Dalit Feminist Theory

A Reader

Sunaina Arya, Aakash Singh Rathore, Sunaina Arya, Aakash Singh Rathore

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000651485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Dalit Feminist Theory: A Reader radically redefines feminism by introducing the category of Dalit into the core of feminist thought. It supplements feminism by adding caste to its study and praxis; it also re-examines and rethinks Indian feminism by replacing it with a new paradigm, namely, that caste-based feminist inquiry offers the only theoretical vantage point for comprehensively addressing gender-based injustices.

Drawing on a variety of disciplines, the chapters in the volume discuss key themes such as Indian feminism versus Dalit feminism; the emerging concept of Dalit patriarchy; the predecessors of Dalit feminism, such as Phule and Ambedkar; the meaning and value of lived experience; the concept of Difference; the analogical relationship between Black feminism and Dalit feminism; the intersectionality debate; and the theory-versus-experience debate. They also provide a conceptual, historical, empirical and philosophical understanding of feminism in India today.

Accessible, essential and ingenious in its approach, this book is for students, teachers and specialist scholars, as well as activists and the interested general reader. It will be indispensable for those engaged in gender studies, women's studies, sociology of caste, political science and political theory, philosophy and feminism, Ambedkar studies, and for anyone working in the areas of caste, class or gender-based discrimination, exclusion and inequality.

Part I
Indian feminism vs Dalit feminism

As explained in the Editors’ Introduction, the present Reader attempts to correct defects within Indian feminism by introducing the category Dalit into the heart and centre of Indian feminist thought. Mainstream feminists fail to reflect closely upon a key aspect of the Indian patriarchal system, due to their refusal to acknowledge the centrality of the caste-based social order peculiar to India. Thus, they lose the important insight that caste-based feminist inquiry is the only way to comprehensively resolve gender-based injustices, and to facilitate us (all of us) in theorising Indian feminist discourse.

Part I presents three different challenges to theorising feminism in India along the lines indicated earlier. These challenges are posed not by just anyone but by foremost feminist theorists of India. Take for example Nivedita Menon, a lead-ing Marxist feminist, who identifies capitalism as the most salient perpetuator of patriarchy in the South Asian context, and expresses strong resistance to intersectionality, which she dismisses as a tool for governmentalising and depoliticising gender (Chapter 1). Although they fully support efforts toward cultivating a Dalit feminist theory, a serious intellectual obstacle is nevertheless posed by Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana. The authors forward a major hurdle for theorising gender as such, arguing that the primary subject of feminist inquiry, i.e., woman, is not a homogeneous category, due to its substantive linkage with caste, class and community factors (Chapter 2). As Tharu and Niranjana provide no clues for how this challenge may be faced (though Tharu will later take some steps in Chapter 14), we thus encounter here a pessimistic approach towards theorising Indian feminism that Dalit feminists must themselves set out a course to overcome. Third, from an internal critical standpoint Gopal Guru has introduced a new notion ‘Dalit patriarchy’, and Uma Chakravarti and V. Geetha have furthered such deeply irresponsible concepts into mainstream feminist discourse; that is, ‘graded patriarchies’, and especially, ‘Dalit patriarchy’ (Chapter 3). These misleading concepts have been appealed to without offering empirical evidence, or logical coherence, or even theoretical necessity. Misdirection of just this sort serves to give credence to the increasingly posited ascription of mainstream Indian feminism as a savarna feminism. That is, as a sort of feminism that privileges dominant caste Indian women, both in theory and in practice.

The selection of texts in Part I reveals something further about mainstream Indian feminism. That is, that again seemingly true to its characterisation as savarna feminism, mainstream Indian feminism tends completely to ignore the Dalit feminist insights forwarded over the last century by pioneers like Dr B.R. Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule and Pandita Ramabai, and carried forward by their successors (Rege, Pawar, Moon, Paik and others). Such insights have been a source of sensitising and reforming the Indian social system by taking up the issues of all Indian women. Unfortunately, Indian feminism has stopped its ears to this long and productive history of Dalit feminism, and has instead relegated Dalit feminist interventions to the status of mere informants, or dismisses it as being constituted simply by works of poetry and short stories, or ‘others it’ by characterising it always as the et cetera, in phrases like ‘feminist theory and other political initiatives’.

Beyond ignoring or othering its predecessors (the area of focus for Part II of the Reader), mainstream Indian feminism has also exhibited its savarna privilege by choosing to turn away from the well-documented experience of Dalit women’s lives, which has long revealed unique forms of vulnerability to violence due to intersectional caste, gender and class disadvantage. As Part III will explore in greater detail, Dalit women’s representation as objects of lust and servitude, as symbols of impurity and evil, and other peculiar patriarchal and misogynistic modalities of representation of Dalit women, have not been brought into the purview of mainstream feminist discourse, or has been dumped onto the shoulders of Dalit feminists as their own burden and responsibility. The misfortunes of Dalit women’s everyday experiences have never been challenged by caste-privileged ‘Indian’ feminists because it is not their problem.

For these reasons, the mainstream approach to Indian feminism tends to pose a hindrance for the flourishing of gender justice for all Indian women. Irony of ironies, Indian feminists seem to be as brahmanical as the patriarchal system they seek to dismantle.

1
A critical view on intersectionality¹

Nivedita Menon

In this second decade of the twenty-first century, we all know that feminism is not in fact about ‘women’ but about recognising how modern discourses of gender produce human beings as exclusively ‘men’ or ‘women’. In other words, feminism requires us to recognise that ‘women’ is neither a stable nor a homogeneous category. But nor are caste, race or class stable or homogeneous categories.

Does intersectionality as a universal framework help us to capture this complexity? I argue that it does not. In this chapter, I will address this question through the intricacies of the terrain that feminist politics must negotiate, using the Indian experience to set up conversations with feminist debates and experiences globally.

Theory must be located – we must be alert to the spatial and temporal coordinates that suffuse all theorising. When we in the non-West theorise on the basis of our experiences, we rarely assume that these are generalisable everywhere, unlike theory arising in the West. But we do believe that comparisons and engagements with other feminisms are not only possible, but unavoidable. I assume and address therefore, the lively global feminist voices that surround us.

Two sets of questions

The first set of questions we come up against when engaging with the idea of intersectionality circulate around the imperialism of categories, and the manner in which concepts developed in the global North are assumed to have universal validity. Even when an understanding of politics in the global South predates a name for a similar understanding developed in the Western academy, it is the earlier conception that will be named after the later. For instance, in a paper on Ram Mahohar Lohia, a Socialist activist and thinker of mid-twentieth-century India, who tried to link caste, class, gender and the politics of language (English versus Hindi) in his life and work, the twenty-first-century writer of the article explicitly uses the framework of intersectionality.² The point here is not about anachronism, and whether or not concepts can be made to travel across time, because I believe this is possible. Rather, I am suggesting that the tendency when studying the ‘non-West’ is to test the applicability of theory developed through ‘western’ experience, rather than entering into the unfamiliar conceptual field opened up by thinkers and activists in the former.

The assumption is that the concepts emerging from Western (Euro–American) social philosophy necessarily contain within them the possibility of universalisation – the reverse is never assumed. Can, for instance, Julius Nyerere’s concept of Ujamaa or the trope of Draupadi as the ambiguous figure of assertive femininity ever be considered relevant to analyse Euro-American experience? But Antigone can be made to speak about women and war everywhere.

The second set of questions has to do with the power of international funding to promote certain concepts. The concept of intersectionality has by now travelled very widely globally, being attached to funding, United Nations (UN) funding in particular. Nira Yuval-Davis tracks the introduction of the concept in the UN to the preparatory session to the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in September 2001, at which Kimberlé Crenshaw, the originator of the concept, was invited to speak.³ As a result, in India too, non-governmental organisation (NGO) documents and activists have started to use it quite unproblematically. What are the implications of this kind of ‘facilitated travel’ of concepts, and do funding agendas depoliticise initially radical concepts?

It has been argued even for the country of its birth that the spread and dominance of the intersectionality framework, which has made intersectionality a buzzword, has obscured the fact that different feminist perspectives, from feminists-of-colour to poststructuralist, have long held the notion, as Jennifer C. Nash puts it, that identity is formed by ‘interlocking and mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality’, that ‘woman’ itself is ‘contested and fractured terrain’, and that the experience of ‘woman’ is always ‘constituted by subjects with vastly different interests’. In this sense, Nash argues, ‘intersectionality has provided a name to a pre-existing theoretical and political commitment’.⁴

This is even more the case in India, but here it is not simply a question of giving a name to a pre-existing perspective.

‘Woman’ in Indian feminism

The first set of questions I outlined earlier, around the ‘imperialism of categories’, leads us to think about how ‘Woman’ has come to be constituted and reconstituted in feminist politics in India. Generally, the term intersectionality when used in India expresses one of two familiar feminist ideas – ’double and triple burdens’, or that ‘Woman’ must be complicated by caste, religion, class. When used in this sense, the term has no particular purchase, and adds nothing new to our understanding. This is because the politics of engaging with multiple identities, their contradictions and interrelations, goes back to the early twentieth century and the legacy of anti-imperialist struggles in the global South.

Whether Mahatma Gandhi and Bhimrao Ambedkar in India or African socialists like Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah, most nationalist leaders constructed national identities, not through the idea of individual citizenship but through that of communities – caste, religious, ethnic groups. Their language of politics remained non-individualistic even as the idea of the individual entered these societies via colonial modernity. So there remained always a tension in postcolonial democracies between the individual and the community defined in different ways, as the bearer of rights. This tension is evident in the Indian Constitution, for instance, where the Fundamental Rights protect the rights of both the individual and of the religious community. Sometimes this leads to contradiction between the two – as when equal rights for women as individuals come into conflict with religious personal laws, all of which discriminate against women. Similarly, the demand for reservations in representative institutions on the basis of group identity – women, castes or religious communities – fundamentally challenges the individualist conception of political representation at the core of liberal de...