Dalit women in the social justice revolution in India

2018

Since long ago, Dalit women in India have been living in silence through the centuries. They have remained and acted as mute spectators to their exploitation, oppression, and barbarity done to them. They do not have control over their own bodies, earnings, and lives. Instead, somebody else controls them. The extreme expression of violence, exploitation, and oppression against them is visible in forms of hunger, malnutrition, diseases, physical and mental torture, rape, illiteracy, ill-health, unemployment, insecurity and inhuman treatment. The collective forces and the effect of Feudalism, casteism, and patriarchy have made their lives a living hell. An overwhelming majority of them live under the most precarious conditions. In the present age of modernism and post-modernism they are still living in the dark age of savagery. Caste has played an instrumental role in raising issues related to the more marginalized among women ie Dali women. In a highly hierarchical society, women belo...

Looking at the gendered nature of Dalit protest in Tamil Nadu. The chapter assesses the agency and autonomy of Dalit women activists.

2020

Contemporary India is a backward capitalist society with a number of feudal cultural remnants. When we contextualise the institution of caste in the contemporary political and economic structure, we understand a clear dichotomy in the positioning of "man" and a "woman" in it. Any theoretical account of gender power equation and women"s oppression must be firmly located in the social power context. Dalit women in India are situated at a very crucial juncture right now where they have to cross three thresholds simultaneously: class, class and patriarchy. These are the three hierarchical axes of social structure which are crucial to the understanding of gender relations and the oppression of Dalit women.The roots to this lie in the first millennial traditional Brahminical law code, the Manusmriti, which continues to shape the unwritten norms in Indian society. It enjoins social, economic and political practices as a religious duty which are severely discriminat...

Submissive, subdued, subjugated, dominated, exploited have become the part and parcel unwilling traits of when it comes to being a woman. Women in this ‘developing’ universe have been meted to injustices throughout epochs. From time and again history has been the rightful evidence of such injustices inflicted upon women under the shameful veil of tradition, culture, caste, class and others. The pathos of being a woman in India escalates when one comes from the lower rung of the varnashram system i.e. a Dalit. A Dalit woman not only faces the exploitation of being a woman but bears the ill treatment of the savarnas or the twice born castes for being a Dalit. Her pathos soars when she has to bear the brunt of the atrocities of men belonging to her caste. These Dalit men being ruthlessly treated by the upper castes, satisfies their anger by hurling it upon their women. The crux of this paper is to present the hapless condition of the Dalit women in India, their rights from which they remain ignorant and the so called protective mechanisms of the country that goes numb when it comes to safeguarding a Dalit.

Scholar's Paradise (ISBN: 9781980446330), 2017

The dilemma of Poverty is ecumenical and arduous altogether. It has become an indomitable concern at global platform. Generally Poverty is considered as a condition where a person standpoints his insufficiency to conform to his basic amenities of life like food, cloth and shelter. In today’s globalized world the ambit of poverty has aggrandized from inadequacy of basic needs to deficiency of human development aid facilities such as education, health and public security. The poverty is a backing feature of one’s class in society. The reactionary Varna and caste system has been a part of Indian Hindu Society from ancient times. Today only in India such a caste system prevails. The source of Ancient Hindu Law, Manusmriti, lays downtrodden existence of the out classes namely Shudras and women. The caste oppression and gender inequality has hounded India. The class exploitation comes as another hindrance towards the goals of equality. India has been an overly patriarchal and caste dominating society. The vulnerable people in India can be understood as the group of persons who are exposed to absence of decent livelihood on account of disability, ailment, age and so on. Women have to face the humiliation of three fold discrimination because they are hindered by their gender, class and caste. Dalits hold attention as the dejected rundle of the civil ladder. They have been incarcerated to debasement and coercion by the elevated classes in the caste biased Indian society for centuries. It is a blot on the landscape that this merciless practice still perseveres in various parts of India. The author has attempted an effort to make visible the hidden exploitation of Dalit women to the readers. Keywords: Dalit Women, Violence, Vulnerable People, Poverty

New Academia: An International Journal of English Language, Literature and Literary Theory, 2020

The aim of this paper is to locate the journey of a few aspirational women from the Dalit community, the most persecuted group in India, from the fringes of society to its centre, carving for themselves a life of dignity and prosperity.In fact, it may even be argued that the Dalits of India have suffered a similar fate with that of the Afro-American community, living for centurieswithin the 'margins', being an unacknowledged and derided part of society as the 'unwanted insiders'. As Bell Hooks observes in her seminal work Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984):'To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.'In current sociological and literary epistemology, Dalit Studies has emerged as a new, interdisciplinary mode of assessing and situating the Indian Dalit community. In this respect, this paper takes a few short stories from the Rajasthani Dalit writer Ratan Kumar Sambharia as frameworks to assess the Dalit woman's situation in India and her constant struggle to form a narrative alterity. The Dalit woman faces the double-whammyas a sociological 'other', not only because she is a Dalit but also because she is a Woman. The Dalit woman is under constant pressure to abide by the set social praxis and follow a preordained trajectory, the transgression of which unleashes a multitude of challenges along her path. Therefore, it is important to look at the Dalit Woman as a separate entity, with struggles unique to her social reality. This paper takes a look at some of these pressing issues that have plagued Indian society since generations.

History testifies the presence of cleavages in every society, characterized by atrocities, discrimination, exploitation and subordination that raised peoples demand for justice and equality. It is this idea of equality that forced people to protest in the form of movements. The Dalit Movement also began as a protest movement in India. The Dalits, also called as Atisudra, Panchama or Outcasts, at present constitute one of the most depressed and marginalized sections of Indian society. Socio-cultural exclusion, economic deprivation and political exploitation of centuries made them to break out of such kinds of age-old prejudices. Hence, they began to protest with the help of literatures, or forming organization like the Dalit Panthers, which came to be recognized as the Dalit Movement. This paper is an attempt to bring forth the various aspects of Dalit’s lives that led to the movement, in the radiance of four Dalit literatures.

Dr. Ruth Manorama, The National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW), India, highlights the continuing plight of Dalit women in India.

C aste has played an instrumental role in raising issues related to the more marginalized among women. In a highly hierarchical society, women belonging to the lower castes have lesser access to public fore, which is compounded by their gender. Dalits and the marginalized are still colonized by the feudal lords the Elites without freedom from caste discrimination. Indians have driven out the colonizers but not the one who are discriminating Dalits. For Dalit women, they are also coerced to be victimized in the patriarchy. Dalit women are bearing the burden of double day caste and sexual division of labor. Dalit women are demeaned and degraded and their body is a free terrain of colonization by men from other community. Dalit women are a deprived section and at the lowest level of economic and educational structures. They are poor, illiterate, sexually harassed, faces state, caste violence and exploited. Doubly, triply or multiply discriminated, Dalit women face a lot of struggles in daily bases otherwise just being overwhelmed with those surges of discrimination up to them. Without being struggling, Dalit women would be just left in despair.