Dalit Women Speak Out

“Women always face violence from men. Equality is only preached, but not put into practice. Dalit women face more violence every day, and they will continue to do so until society changes and accepts them as equals.” — Bharati from Andra Pradesh The right to equality regardless of gender and caste is a fundamental right in India. However, the Indian government has acknowledged that institutional forces arraigned against this right are powerful and shape people’s mindsets to accept pervasive gender and caste inequality. This is no more apparent than when one visits Dalit women living in their caste-segregated localities. Vulnerably positioned at the bottom of India’s gender, caste and class hierarchies, Dalit women experience the outcome of severely imbalanced social, economic and political power equations in terms of endemic caste-class-gender discrimination and violence. This study presents an analytical overview of the complexities of systemic violence that Dalit women face through an analysis of 500 Dalit women’s narratives across four states. Excerpts of these narratives are utilised to illustrate the wider trends and patterns of different manifestations of violence against Dalit women. Published by Zubaan.

Presents an analytical overview of the complexities of the systematic violence that Dalit women face depite the right to equality regardless of gender or caste in India.

These previously undocumented stories reveal the lives of the Dalit—or untouchable women—in India by highlighting the continuing issues of human rights and discrimination. Recording such experiences as working in rice fields and living in slums, this work includes oral histories and covers a wide range of topics, including dowry burnings, marriages, beggars, human traffickers, and political and social activists. An exploration of the effects of Dr. Ambedkar, the architect of India’s constitution and the advocate of positive reservations for untouchables in education and employment, and other historical movements and religious texts on these women is also included.

This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in three villages in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where Dalit women engage in struggles to secure or protect livelihood entitlements such as housing land or work. The research examines the processes of these women organising and evolving collective action strategies to claim access to and control over livelihood resources in different contexts where they face social exclusion.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: We ask you to rethink: Different Dalit women and their subaltern politics -- Part I Imagining a new Dalit women's politics -- 1 Foreword: Dalits, Dalit women and the Indian State -- 2 For another difference: Agency, representation and Dalit women in contemporary India -- Part II Dalit women's conceptualizations of caste difference and their means of collectivization -- 3 Gendered negotiations of caste identity: Dalit women's activism in rural Tamil Nadu -- 4 Liberation panthers and pantheresses? Gender and Dalit party politics in South India -- 5 Microcredit self-help groups and Dalit women: Overcoming or essentializing caste difference? -- Part III A broken empowerment? Are women still trapped by caste and patriarchy? -- 6 Dalit women, rape and the revitalisation of patriarchy? -- 7 Different Dalit women speak differently: Unravelling, through an intersectional lens, narratives of agency and activism from everyday life in rural Uttar Pradesh -- 8 Subsidising capitalism and male labour: The scandal of unfree Dalit female labour relations -- Part IV Religion as Dalit political practice -- 9 Transformation and the suffering subject: Caste-class and gender in slum Pentecostal discourse -- 10 Improper politics: The praxis of subalterns in Chennai -- Afterword: The burden of caste: Scholarship, democratic movements and activism

Roja Singh's critical ethnography on caste and gender is rooted in interactions, and lived experiences in communities of Dalit women in Tamil Nadu, India. Situated in transnational feminist discourses, Singh's perspective as a Dalit woman, provides an intersectional social analysis of power structures that sustain caste dominance in South India today. She describes strategies of social change in Dalit women's activism as rooted in subversive applications of imposed identities of "difference" thwarting social boundaries and punishment traditions. The core of this Interdisciplinary work is Dalit women's songs, oral and written testimonial narratives, including Singh's personal story.

In this path-breaking study, a first in many ways, Anandita Pan argues that dalit women are an intersectional category, simultaneously affected by caste and gender. The use of intersectionality permits observation of the ways in which different forms of discrimination combine and overlap, challenging the apparent homogeneity of the categories 'woman' and 'dalit' as seen by mainstream Indian Feminism and Dalit Politics. This points to the difference between women and dalit women and the latter with dalit men, which leave them unrepresented. The book investigates the questions of 'selfhood', identity, representation and epistemology which reveal the 'savarnanization' of 'Indian woman' and the masculinization of 'dalit'. There is an incisive discussion of knowledge produced about dalit women and the intervention and contribution of Dalit Feminism therein. The book concludes with the question of who can be or become a dalit feminist, intriguingly, not a limited category.

Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics. The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.