Dalit women in India: A Critical study

The paper describes the ways in which Dalit women are quite different from their higher-caste counterparts. It aims at providing comprehensive and critical introduction to the Dalits in contemporary India from the perspective of history and political economy. It discusses women who had a close involvement with the Ambedkar movement. These women activists are a great source of growing enthusiasm. In contrast to poorer families, women undertake strenuous agricultural and domestic labour. They are relied upon to order, sustain and provide for the household. For all sits hardships, Dalit life affords women autonomy and allows for a distinctive Dalit female subjectivity. In the lieu deprived families, social mobility has resulted in the subjection of daughters to the requirements of middle-class morality. In such families the increased emphasis on women as ‘status producers’ is manifested by a greater investment in girls’ education on the one hand but a heightened surveillance of female sexuality on the other. When socio-economic circumstances allow it, Dalits begin to repudiate egalitarian norms; they attempt to consign them to the past by labeling them ‘backward’. Instead, they appropriate a gender ideology similar to that of the locally dominant castes and adapt it to fit a politicized construction of Dalit identity. When they withdraw from work, women escape the drudgery, degradation and hardship of labour. But when they become housewives, not only do they lose some of the freedom they once took for granted, they now see these old ‘freedom’ as marked mobility brings more a ‘comfortable’ life and enables women to avoid the various forms of exploitation associated with wage labour. It erodes Dalit egalitarianism within the family and community.