DOI: 10.1111/hic3.

12491

ARTICLE

The rise of new Dalit women in Indian

historiography
Shailaja Paik

Faculty at the University of Cincinnati

Abstract
Correspondence
Shailaja Paik, Faculty at the University of Especially since the political turmoil of the 1990s, scholars
Cincinnati, OH.
have focused on the marginalized histories of Dalit
Email: [email protected]
Funding information
(“Untouchable”) communities in India. Yet these investiga-
National Endowment for the Humanities- tions also concentrated exclusively on the male Dalit com-
American Institute of Indian Studies
munity. Only recently, however, scholars have focused
their attention on Dalit women as “subjects” of study. Dalits
are dominated and dominating at the same time. My article
examines Dalit women's lifeworlds under double patriarchy
in colonial and post‐colonial India to highlight the contribu-
tions of scholars in understanding how different Dalit
women are negotiating, challenging, politicizing, and
transforming conditions of their discriminated Dalit status:
as sexed women and caste Dalit. I theorize and focus on
ways “new” Dalit women engaged with the incremental
intersecting technologies of caste, class, gender, sexuality,
and community to carve out their subjectivity, agency,
respectability, and honor in modern India. To this end, I
dwell on a variety of themes—generative gender and
“new” Dalit women, upper‐caste prejudice, community,
patriarchy, honor, and formal education to illuminate the
changing sociality and complexities of Dalit women's
worlds. My review article demonstrates that Dalit women's
universal perspectives and historical and political practices
are deeply democratic and as such have the potential of
engaging in inclusive and productive politics, building soli-
darities, and actually reshaping the larger fields of South
Asian Studies, India Studies, Dalit Studies, and Gender
Studies.

History Compass. 2018;e12491. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hic3 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1 of 14
https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12491
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1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N

Over the past two decades, especially since the political turmoil over the Mandal Commission Report of the 1990s,
scholars have focused on the hitherto unexamined histories of Dalit communities. Many of them have centered on Dalits
as actors and subjects of history and have documented Dalit's struggle for dignity and the shaping of a new Dalit conscious-
ness. Most significantly, they have contributed to the building of Dalit Studies as a critical intervention in the larger field of
India studies and more broadly, South Asia studies. Nonetheless, most scholars studying Dalits in different parts of India
have adopted a male vantage point and as a result, concentrated on the efforts of Dalit men, thus diminishing or even
excluding women's actions and aspirations. Only very recently have scholars produced books devoted to the understand-
ing of Dalit women, and sub‐caste, class, rural/urban, and gender inequalities within Dalit communities.
Yet there remains a scarcity of historical studies on Dalit women. Anthropologists and Sociologists, because of
their methodological tools of engaging ethnographies, have immersed in the vernacular lifeworlds of Dalit women
and have been more sensitive to the complexities of Dalit women's experiences, than historians who have traditionally
relied disproportionately upon the objectivizing archive produced by the colonial and postcolonial states. My book Dalit
Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Paik, 2014a) provides the first historical analyses of Dalit
women's ideas, actions, and lives in 20th century Maharashtra (Western India). While some historians have studied
Dalits resistance to both colonial and Brahmanical hegemonic discourses and power and their quest for their own
modernity, there is little study of how women fought against double patriarchy—both private and public.

2 | C A S T E , P R E J U D I C E , A N D TH E M A K I N G O F S O C I A L DI F F E R E N C E

The main problem has been with both, upper‐caste reformers as well as scholars' emphasis on modern Indian
historiography's central dichotomy of colonialism and nationalism that has denied Dalit women and men the space
to launch anti‐caste movements and critiques of caste, community, gender, and the nation. Mainstream, feminist,
and Dalit historiography as well as writings by Dalit male activists have overlooked ordinary Dalit women who have
authored radical social and political agendas. Unlike middle‐class, upper‐caste women, Dalit women never figured as
“agents” or “subjects” in historical accounts of either anti‐colonial nationalist struggle or of women's reforms.
Historically, both nationalist and feminist reformers as well as scholarly historiography neglected the presence of
“caste communities” to focus on gender categories. Feminist scholars and women activists also made gender‐based
oppression normative, thus excluding Dalit communities altogether. In so doing, feminists actually masked the ways
class, gender, and sexuality intersected with caste oppression and constructed a homogeneous “Indian woman.”
Although some elite upper‐caste women were sympathetic to the cause of Dalit women, the former were also
constrained by their caste locations and many were complicit in reinforcing structures of difference and differentia-
tion between castes and classes. There was also a real fear of transgressing caste boundaries for respectable upper‐
caste elite women. (Paik, 2014a, 2014b).
As a result, scholars working through their upper‐caste bias ignored the gendering of the caste question, espe-
cially as it affected Dalit women. When they did study women, there is indeed much scholarship on “Women in Mod-
ern India,” they tended to focus on the concerns of upper‐caste women, and most significantly, Brahman women in
terms of sati, enforcement of widowhood, widow re‐marriage, child‐marriage, age of consent, and so on. Reformers
as well as scholars resignified Brahman women's problems as those of Hindus and therefore Indians (Chandra, 2012).
In a similar vein, as I have examined even women's movements in post‐colonial India downplayed caste technologies
to focus on the unity among women as “victims.” By fixing Brahman women and Brahmani practices as “Indian,” some
scholars have subsumed the powerful collusion of (upper) caste, class, and patriarchy into “Indian identity” itself. Dur-
ing this process, upper‐caste women took the lead in demanding rights for women and constructed “liberal feminism”
which reflected their concerns. They set the norms, which produced further contestations. The tensions and failure in
Indian feminism laid out the conditions for the emergence of Dalit subjectivity, agency, and separate Dalit women's
PAIK 3 of 14

organizations since colonial times (Paik, 2014a, 2014b). Dalit women faced numerous difficulties, yet their collective
and individual experiences also enabled numerous possibilities and choices.
The other problem lies in scholarly analysis of a unilinear, one‐sided reading of Dalit women's lives as “victims” or
“heroines.” Unfortunately, the dominant renderings of mainstream historiography of both India and the women's
movement, cast Dalit women as the “laboring poor” or “unfortunate and lowly.” On one hand, scholars looked upon
Dalit women as those “broken,” “terribly thrashed,” or “brutally battered.” On the other hand, some like Gail Omvedt
examined the radical agency of women who “smashed the prison,” and Josiane and Jean‐Luc Racine documented the
extraordinary life of Viramma and Racine (1997), the elderly Dalit agricultural laborer, singer, and storyteller. In my
work, I have prised open the gaps in scholarships and dichotomies to emphasize how Dalit women's fragmented,
flawed, complex, and contradictory lives cannot be confined to linear readings. We need to pay attention to the
deeper complexities of Dalit women's subjectivities as both victims and transgressive agents: Their struggles against
their victimhood and vulnerability shaped their selves, agency, and politics in colonial and postcolonial times. Dalit
women's capacities to recognize, reflect, and reorganize for effective and purposive action, both as individuals and
as part of a larger community, cannot be understood within the binaries of enacting or subverting norms, or within
the confines of liberalism. Rather, their networks of negotiations, abilities, and skills to transform relationships of
social injustice were constituted, and enabled through their specific subordinated position. Dalit women's agency
belonged to them as well as to the culturally specific and historically contingent arrangement of power in which they
were located (Paik, 2009a, 2009b, 2014a, 2014b, 2016, 2017c).

3 | G E N E R A T I V E G E N D E R A N D “ NEW ” S U B J E C T S O F H I S T O R Y

My work has examined how Dalit radicals played a creative role in radically democratizing gender norms and
indeed, deploying gender as a generative activity (Paik, 2014a, 2014b, 2016) to imagine new forms of public eman-
cipation during colonial times. Historically, alongside the fight for equality, respect, and freedom from double colo-
nialism—internal (Brahmani) and external (British)—Non‐Brahmans (like Jotirao Phule in Maharashtra and
Maniammai and Periyar in South India) and Dalits (especially Dr. B.R. Ambedkar) also politicized women's reforms.
I have analyzed how Dalits intimately connected their struggle for education, equality, freedom, and power with the
politics of radically remaking Dalit women as new historical subjects and transgressive agents of social reform (Paik,
2014a, 2014b, 2016).
Thus, Dalit radicals constituted “new” Dalit women as, “transgressive subjects” orthogonally to discourses and
power of upper‐caste erasure and differentiation that sought to conceal or even repress them. They recognized
how caste and patriarchy created a system of double oppression for Dalit women as members of Dalit caste
and female gender. Most significantly, as I have argued, Dalits engaged in a “technology of the self,”1 and
expanded it to the community, to radically reconstitute women's subjectivities and refashion them. As a result,
Dalits attacked double patriarchy by emphasizing women's education and challenging gender inequalities within
the community.
This radical re‐making of Dalit women critically departed from the project of “recovery” of women's subjectivities
as in the case of upper‐caste, elite, and imperial women (Paik, 2014a, 2014b, 2016). Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi
Moon recorded ethnographies of Dalit women who participated and made history in the Ambedkar movement
(Pawar & Moon, 1989). Phule and Ambedkar were thus feminist men who pioneered what I call the “incremental
intersectionality” of caste and gender oppression for all women and especially for Non‐Brahman and Dalit women.
Many scholars, including myself, have taken cue from them to further analyze and theorize the multiple and overlap-
ping oppressions.
Dalit women thus critically shaped and were in turn transformed by the “incremental interlocking technologies”
of gender, caste, class, sexuality, family, community, and education. Here I am deepening my earlier conceptualiza-
tions of “double discrimination” and “interlocking technologies,” (Paik, 2014a, 2014b) by articulating the additive
4 of 14 PAIK

model of interlocking technologies, analogous to the tightly layered rings of an onion. Thus, education, caste, gender,
class, sexuality, community, and nation were not only interlocking operations but also simultaneous, consistently
constricting, cumulative processes that obstructed Dalit women by each additional level of oppression.
Many Dalits were thus devoted to simultaneously attacking caste and gender technologies and hence the ques-
tion of Dalit women's emancipation was central to Dalit political and social programs in colonial and post‐colonial
India. Yet, over time, the tenuous project of “new Dalit feminism” emerged to be a fraught process, in that in
challenging some inequities, some reformers and radicals actually produced them anew. Certainly, Dalits are domi-
nated and dominating at the same times. As a result, there were certain limitations, and some ambiguities marred
Dalit's radicalism. These constraints on Dalit women's agency thwarted Dalit male leaders' promise and efforts to
democratize educational opportunity.
In my work, I have prised open the gaps in scholarships and dichotomies to emphasize how Dalit women's
fragmented, flawed, complex, and contradictory lives cannot be confined to linear readings. We need to pay attention
to the deeper complexities of Dalit women's subjectivities as both victims and transgressive agents: Their struggles
against their victimhood and vulnerability shaped their selves, agency, and politics in colonial and postcolonial times.
Dalit women's capacities to recognize, reflect, and reorganize for effective and purposive action, both as individuals
and as part of a larger community, cannot be understood within the binaries of enacting or subverting norms, or
within the confines of liberalism. Rather, their networks of negotiations, abilities, and skills to transform relationships
of social injustice were constituted, and enabled through their specific subordinated position. Dalit women's agency
belonged to them as well as to the culturally specific and historically contingent arrangement of power in which they
were located (Paik, 2009a, 2009b, 2014a, 2014b, 2016, 2017c).
To protest against the incremental interlocking technologies in post‐colonial India, some women resorted to a pol-
itics of writing and publishing their stories and social autobiographies. Once we seek to go beyond sociological gener-
alizations about Dalit women to uncover a more subjective historical experience, we encounter many silences.
Although there are few fragmentary evidences, unlike upper‐caste elite women, Dalit women did not extensively write
for or publish magazines of their own at least during the colonial period. Hence, we have to understand their views and
lives through the vision and ideas of male reformers who wrote regularly for printed newspapers and periodicals started
by Dalits. However, in post‐colonial times, many Dalit women have expressed and published their ideas and life histo-
ries to recuperate their humanity, document their social suffering, and carve out a space for themselves. Their stories
are important especially given the lack of empirical studies and “official” historical sources on Dalit women.
In the wake of the Dalit literature of the 1960s, Dalit women from different parts of India and pioneering fem-
inists like Bebi Kamble, Shantabai Kamble, Urmila Pawar, Kumud Pawade, Faustina Bama, Kausalya Baisantri, Kusum
Meghwal, among many others, wrote and published a significant amount of literature. They provide details not only
of their plight, suppression, humiliation, dilemmas, and exploitation but also of their challenge to communitarian
notions of a monolithic Dalit community; their social, economic, religious, and political deprivations; and their struggle
and status in society. Dalits like Bama are fired by the desire to construct a new world of justice, equality, and love.
Like the double‐edged karukku, they keep the oppressors slashed (Bama, 2000). Such testimonies expand spaces for
the proliferation of Dalit feminism.
Dalit feminists gendered experiences bear testimony to the “double jeopardy” of Dalit women. They argue that
Dalit women are “Dalits (in relation) to Dalit men.” They are “doubly Dalit” (Jogdand, 1995) because they bear the
burden of gender and caste oppression. This situation of Dalit women mirrors that of African‐American women
who are “doubly bound” (Hill Collins, 1990; Gay & Tate, 1998; Crenshaw, 1989) by race and gender. In the two cases,
race and caste politics has trumped conversations about gender oppression. Both Rege (2006) and I (Paik, 2014a,
2014b, 2016) have drawn upon Black feminist studies and critical race theorists. While clearly understanding the
specificities of different locations and context, I have analyzed the incremental intersectional oppression of caste,
gender, sexuality, and community as it has affected Dalit women. I reiterate that we might learn from such compar-
ative transnational exercises, enrich feminist theory and praxis, and work towards a greater liberation of women (Paik,
2016).
PAIK 5 of 14

4 | E D U C A T I O N A N D T H E N E W D A LI T WO M A N

Especially from the end of the 19th century, Dalits looked upon secular education as an important vehicle of mod-
ernization and emancipation. They wrested the modernizing force of education from the British and Brahman Raj
and shaped their own resistance in colonial India. Furthermore, (Non‐Brahman and) Dalit radicals sought to democ-
ratize education and gender relations. Especially Phule, Periyar, and Ambedkar emphasized egalitarian relationships as
opposed to privilege, and combined critiques of knowledge, caste, and gender hierarchies in ways that opened up
new spaces for women in general and Dalit women in particular. For Dalits, the politics of caste, gender, education,
moral reforms, and self‐discipline complicated modes of political participation, their claims to rights, and their subject
formation in a colonial context, which always‐already precluded the production of individual and collective agency.
Dalit radical's powerful discourse shaped Dalit women, who participated in collective action for education and
empowerment. Yet, despite Dalit leader's promises and efforts to expand educational opportunities, their connection
of modern education with gender and moral reforms had unsettling implications for Dalit women. My first book doc-
umented this story in the context of Maharashtra.
Once again, compared to historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and demographers have
mined the field of Dalit's education. Suma Chitnis (1981), Padma Velaskar (1990), S.K. Chatterjee (2000), G. G.
Wankhede (2001), Veronique Benei (2008), Craig Jeffrey (2010), and Roger and Patricia Jeffery (2008, 2010) have
examined the deeply contentious territories of caste practices and education in independent India. My book builds
on the works of these sociologists and anthropologists to provide historical depth and the working of historical pro-
cesses involved in the construction of Dalit exclusion since the middle of the nineteenth century, as well as the shap-
ing of Dalit women's subjectivity over time. I discuss the varying outcomes of Dalit women's formal education. I
extend Benei's anthropological study to illustrate that schools not only discipline and shape women in particular ways
but at the same time encourage them to an extent to develop their own understanding of social and political life.
Moreover, scholars have barely studied the potential connections between hierarchies of caste, class, “public”
institutions such as education and “private” realms like the family, gender, desire, marriage, and sexuality. Although
some feminist scholars have examined colonial education, they have confined their works to elite Hindu, Muslim,
and Parsi women. There is also little historical study of the post‐colonial period. My work critically shifts the gaze
to Dalit women alone to focus on the intimate practices of prejudice as Dalit women negotiated with the colonial
and post‐colonial Indian state and upper‐caste power. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate the experiences
of Dalit women on university campuses.
Studies of upper‐caste elite women and men also overshadow the intellectual history and educational philoso-
phies and practices of Non‐Brahman and Dalit leaders. Rege (2010) and I have examined the feminist pedagogic tech-
niques of Phule and Ambedkar (Paik, 2014a, 2014b). The feminist sociologist Padma Velaskar examined the hidden
role of education in the Dalit struggle for liberation. She argues that education has acted as a mediator in “contested
reproduction” as well as in “contested change” of the structures of caste inequality and untouchability (Velaskar,
1990). Despite of increased educational uptake, many Dalit girls and boys continue to drop out of schools, due to
economic and social pressures.

5 | C O M M U N I T Y , H O N O R , P A T R I A R C H Y , A N D TH E C H A N G I N G
S O C I A L I T Y OF D A L I T W O M E N

“New” Dalit women play a crucial role as symbols of Dalit community identity as well as signs of “caste,” “civilization,”
and carriers of “culture.” Historically, both the colonial rulers and upper‐caste elite Indians looked upon Dalits as
“uncivilized,” “docile,” “barbaric,” and certainly lacking in “civility” and “culture” (Paik 2014a). As a result, Dalits
depicted civilization and culture as important, in order to be recognized, accepted, and assimilated into the larger
Indian society. In so doing, however, radical, authoritative Dalit men, including Ambedkar and the larger community
6 of 14 PAIK

burdened Dalit women with gendered norms of propriety and respectability. They emphasized modernity and mod-
esty for women, and in the process, sought to control Dalit women's social and sexual selves. Thus, uncertainties,
anxieties, and ambiguities threatened Dalit radicalism at particular conjunctures (Paik 2014a). As caste continues to
trump gender, the emphasis on violence against the community silences critics of domestic violence.
Only over the past three decades have feminists critically analyzed patriarchy and the power and privilege
enjoyed by select castes and classes, both historically and contemporaneously. Feminist scholars like Kumkum
Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (1990) acknowledged the neglect of lower‐caste and peasant women in their pioneering vol-
ume on Recasting Women in India. Some historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and activists like Gail Omvedt
(1980), Uma Chakravarti (1993, 2003a, 2003b), V. Geetha, Dietrich (2003), Pratima Pardeshi, Rege, Karin Kapadia,
S. Anandhi, Anupama Rao (2003), Vandana Sonalkar (1999), Ruth Manorama, Manuela Ciotti (2010), Clarinda Still,
Charu Gupta, and myself have provided a necessary corrective, by examining the theoretical and material aspects
and the compounded nature of caste, class, sexuality, and gender questions. Scholars have also explored the specific
challenges of “Dalit Feminism” (Guru, 1995; Rege, 1998; Margaret, 2005; Paik, 2009a, 2009b; Patil, 2013).
In one chapter of her book, Rao (2009) illustrates how issues of caste and gender technologies complicate Dalit's
political participation and modernization. One of her case studies explores the intersection between law, violence,
and Dalit identity that produced Dalit women's sexual vulnerability in post‐independence Maharashtra. Through their
critical ethnographies Sumitra Bhave, Kapadia, Anandhi, Priyadarshini Vijaisri, Ciotti, and Still have analyzed the ways
these entangled oppressions affected the everyday experiences of ordinary Dalit women in modern India and shaped
their actions and aspirations. In a similar vein, in their most recently edited book, Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alter-
native Politics (Kapadia, 2017), Anandhi and Kapadia have centered on India's bourgeois hegemony and the ways Dalit
women have deployed a “multi‐modal praxis” to challenge and transform their subordination.

5.1 | Upward social mobility, middle classness, and masculinity

The creation of Dalit women's subjectivity and the community's anxieties regarding svabhimana (self‐respect) and ijjat
(honor and respectability) during its passage to a certain modern, middle class, respectable status have had contradic-
tory outcomes for women in colonial and post‐colonial periods (Paik, 2014a, 2014b, 2016, 2017c). I have analyzed
that along with their fight for civic and human rights, Dalit also contested for prestige, honor, and self‐respect espe-
cially along the axes of gender and sexuality. It was important for further politicization of the community. The control
of women was important to improve Dalit's svabhimana and ijjat as Dalits sought to claim a humanity, raise their
social status, build dignity, and strove for important social and political change, equality, and citizenship in modern
India.
As a result, although Dalit radicals saw women as transgressive agents, they also simultaneously restricted them
and disciplined them on moral grounds, and inculcated a “robust body politics” of “cultured,” modest, respectable
behavior, clean clothes, and comportment (Paik, 2014a, 2014b, 2017c). In the process, they marginalized and even
excluded Dalit women and their specific oppressions. Thus, Dalit radicals' democratizing practices certainly had lim-
itations; yet, as I have shown in my work, we need to pay attention to Dalit's intentions and strategies for building
self‐respect and dignity in specific historically contingent conjunctures. Rao and I (working on Maharashtra), and
Gupta (on UP) have shown that reform of women in colonial times also reconstituted new forms of masculinity
and patriarchy. Bernard Cohn and Ciotti (working on Uttar Pradesh), and Kapadia, Anandhi (2002), Hugo Gorringe,
and Still (on contemporary South India) have identified similar gendered trends.
While working towards a “united community” and Dalit power, Dalit men also include women in a tokenistic
way or pay mere lip service to the specific problems of Dalit women. My work demonstrates that they prefer to
inscribe consensual politics, resolve the tension within the confines of the (ghar, home or metaphorically the “fam-
ily”) community, and further silence women (Paik, 2014a, 2014b). Elite reformers, including liberal feminists,
adopted a similar strategy to resolve the “Untouchable Question” inside the “Hindu” (thereby “Indian”) community
and also claimed (like Gandhi) the right to “truly” represent the Untouchables. Many Dalit men writers and leaders
PAIK 7 of 14

thus neglected domestic abuse of Dalit women. Like some feminist scholars, although adopting a different move,
some Dalit men have tried to subsume gender oppression inside the community and failed to seriously engage
with Dalit women's experiences. By failing to prize open the constitutive role of patriarchy in shaping and main-
taining caste, many intellectuals have lost the opportunity to comprehend the wider structural logic that sustains
casteist societies. For most of them caste discrimination seems to be the primary challenge, and gender, class, or
sub‐caste differentiation figure tangentially at best. They fear that a strong Dalit woman's “feminist” movement
and specifically speaking about women's exploitation may further split the community, threaten organization,
solidarity, and actually deter the larger Dalit movement (Paik, 2014b).
Notwithstanding this silencing, patriarchy among Dalits has been severely criticized by scholars and activists alike
(for examples from Maharashtra see: Bhave, 1988; Guru, 1995; Rege, 2000; Pawar, 2002, 1994; Pardeshi & Rege,
1998; Bhagwat and Pardeshi, 1998; Paik, 2014a, 2014b). The writer, Dinkar Salve in Chakravyuhat Dalit Chalval (Dalit
Movement in a Maze) 1997, underlines the need for Dalit politics to view Dalit women not as numbers but as rev-
olutionary agents. By contrast, Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi (1986), Kancha Ilaiah (1996) (though he later changed
his stand), and Pawar (1994) have romanticized patriarchy among Dalits. However, Pawar for one contradicts herself
by examining patriarchy in Dalit families.
Taking into consideration the above contestations, Gopal Guru in his pioneering argument emphasized Dalit
women's need to “talk differently” (Guru, 1995, p. 2548–2549). Guru accused Dalit leaders of subordinating and at
times suppressing the independent political and cultural expression of Dalit women. To him, Dalit women alone
can offer a “more encompassing view of social reality,” because certain non‐Dalit women activists “remained ambiv-
alent regarding the critique of caste” (Guru, 1995, p. 2549). His critique insinuates that social location determines the
perception of reality and therefore representation of Dalit women's issues by non‐Dalit women is less valid or inau-
thentic (Paik, 2017b). Certainly, there are problems as the mainstream has seldom seriously engaged with the Dalit
Question. I have also dealt with this in my own work. Yet I agree with Rege that Guru's claims based on authenticity
of experience may lead to a narrow identity politics, which may further limit the emancipatory potential of Dalit
women's organizations (Rege, 1998, p. 44).
After more than two decades of his emphasis on “Dalit women talk differently,” Guru continues to maintain that
“one must have a [Dalit] background characterized by deprivation or under privilege” to expose the contradictions in
Indian social life” (Guru, 2016, p. 48) [Emphasis is mine]. Certainly, a Dalit woman's doubly discriminated condition is
even more precarious, sexually vulnerable, and utterly humiliating. However, Guru's limited viewpoint underlining
exclusivity may further confine Dalits and “others” to their own communities and not allow them to reach out to each
other—surely an important directive given that social change will require the vital participation of higher castes as
well (Paik, 2017b).
Significantly, like many Dalit men, many elite upper‐caste feminists have failed to mobilize difference as a tool to
initiate change. Instead, they have insisted on a monolithic Indian feminism and womanhood, thus making “gender
oppression” the basis of a “natural” bond between different women. A few upper‐caste and middle‐class feminists
argue that Dalit women's first loyalty must be to their gender and urge the latter to see the way in which they are
being exploited by their own fathers, husbands, and brothers. The feminist, Chhaya Datar, accuses Dalit Panthers
of using Dalit women as pawns in the race for power, of not encouraging Dalit women, and not taking up their issues
in the revolt against Brahmanical culture during the 1970s (Datar, 1999, p. 2965). She thus blames men in general and
the Dalit Panther Party in particular for not empowering women and encouraging their dependence on men. Datar's
preoccupation with women's unity and empowerment led her to critique patriarchy in Dalit communities.
Most recently, in the context of Uttar Pradesh, in one chapter on Dalit manhood, Charu Gupta analyzes ways
Dalit men constructed themselves as legitimate political subjects, in part by colluding with dominant notions of mas-
culinity, in turn strengthening patriarchal practices in domestic spheres (Gupta, 2014). She concludes that although
“Dalit masculinity was not a stable category and responsive to its cultural, historical, social, and political
embeddedness” yet “one can only hope that Dalit men will evolve and ultimately dismantle the very ideological fetters
that fasten them to a corrosive paradigm of masculinity” (Gupta, 2014, p. 165) [Emphasis is mine].2 Implicit in Gupta's
8 of 14 PAIK

linear, teleological, social Darwinistic argument is the claim that upper‐caste men have already evolved and Dalits
should follow their part toward the same endpoint.
Thus, unlike Ambedkar, Periyar, and Gandhi, although like women feminists of the early twentieth century,
with this regrettably patronizing language, Gupta returns the burden of evolution to Dalit (women and) men
alone.3 She and leaves the upper‐castes free of responsibility in their own construction and consolidation of social
structures. It is Dalit men alone who are yet to “evolve.” She does not develop this point further, leaving us
wondering about its seemingly narrow vision as well as the terms of this imagined evolution. Once again, Gupta
implicitly endorses upper‐caste Hindu men as the “standard” and falls back into the traps she sought to critique
in the first place (Paik, 2017a).
Some feminists have thus paid little attention to the ways patriarchy operates through caste technologies, by
entrenching divisions among caste communities and reproducing caste hierarchies. In accusing Dalit male leadership,
the above feminists have not examined the complicity of upper‐caste, middle‐class women with their own commu-
nities. Patriarchies operate in a relational manner and are subject to a wider political economy, occupying different
configurations, and to continual reformulation. As Kumkum Sangari has reminded us, there are multiple patriarchies,
and no kind of patriarchy can be challenged in isolation (Sangari, 1995, pp. 3287–3310, 3381–3391).

5.2 | “Sanskritization” or “Assertion”?

Many scholars have argued that as social status improves, lower castes, including Dalits “sanskritize,” that is, imitate
upper‐castes, further constrain women, and become more patriarchal (Berreman, 1993; Pillai‐Vetschera, 1999;
Deshpande, 2002). However, many scholars have also critically questioned M.N.S. Srinivas's model of
“sanskritization” (Srinivas, 1952) and Michael Moffatt's “consensus” (Moffatt, 1979) to examine how Dalits have both
resisted and appropriated some upper‐caste norms (Zelliot, 1992; Deliege, 1997; Paik, 2014a, 2014b).
Many scholars suggest that Dalit women are worse off due to upward mobility. On the one hand, scholars such as
Berreman (1993), Deliege (1997), Searle‐Chatterjee (1981), and Gough (1993) maintained that gender relations were
unequal at the higher scale of the social structure, while they were relatively egalitarian among Dalits and Tribals. On
the other hand, Gorringe, Anandhi, Still (2014), Deshpande (2011), and Pillai‐Vetschera (1999) have argued that as
social status improved, many Dalits adopted, even appropriated “sanskritic” values and allayed gender equality. They
conclude, like Liddle and Joshi, that in attempting to move up in status, Dalit groups became more patriarchal and
hence constraints on women are an essential part of a rise in caste hierarchy, so that “most severe gender inequalities
of all are found among the poor, low‐caste groups which are striving for upward mobility” (Berreman, 1993, p. 370).
Deshpande argues that Dalit women are both poor and lacking in autonomy in contemporary times (Deshpande,
2011, pp. 136–139) and that the earlier “trade‐off between material well‐being and autonomy and mobility” has
now vanished (Deshpande, 2011, p. 108). To her, SC women seem to have lost the comparative advantage in terms
of freedom of movement, access to money, healthcare decision, and suffer more domestic violence than upper‐caste
women. While they may be materially disadvantaged compared to upper‐caste women, they do not enjoy greater
equality to compensate for it (Deshpande, 2011, p, 139).
But the situation is more complex as the economist Judith Heyer has pointed out in the study of rural Tamil Nadu
in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. She indicates a similar trajectory of upward mobility akin to Kapadia's (1995,
2002) work, but argues that Dalit women are healthier and more assertive once they escape wage labor. She suggests
that these women are better off. Although Clarinda Still's study of Madiga Dalit women in rural Andhra Pradesh
agrees on empirical lines with Kapadia and Heyer, yet she departs like Paik from one‐dimensional view of Dalit
women to explore the lives of Dalit women and document their lives under patriarchy. She focuses on honor,
gendered upward mobility, and the “Dalitisation” of patriarchy to demonstrate how a relatively egalitarian set of
gendered relationships among Dalit women and men is “now becoming more honor‐oriented, a process embraced
and resisted by both men and women” (Still, 2014, p. 18).
PAIK 9 of 14

Still also disagrees with Manuela Ciotti who argues that, “in order to be modern in contemporary India, the
Chamars appropriated the features of a past modernity to create a retro‐modernity” (Ciotti, 2010, p. 12). Still main-
tains that such a reading misses the “nature of Dalit identity in present day India” (Still, 2014, p. 208). Thus, certainly,
ideas about “modesty” and “appropriate” behavior are not declining but rather Dalit women (and men) are revising
them to constitute a crucial part of India's new brand of post‐colonial modernity. Gorringe (2017) in one essay has
examined how the Liberation Panther Party, the largest Dalit party in Tamil Nadu of 1999, reinforced patriarchy
and inscribed hyper‐masculinity and male physical strength. Notwithstanding their sensitivity to the complexities
of the present‐day experiences of Dalit women, Still and Gorringe unfortunately, miss the historical depth of these
contradictions, by assuming that there is a single, bourgeois modernity. There is thus no straightforward answer to
whether Dalits are merely “sanskritizing” or “asserting,” because they are using the hegemonic idiom to constantly
negotiate the “traditional” and “modern” and refashion their present and futures.
Thus, although Dalit women and men forged a new Dalit womanhood in colonial and post‐colonial India, this suc-
cess on many fronts came at heavy costs. Upwardly mobile, honorable women were to follow a Brahmani patriarchal
maryada, honor codes and a certain respectability to emerge as modest and modern women. In so doing, however,
elite Dalits ostracize and discriminate against the “other,” “lowly,” “vulgar,” Dalit women, such as Tamasha women
or Prostitutes (Paik, 2014a, 2014b, 2017c). The feminist anthropologist, Lucinda Ramberg, examines the tenuous:
“independent” yet “vulnerable,” social life, sexual labor, and complex social roles of stigmatized Dalit Jogatis in
Karnataka and Maharashtra (Ramberg, 2014). Similarly, Anandhi has worked on Dalit Mathammas in rural Tamil Nadu
(Anandhi, 2013) and Vijasri analyzes how caste, sexuality, and ritual practices shaped the dangerous marginality and
ambivalence of Joginis, the outcaste priestess in Andhra Pradesh (Vijaisri, 2015).
Dalits have not merely reproduced inequality between upper caste and Dalit women and patriarchal practices of
upper castes. The problem is the deeper, historical, and tenuous process of reforming, maintaining dignity, carving out
a positive humanity, rising in the eyes of upper castes, becoming “civilized” and “cultured,” and adopting certain
respectable moral standards, in order to be accepted by the larger Indian and international society. Certainly, not
all Dalits approve of the mainstream agenda, and many have historically carved out alternative strategies to challenge,
negotiate with, and selectively appropriate certain hegemonic normative ideas for their own purposes, and in fact,
“Dalitize” them. The problem lies in the particular incremental interlocking caste, class, sexual, and gendered technol-
ogies, which burden women alone with pressures and consequences of changing norms and Dalit women especially
are vulnerable to accusations of “immorality” and “vulgarity.”
Historically, upper‐castes have used violence and the rape of Dalit women as an instrument to perpetuate
caste hierarchies (Kannabiran & Kannabiran, 2003). Scholars and activists have yet to pay serious attention to this
subject. The state has been complicit, and as a result, it rarely punishes the perpetrators of violence against
women. Anand Teltumbde's powerful “insider” work on the 2006 Khairlanji event (in Maharashtra) identifies it
as a culmination of upper‐caste atrocities against Dalits (Teltumbde, 2008). Moreover, he explodes many myths
of economic development, progressivism, Dalit mobility, and empathy for fellow Dalits. Similarly, Aloysius I.S.J.,
Jayshree Mangubhai, and Joel Lee's edited book explores the qualitative nature of violence against 500 Dalit
women within and without the family (2011). In one chapter of her book, Laura Brueck focuses on the “rape
script,” that exemplifies the banality of sexual violence of Dalit women (Brueck, 2014). She argues that while Dalit
men write their own story of revenge and retribution (Brueck, 2014, p. 161), Dalit women writers like Kusum
Meghwal, in turn, have critiqued men and depicted women as capable of verbal and physical resistance who
experience psychological catharsis in resisting or taking revenge on the agents of sexual violence themselves
(Brueck, 2014, p. 170).
Working on rural Dalit women, in Tamil Nadu, S. Anandhi examines how Adidravidar women's collective activism
thus transcended caste and “created a new politics of belonging” to “conduct politics differently from men” (Anandhi,
2017, p. 120). Kapadia and Nathaniel Roberts focus on slum Dalit women's “improper politics” and “agentive suffer-
ing” to demonstrate how Dalit women use their difficulties to carve out their agency through their conversion to
Pentacostal Christianity (Roberts, 2017). In a similar vein, but in rural Uttar Pradesh, Radhika Govinda and Ishita
10 of 14 PAIK

Mehrotra in their essays have examined how NGO women departed from the dominant BSP women and the
feminization of unfree labor Dalit women laborers, respectively (Govinda, 2017; Mehrotra, 2017).
These debates and divergences among feminists call for plurality in feminist theorization and practices. Along
with other scholars, I have argued that we need to challenge patriarchy within Dalit community, in order to foster
political radicalism. Rege, a non‐Dalit, calls upon higher caste/class feminists who may propagate Brahmanical femi-
nism to be self‐reflexive and to “re‐invent” themselves as Dalit feminists in order to strengthen the movement (Rege,
1998, p. WS‐45). Although her approach of “re‐invention” as “vulnerable Dalit woman” is deeply sympathetic, it does
not allow Dalit women to work on their own potentials. It once again calls for upper‐caste feminists to appropriate
Dalit women and their voices, stand in for them, represent, and in the process silence them. Instead, I agree with
Anandhi and Kapadia who in their recent volume on Dalit women's ethnographies pay attention to a variety of Dalit
women's different speeches and learn from Dalit feminist standpoint to “stand together with Dalit women” (Anandhi
& Kapadia, 2017, p. 28–32) in solidarity, instead of “re‐inventing” as Dalit women. This genuine dialogue, faith, trust
and confidence between the different castes of women and Dalit sexes will allow us to construct bonds of sentiment,
expand feminist theory and praxis, and build bridges towards a common program of annihilating caste. Such an exer-
cise of building bridges may allow Dalits to effectively share their experiences and struggle together for an inclusive,
deeply democratic, and transnational politics (Paik, 2014b).4

6 | C O N CL U S I O N

Dalit women's universal perspectives and historical and political practices are deeply democratic and as such have the
potential of engaging in inclusive and productive politics, building solidarities, and actually reshaping the larger fields
of South Asian Studies, India Studies, Dalit Studies, and Gender Studies. Dalit women's precarity of life provides a
vantage point from which to analyze the deep and common continuities of structures of caste, gender, law, educa-
tion, culture, capital, human rights, and struggles over sexuality, and labor (Paik, 2014b). Different Dalit women
inhabit a variety of conflicting spaces from where they speak. We need to pay close attention to the different forms
of incremental intersecting technologies that thwart Dalit women in tenuous historical conjunctures. In their struggle
to achieve revolutionary modernity and to simultaneously fight against the violence of caste discrimination and
untouchability, radical Dalits were also at times ambiguous regarding women's roles.
There is certainly a tension between the understanding of Dalit women as “sexually liberated,” “economically
independent,” and “better off,” and accounts of Dalit women as “worse off,” that is socially, economically, and sexu-
ally oppressed than upper‐caste women. Hence, it is crucial to recognize the central relation of power and privilege
that sustains it, the marked advantage of being the dominant, the normative, and hence the mainstream. We there-
fore need to take both, mainstream feminists and Dalit men who are ambivalent about the Dalit woman's question, to
task and force them to confront the forces of double patriarchy in their respective struggles. Scholars also need to
transgress their disciplinary boundaries, draw upon each other's work, and engage in inter‐disciplinary dialogues
to unravel the lifeworlds of Dalit women.
I underscore that the Dalits' micropolitics, inscription of honor, self‐respect, hypermasculinity, andrestriction of
women, need to be understoodwithin larger historical contexts,contingencies, and deep histories ofassertion, strife
against stigma, socialand sexual humiliation of Dalit women,and emasculation of Dalit men over centuries.
It is only by understanding the historical contradictions, pressures, and complexities inherent in Dalit women's
location within various incremental intersecting technologies that Dalit and non‐Dalit women and men can devise
the most inclusive and productive political praxis. Sexual and caste identities are both crucial to locating the figure
of the Dalit woman. Their struggle is directed at the sexism of Dalit men, but they are allied with Dalit men in the
fight against caste oppression. Certainly, a Dalit feminist perspective is distinctive. It is possible, however, for the out-
sider to develop deep empathy towards the suffering and oppression that being a Dalit entails, thus building many
bridges across feminist movements and Dalit movements. Dalit feminism‐womanism‐humanism provides the
PAIK 11 of 14

possibility of an interpersonal understanding of differently disadvantaged lives and allows a broad feminist,
antipatriarchal, anticaste, antiuntouchability, and antiracist analysis (Paik, 2014a, 2014b). As the feminist Kumud
Pawade emphasizes, “the day Dalit [women, men, and non‐Dalit men's and] women's organizations deal with these
challenges successfully, [it would be understood that] that would be a su‐din, a good day.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMEN TS
I thank Douglas E. Haynes, Projit Mukharji, and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments on the essay. I am
grateful to Projit Mukharji and particularly one anonymous reviewer for discussing some critical debates that helped
sharpen some points.

ENDNOTES
1
I am drawing on the French theorist Michel Foucault here. For details, see Paik, Dalit Women's Education and “Forging a
New Dalit Womanhood.”
2
Gupta, The Gender of Caste, 165. Emphasis is mine. For details, see my review of Gupta's book in the Journal of South Asia,
2017.
3
For details on Ambedkar, Gandhi, and early feminists, see Paik, Dalit Women's Education, Chapter 3.
4
For details, see Paik, “Building Bridges,” 91–93.

ORCID

Shailaja Paik http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3293-9592

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Shailaja Paik, an Associate Professor of History with the University of Cincinnati, OH, is the author of Dalit
Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (2014). Her research and teaching interests lie at the
intersection of a number of fields: modern South Asia, Dalit studies, gender and women's studies, social and polit-
ical movements, oral history, human rights and humanitarianism. She has also written several articles and essays
in prestigious peer‐reviewed journals that focus on the forging of a new Dalit womanhood in colonial Western
India, the education of Dalit women, patriarchy within Dalit communities, the history and politics of naming
Dalits, sexuality and stigma and building solidarity between Dalit and African‐American women. She is currently
working on the National Endowment for the Humanities ‐ American Institute of Indian Studies funded project
that examines the politics of caste, gender, sexuality, art and aesthetics, community and nation in popular culture
in modern Maharashtra.

How to cite this article: Paik S. The rise of new Dalit women in Indian historiography. History Compass. 2018;
e12491. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12491