Reading "Dalit Women Talk Differently"

We celebrated International Women's Day last month. And this month is observed as Dalit History Month. Hence, it is important for us to take a look at India's feminist movements and struggles from an intersectional point of view.

The beginning of the women’s movement in India can be traced back to the nineteenth-century social change development. Feminism as a women-led movement began independently in Maharashtra, with pioneering advocates for women’s rights and education such as Savitribai Phule, who founded India’s first girls’ school.

In the Indian context, feminist movements had multiple angles of political ideologies and various issues that Indian women faced had roots in caste, class, and gender politics. However, these intersectional issues were ignored in the daily feminist struggles up until the 1980s when there was a change in the discourse of feminist movements.

Towards the 1980s and 90s, the focus of feminist studies shifted to the black and third-world feminist approaches. The increasing invisibility of women from the marginalized sections especially Dalit women in the Indian context led scholars to study the struggles and movements of Non-Brahmins, especially women. The 1980s were the years when the struggles of the ones who were deemed voiceless sparked a new debate on the?intersectionality?of caste, gender, and identity politics (Phadke 2003).

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In the 1990s several assertions were made for Dalit women’s identity and after a long struggle, the National Federation of?Dalit Women and?All India Dalit Women’s Forum came into existence.

Sharmila Rege writes, "The emergence of autonomous dalit women's organisation led to a major debate; set rolling by the essay 'Dalit Women Talk Differently' [Guru 1995], A series of discussions around the paper were organised in Pune by different feminist groups. A two-day seminar on the same was organised by Alochana - Centre for Research and Documentation on Women in June 1996."

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In the essay, Guru argued that to comprehend the Dalit women's need to speak differently, it was necessary to identify?internal and external variables that influence this phenomenon. He locates their need to speak differently in a rhetoric of descent by Dalit males against the middle-class women's movement and the moral economics of peasant movements.

He sees it as a protest against their exclusion from both the political and cultural arenas. It is also emphasized that social location influences the perception of reality, and hence the depiction of Dalit women's difficulties by non-dalit women was less valid and authentic.

You can read the full essay here:

Even after almost fifty years of the second phase of the women’s movement,?the Indian feminist movement is still accused to be westernized that has failed to identify with the complex nature of Indian society.

At one level these critiques are against the exclusive tendency of mainstream feminism. At another level, this labelling must be contextualized against the conservative backlash to feminist struggles.

It is important to recognize that feminism and its struggles are multifaceted and there are various local movements concentrated in different parts of the country which need to be recognized and included in the larger feminist movements to make the struggles inclusive and just for all.

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