Incorporating Dalit Women’s Voices Into Dalit Studies

Wandana Sonalkar

Paper submitted for the National Seminar on “Interrogating Dalit

Studies”, December 10th to 12th, 2007, Madras Institute of
Development Studies

The entry of Dalit Studies into the academia, the establishment

of Ambedkar Chairs and Centres, etc., is, as stated in the Concept
Note for this seminar, a phenomenon of the last two decades or so.
This period coincides with a shift in the scenario of Indian politics
whereby caste became an explicit issue in politics, for the first time
since independence. The assertion of claims to political power by
parties of the lower castes has since been an enduring phenomenon
in Indian politics; new alliances were formed, regional parties also
claimed their share of power at the Centre, and even trade unions
and other organisations split along caste lines.

Thus we can certainly see the development of Dalit Studies as

the outcome of a political struggle. It is true that the emergence of
Dalit Studies can be placed within a scenario of the various new
disciplines that are also finding place in the universities: Area
Studies, Cultural Studies, and , of course, Women’s Studies. The
acceptance of these ‘inter-disciplinary’ projects within academia, on a
global scale, is also the outcome of earlier political struggles all over
the world.

It has been noted that the phenomenon of dalit women forming

their own political organizations and voicing the claim to represent
themselves in national and international forums emerged on the
Indian political stage about ten years ago.1 So it follows that we can
now expect that issues related to dalit women should now find their
way into academic curricula and research projects on both the
empirical and theoretical planes. I submit in this paper that this is an
important area of concern for those who are aiming to bring more
substance, direction and significance into the field of Dalit Studies. I

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go on to outline some theoretical and empirical issues that are raised
--- for Women’s Studies as well as for Dalit Studies, and also for the
older academic disciplines like economics, for example --when “dalit
women’s voice” is given its due political importance.

What kind of theoretical questions are raised by “dalit women

talking differently”, to use a phrase made famous by Gopal Guru
about a decade ago.2 It is important to stress that the claim for self-
representation that was made by several dalit women’s organizations,
around the time of the International Women’s conference in Beijing in
1995 was a political demand; women’s organizations dominated by
upper-caste, urban women cannot speak for dalit women. Dalit
women subsequently also spoke in international forums on human
rights and against racism. Besides the claim for self-representation
which echoes the concerns of Ambedkar when he called for separate
electorates for the Dalits is the assertion of a different identity by dalit
women’s groups as a part of a cultural politics whose importance we
have recently begun to recognize.

Sharmila Rege’s response to these developments was to argue

that the feminist movement should adopt a ‘dalit feminist
standpoint’, that non-dalit feminists should ‘reinvent themselves as
dalit feminists.’3 I think the time has come to explore the
philosophical implications of adopting a dalit feminist standpoint.
Why is the dalit feminist standpoint privileged? The black American
feminist bell hooks puts it like this when she talks of black women:
‘those at the very bottom of the social hierarchy see more broadly the
condition of society since they are not blinded by the rewards of that
society and are consequently less committed to it. They are more in
contact with the truth of society.’4 There is an anarchist spirit
expressed here, a celebration of rebelliousness, so that we can read
the statement leaving aside our post-modern discomfort with a
phrase like ‘the truth of society’. There are problems, however, with
reading it as an invitation for white feminists to ‘reinvent themselves
as black feminists.’

A formulation like Rege’s implies that the dalit woman is

subjugated because of her caste, class and gender, and therefore, just

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as the standpoint of the proletariat is important to a Marxist theory
challenging capitalism, and feminist standpoint theory challenges a
dominant patriarchy, a dalit feminist standpoint can at once confront
capitalism, caste and patriarchy. This, however, does not take us very
far in itself.

As a reviewer of the above-cited anthology on Gender and

Caste remarks, ‘It is somewhat surprising that many of the essays
focusing on the political mobilisation of dalit women draw on a
language for dalit women's difference as the "downtrodden among
the downtrodden" (Bandhu), the subaltern among the subaltern
(Malik) or 'slaves of the slaves' (cited in Zelliot). While one might
wonder, as Rao does, about the possible fetishising of dalit women's
suffering, I would further question the analytical value of such
hierarchies of suffering, which tend to reify the living social
relationships that constitute dalit women's lives, and to locate dalit
women as objects of pity.’5 If we are to steer clear of this, it will be
helpful to look at the lessons of Marxist and feminist standpoint
theories.

While Marx’s project was certainly the emancipation of the

proletariat, his analysis of capitalism did not so much privilege the
standpoint of the proletariat as try and lay bare how the labour-
capital relation is basic to the functioning of the capitalist system.
This leads us to insights on the nature of state power; of the role and
changing nature of the market as it treats not only produced goods
and labour, but increasingly diverse aspects of human life and the
environment as commodities subject to the laws of demand and
supply, obscuring the real changes that are taking place in relations
between people, obscuring the links between production and
people’s needs, the nature of poverty and the generation of new
kinds of inequality as people’s aspirations and mobilities change,
while the old forms of inequality are far from being eradicated.

It will be useful here to quote from a commentator on Marx,

Moishe Postone, who distinguishes ‘between two fundamentally
different modes of critical analysis: a critique of capitalism from the
standpoint of labour, on the one hand, and a critique of labour in

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capitalism, on the other. The first, (which Postone calls “traditional
Marxism”)which is based upon a trans-historical understanding of
labour, presupposes that a structural tension exists between the
aspects of social life that characterize capitalism (for example, the
market and private property) and the social sphere constituted by
labour. Labour, therefore, forms the basis of the critique of capitalism,
the standpoint from which the critique is undertaken. According to
the second mode of analysis, labour in capitalism is historically
specific and constitutes the essential structures of the society. Thus
labour is the object of the critique of capitalist society.’6 The
domination of labour under capitalism takes abstract form that do
not simply veil …the “real” social relations of capitalism, that is, class
relations; they are the real relations of capitalist society, structuring g
its dynamic trajectory and its forms of production.’

Can we undertake a critique of caste society in India in which

the dalit woman’s subjugation is the central object? Something like
this was being envisaged by Ambedkar when he talked of women
being ‘the doorway to the caste system’; but to answer this question
in a contemporary context we should first take a look at western
feminist standpoint theory. The critique of liberalism from that point
of view has moved far beyond the realisation that liberal democracy
divides men’s social existence into a public and private sphere, that it
is in the public sphere that the citizen enjoys rights and equality,
whereas women are relegated to the private sphere. It is of course
well known that one of the earliest slogans of the women’s
movement, in response to such a realisation, was ‘the personal is
political’.

Women, being excluded from the public sphere, are also not
party to the social contract. And so we can understand that the very
legitimacy of that social contract, whereby an individual gives up a
part of his freedom in order to become part of a civil society where
others also respect his limited freedom, depends on a prior
subjugation of women to men. And so the very language of rights
and obligations is coloured by a masculine, in fact patriarchal,
standpoint. Recent feminist standpoint theory offers a feminist
challenge to these premises: it underlines the oppositions,

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dichotomies and separations that liberal political theory is based on.
Besides the public/private separation, the concept of an individual
logically prior to society, the nature of choice and obligation for a
‘free’ citizen, all depend on such separations. A feminist standpoint is
able to question these dichotomies because women speak from the
place of those who are excluded, but also because women living in
present-day society are always making connections rather than
separations. Because of this, a dilemma that appears as a clear ethical
choice between two alternatives for a man, would be seen as a more
nuanced choice between two alternatives having manifold
implications for the lives of all those who are affected by that choice.
This kind of statement does not depend on an essentialist view of
feminine nature, but a recognition of how the woman’s psyche is
constructed in society, from her childhood and throughout her life, as
she is concerned with care and nurture, with relationships and
intimate responsibilities. 7

Can we raise similar questions for Indian democracy if we

place the dalit woman’s experience at the centre of our analysis? The
dalit woman, like other women, is entrusted with the care and
nurture of children in her family, but that trust is compromised by
society’s exclusion of her children, by their being treated as inferior,
polluting and undesirable from an early age. She cannot therefore
see herself as the person to whom the discourse of a nationalist
femininity is addressed: Ambedkar’s appeal to the women who took
part in the Chavdaar lake satyagraha in 1927 was that they must join
the political movement for emancipation of the untouchables, or how
could they tolerate their children being excluded thus? 8 Black
women in the US report a much greater degree of community sharing
of childcare and nurturing responsibilities than among whites; this
may be true for dalit women also, but in Indian caste society,
community sharing is also compromised by patriarchal
considerations of caste and sub-caste.

The dalit woman’s beauty and sexuality are, as Susie Tharu

observes, ‘for the dalit man not sources of joy but of anxiety and
emasculation’. Through the dalit woman, power is exercised over the
dalit man. Thus the private sphere is no refuge for her; rather, for

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her, nothing is allowed to be private. The European myth of romantic
love is an important constituent of the notion of individual freedom:
it partially recognizes the freedom of an unmarried woman to choose
her marriage partner; the man woos her, tries to convince her to
accept him as her mate, but once she has accepted, she agrees to be
subjugated to him, and gives up her freedom to a great degree in
return for his protection. This myth will not quite wash for the dalit
woman, since her husband cannot offer her protection from the
claims of upper-caste men. This way of looking at the question can
perhaps help explain why the dalit woman retains a greater degree of
freedom and equality vis a vis her husband after marriage. It also
explains the prevalence of patriarchal violence even within dalit
marriages: as the man traces a troubled and continually challenged
trajectory of upward economic and social mobility, he feels a
necessity to demonstrate his control over his wife. This is certainly a
better approach than the ‘slave of the slave’ formulation. Although
one of the most stable props of the caste system is the hierarchy
where everyone has room to feel superior to someone else, right
down to the woman of the lowest caste, merely taking note of this
cannot help us understand the contradictory and changing nature of
what has been misleadingly called ‘dalit patriarchy’. Perhaps the
above analysis can lead us to assert that, in Indian caste society,
patriarchy is always Brahminical, or at least is constituted by
Brahminism.

Ambedkar in his speeches on the Hindu Code Bill had

problematised the public/private division for Hindu society,
insisting that it would not be enough to grant Indian citizens
economic equality in the public sphere, social equality must extend to
the private, to the area of personal laws. Since Hindu caste practices
are a part of religion and operate beyond the realm of the family,
religion cannot be treated as an entirely private matter. The use of the
method of feminist standpoint theory can help us to carry his
understanding further, into today’s world of changing caste
equations in politics, of economic neo-liberalism and its new myths
and realities.

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 Just as Marx sees labour as an abstract category in capitalism
and sees the way capitalism makes labour and commodities into
abstract entities whose relationship with each other is characteristic
of and structured by the system, so can we understand the gendered,
caste body of the dalit woman as carrying the crucial characteristics
of the caste system. Non-dalit women, and dalit men, may
sympathise with her suffering because it is more extreme than ours,
but it is equally important to protest against the violence committed
on her because this violence demonstrates again and again how caste
society functions, how its injustices are renewed and reified with
every such act. An event like the massacre of members of the
Bhotmange family in September last (September 2006) needs to be
thoroughly understood in all its ramifications. The initial provocation
for the attackers was the upward economic mobility of a dalit family
and the defiance of Surekha and her daughter Priyanka who flouted
all kinds of unspoken rules when Priyanka rode a bicycle. The fact
that they were (publicly) raped before they were murdered reminds
us of how the caste system is perpetuated by a constant threat of
gendered caste violence. The role of the state apparatus at different
levels in destroying evidence , and bribing or intimidating witnesses
reveals the nature of our democracy, the potential limits to our
democratic rights, the flawed understanding of individual liberty
that underlies our citizenhood. The extent of public protest and public
indifference that followed tells us about our political culture today.

There is another sense in which women, and among them dalit

women, play a central role in perpetuating the caste system . The
preservation of caste identity is largely entrusted to women through
food habits, the organisation of the home and especially the kitchen
or the cooking area, the passing on of folk medicines and other lore,
the celebration of festivals, and so on. The durability of the caste
system lies in that it is not always perceived as humiliating, even for
the lower castes. The culture of one’s caste is the field, in Bourdieu’s
sense, in which men and women play out their lives, adopting
strategies of survival, of bonding with others, including those from
other castes, forming sexual liaisons, developing skills, respecting
and shaping traditions, even if all this is ultimately regulated by a
Brahminical patriarchal order. I think that empirical studies that

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focus on the circumstances of living and the strategies adopted by
dalit women will tell us a lot not only about caste and dalit-ness, but
also about how the new economic order is really affecting ‘us’ --- in
terms of changing work relationships, about the detailed structure of
poverty and deprivation; about which opportunities are opening up
and which closing down. This may be a useful new direction for
economists to take, to carry out poverty and livelihood studies that
are women-focused and explicitly informed about caste. This kind of
research would also call for methodological innovations and
investigation by committed dalit-bahujan scholars: this would be a
real challenge for departments of Dalit Studies. 9

Assessing the impact of economic reforms in these ways would

enable us to engage with the neo-liberal claim that a market economy
opens up choice. What kind of choices does a dalit woman have? We
have hinted at this question in the context of political freedom,
consent and obligation earlier in this paper. There is a need for
theoretical work that brings home to us the profound and varied
implications of dealing with the question of choice, especially in
relation to the object of our critique, the dalit woman and her body in
caste society. A recent event on which older women’s organisations
in Maharashtra with a largely upper-caste membership and the
newer dalit-bahujan women’s organisations took up opposite stands
will serve to emphasise this.

In 2005, the Government of Maharashtra decided to impose a

ban on ‘bar-dancers’: women who are hired by bars and restaurants
serving drinks to perform dances to the music of Bollywood films, for
the entertainment of customers. The practice had become common in
the cities and small town of Maharashtra only within the last few
years; not all bar-dancers crossed the line into prostitution, and some
of them supported families on their income from this occupation. The
government’s motive for imposing the ban was typically
Brahminical-patriarchal-puritanical: these girls, said the state Home
Minister, are ruining the morals of ‘our’ young men.

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 Women’s organisations in Mumbai came out to protest against
the ban, while several dalit-bahujan women’s groups, as well as the
Communist Party of India (Marxist) supported the ban. There were
heated and sometimes acrimonious exchanges between the two
groups of feminists.10

The main arguments of the women’s organisations opposing the

ban will be familiar to western feminists. ‘Moral policing’ by the state
should be resisted; women have the right to earn their living in the
way they choose; in any case, women today have little choice of
occupation, and the ban would throw thousands of women out of
work. The dalit-bahujan women’s groups, on the other hand, argued
that this was a route that attracted girls, especially from lower
middle-class families and the lower castes, firstly to a semi-
respectable occupation but which later led them into prostitution.
These groups’ response to the government ban was to welcome it,
while rejecting its moralistic justifications, and to demand that the
government make arrangements for the girls’ rehabilitation.

The important point here is that the two groups were placing
their responses to the ban within the frameworks of different feminist
histories. The first evokes ‘the right to one’s body’, the individual’s
freedom of occupation, the resistance to moralistic control by a
patriarchal state. There is also the designation of prostitution as
‘commercial sex work’, on a par with other exploitative ways in
which women have to earn their living. The dalit-bahujan groups, on
the other hand, were aware that there are traditional, religiously
sanctioned practices that sexually exploit women of the lower castes;
with the growth of modern cities, many of these women end up as
prostitutes. However, the position that they took, welcoming the
government ban, needs to be criticised along with the other groups’
unquestioning adoption of liberal notions of individual rights and
choice. Are the educated, middle-class members of the dalit-bahujan
women’s associations unconsciously adopting a form of Brahminical
morality? One of their objections appeared to be an aesthetic one: the
dances performed by these girls were ‘vulgar’, lacking the artistic
qualities of folk art forms like the tamasha which were performed by

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lower-caste women, no doubt within a tradition of sexual
exploitation by upper-caste men.

What I have tried to suggest in this essay is that Dalit Studies

needs to accord more importance to dalit women’s voice and to dalit
women as an object of study within a more thought-out theoretical
framework, drawing on the insights of Marxism as well as feminist
standpoint theory. I have only tried to hint at some of the troubling
questions that could be opened up by such explorations, for political
theory, for economics, as well as for Dalit Studies itself, and for Dalit
Studies’ engagement with traditional academic disciplines.

Notes and References

1. see for example, Anupama Rao’s Introduction to the (2003) collection ,
Gender and Caste, kali for women, Delhi.
2. Guru, Gopal (1995) “Dalit Women Talk Differently”, in Economic and Political
Weekly, October 14-21(reproduced in Rao, see above).
3. Rege, Sharmila, 1998, “A Dalit Feminist Standpoint”, in Seminar,
November reproduced in Rao, see above).
4. hooks, bell (2000),Feminism is for Everyone: Passionate Politics, Boston.
5. Sturman, Rachel (2004), ‘World of Dalit Women’, Economic and Political
Weekly, December 11, 2004
6. Postone, Moishe, (1996)Time, Labour and Social Domination, Cambridge
University Press.
7. Hirschmann, Nancy J.(1999) Rethinking Obligation, Cornell University Press.
8. Pawar, Urmila and Meenakshi Moon,(2008) We Also Made History, translated
from the Marathi by Wandana Sonalkar, Zubaan Books, Delhi, forthcoming.
9. A preliminary rudimentary study of this kind is being carried out in
Maharashtra in preparation for an anti-Caste Conference to be held at Dr.
Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University on 17th to 19th January, 2007.
10.The Dalit-Bahujan Mahila Vichar manch, Mumbai, has brought out
pamphlets explaining their position.

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