“Auto-ethnography invites writers to see themselves and everyone else as human subjects constructed in a tangle of cultural, social and historical situation and relation contact zone.” (Brodkey, 1996:29).
Auto-ethnography is a form of research where the writer uses self-contemplation and his own work to disclose his own experience and relate it with the wider cultural ethos, political praxis and aesthetic strategies. While auto- ethnography contains elements of autobiography, it still goes beyond the ‘selves’ where it becomes the collective experience. Ellis and Bochner have divided auto-ethnography in two different approaches of ‘evocative’ and ‘analytical’ approaches. Evocative approach encompass writers owns story and analytical approach comprehend the extensive sets of social aberrant.
Most of the Dalit autobiographies rather than rendering the personal ‘I’ emphasis on collective experience of the Dalits. In this autobiographies the orator is the leading character testify occurrence delineated.
Enunciating about Dalit women writers, as scholars like Gopal Guru and M.S.S. Pandia affirms that Dalit women’s autobiographies dissimilitude from the autobiographies of Dalit men’s where Dalit men confabulate more about “self’s”. Rather than community, at the contrary Dalit women in their chronicle locus their community at the median rather than self. These Dalit women writers not only wrote about their own suffering but about the suffering of their people. These writers’ questions caste hierarchy and accomplice the modification of independent person, yet becoming the voice of marginalized coterie.
Bama’s “karukku” and Pawar’s “The Weave of My Life: A Dalit woman’s Memoirs” are example of auto -ethnography. Where the “I” of account itself proffer the voice of collective. Bama and Pawar trace their personal repression, subjection along with the Dalit women of their own community. Their work becomes exegesis repugnant experience of Dalit women in general. Bama says in her interview affix to her third novel ‘Vanmam’, “Before 1993, I was unknown, Today, when I say “I”, it includes people like me. All these things together form our collective identity and help us all to act together. I cannot claim for myself of an individual, a Dalit woman, I am part of collective awareness I carry their voice”. (Vanmam, p. 151). Even in ‘Karukku’ in first chapter, she starts with unified “our”. “Our village is very beautiful” (p.1), or when she talk about her community she say: “Most of our people are agricultural labourers” (p.1). Even Pawar don’t start with “I” but she start her narration by delineating women of her village. “Women from our village traveled to the market at Ratnagiri” (P.1).
Dalit women writers also use their own regional dialect in their work, similar to that of African American women writers like Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor who characterize their own dialect in their works. This writers use their own dialect to establish the unique voice of their community it also become the momentous element of auto-ethnography. Same use of regional dialect we can ponder in Bama’s and Pawar’s autobiographies.
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