As a preface to Ms. Militancy, Kandasamy announces- “I work to not only get back at you; I actually fight to get back to myself. I do not write into patriarchy. My Maariamma bays for blood. My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on a stranger’s lap. All my women militate. They brave bombs, they belittle kings. They take on the sun, they take after me.”
Meena Kandasamy is the dynamic young dalit woman poet who is in pursuit of the reality of her dalit feminine self. By looking closely at her poetry, this paper would try to understand the modalities of feminine subaltern self as negotiated by a twenty-first century Dalit poet. Her poetry attempts to subvert and assert her caste, gender and regional identities. The introduction to ‘Ms. Militancy’ states that, “she de-romanticizes the world, de-mythifies the religious and the literary traditions by re-appropriating the hegemonic language in a heretical gesture of Promethean love for the dispossessed.” Indeed. Gilbert and Gubar in ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’ point out how ‘to be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead’- and Kandasamy’s poetry, with all its performative traits, is too animated, too lively to be called just alive. The two authors talk about the engagement of women writers ‘in assaulting and revising, destructing and reconstructing the images of women inherited from male literature- especially the paradigmatic polarities of the angel and the monster.’ Kandasamy sees through the binaries and