Tribal Woman: A Dissent against Established Perceptions

Abstract

This article offers a critical re-reading of Kannada feminist thought by foregrounding the experiences of tribal women and challenging the dominant tendency to treat “woman” as a homogeneous category. It argues that much of Kannada feminist discourse, shaped by biological determinism and liberal universalism, has failed to adequately account for the intersections of caste, class, and gender, thereby marginalizing tribal and lower-caste women’s realities. Drawing on folk ballads, oral narratives, and ritual texts such as Korati Kanchiya Kathe, Gaṇḍa Bandanhenge Maaḍalo, EErabaḍappa Kathana Geete, Maleya Madeshwarana Mahaakaavya, and Junjappa Mahaakaavya, the study examines representations of sexuality, marriage, motherhood, labour, and chastity within tribal societies.

Through close textual analysis, the article demonstrates that tribal women are neither uniformly empowered nor uniformly oppressed; rather, they negotiate survival through strategic resistance, subversion, and accommodation within patriarchal and caste-stratified systems. Narratives of sexual violence, agency, and moral transgression reveal how upper-caste and civic-society perceptions construct tribal women as sexually available, while internal patriarchal controls regulate their bodies, labour, and reproductive capacities. The article critiques feminist romanticization of tribal cultures as matriarchal or emancipatory and calls for alternative feminist methodologies capable of engaging tribal women’s lived contradictions. It concludes that a genuinely inclusive Kannada feminism must dismantle caste-blind and gender-only frameworks to recognize tribal women as historical subjects rather than symbolic resources.