Hunger as Lived Trauma in “Akkarmashi” & “The Prisons We Broke”

Author(s)	Dr. Yasmeen Mughal
Country	India
Abstract	Abstract: Dalit autobiographies foreground hunger as a central axis of lived trauma, exposing the intersection of caste, poverty, and systemic exclusion. Sharan Kumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi (The Outcaste) and Baby Kamble’s The Prison We Broke articulate hunger not merely as bodily deprivation but as a profound marker of social humiliation and existential marginalization. Limbale’s narrative situates hunger within the fractured identity of illegitimacy, revealing how caste hierarchies inscribe deprivation into the psyche of the individual. Kamble, conversely, emphasizes the collective suffering of Mahar women, portraying hunger as a generational inheritance that intertwines with gendered oppression and domestic subjugation. Read together, these texts demonstrate how hunger functions as both metaphor and material reality, shaping Dalit subjectivity and resistance. This paper argues that hunger in Dalit life writing transcends biological need to become a discourse of memory, identity, and protest, thereby challenging dominant literary canons and foregrounding the embodied violence of caste.
Keywords	Keywords: Dalit autobiography; hunger; trauma; caste oppression; lived experience; resistance; identity; gendered marginalization
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 1, January-February 2026
Published On	2026-01-30
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i01.67615
Short DOI	https://doi.org/hbmv9c

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