs 85.4 (2006): 2-16. Print.
Human Rights Watch. “Broken People.” Human Rights Watch: Publications, 1999. Web.
Mines, Diane P., and Sarah Lamb. Everyday life in South Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Print.
Roy, Arundhati. “The Greater Common Good.” Friends of River Narmada, 1999. Web.
Singh, Jaswant. “Against Nuclear Apartheid.” Foreign Affairs. 1998. Web.
Viramma, Josiane Racine, and Jean-Luc Racine. Viramma, Life of an Untouchable. New York: Verso, 1997. Print.
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