Visibility through Distributive and Corrective Justice: A Reading of Munshi Premchand’s “The Woman Who Sold Grass” and M.M. Vinodini’s “The Parable of the Lost Daughter”

Abstract

This essay takes a look at Munshi Premchand’s short story “The Woman Who Sold Grass” (“Ghaaswali”, 1929) that represents the harassment of a Dalit woman grass cutter that is not reported to the police so that no corrective justice is offered although the woman herself criticizes the caste-based assessment of her identity. The harasser, the upper-caste landlord Chain Singh, offers a form of reparation that resembles distributive justice for a Dalit family after observing the Dalit woman being verbally harassed by working-class “lower-caste” coachmen.  M.M. Vinodini’s short story “The Parable of the Lost Daughter” (translation first published in 2013) is also examined for its representation of upward mobility and distributive justice for a young Dalit Christian woman who belongs to a working-class family and becomes a research scholar but decides to conform to Brahmanical practices on her way to empowerment and to erase her Dalit Christian identity. This seems to imply that distributive justice in India perhaps encourages compliance with upper-caste practices and fortifies the patriarchal category of caste itself. Her abuse by the father and brother-in-law of her close friend encourages her “return” to the patriarchal category of caste. The essay concludes by referring to Dr Ambedkar’s speech “We Too Are Human” that argues for the extermination of the Hindu caste hierarchy. The essay concludes that the visibility of Dalit and “lower-caste” communities, especially women, and their literature and cultural forms has to be amplified through the visible operation of corrective and distributive justice against all attempts to obliterate them.