Narratives of Marginalization: The Dalit Experience in Bama’s Karukku

Bama's Karukku is examined in this study using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a place of discursive struggle against gender, caste, and institutionalized oppression. This study investigates how Bama's narrative techniques reveal and subvert hegemonic power relations, drawing on Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach and Fairclough's three-dimensional framework. Through Karukku's placement in the larger context of Dalit autobiographies and intersectional marginalization, the research clarifies the rhetorical and linguistic strategies that create subaltern power. The results show how Karukku's narrative fragments, code-switching, and linguistic decisions function as acts of resistance, recovering voice and negotiating identity within repressive social institutions.