While too often the woman being fails to transcend to feminist priorities beyond their immediate  identities and its cultural contours, and women-at-large are object to antagonistic gender regimes, low-caste women embody dual disadvantages of stratified layers of marginalities. Both in terms of caste-hierarchy subjugation and patriarchal subordination. Even as gender and caste intersect, Dalit emancipation and women empowerment have coalesced around divergent identities. In “Futurity in words: Low-caste women political activists’ self-representation and post-dalit scenarios in North-India”, an ethnographic case-study by a cultural anthropologist, Manuela Ciotti yields a counter-intuitive account of a new ‘anti-caste’ stance, coming from the unexpected position of female Dalits.

Two ‘jatis’: purush and mahila

Notwithstanding the united identity that the totality of being the Dalit subaltern posits, Scheduled Caste women activists come out in bold defiance against the ‘Dalit’ affiliation for its “disempowering connotations”. Underpinning themselves as equal, capable “manush” (people\humans), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) Dalit-Women activists from Uttar Pradesh (responders to Ciotti’s study) held Dalithood to be an artificial imposition by the keepers of caste hierarchy: the pandits. The ‘Dalit’ designation of a “shoshit” (socially exploited), a “bahishkrit” (socially excluded) or a “kamjor” (weak) is shunned as an active justification for caste subordination. The responders claim the existence of only two ‘jatis’: purush (male) and mahila, (female), with the activists hoping to break free from the Dalit condition of powerlessness.

The need to replace caste as the ‘key identitarian value’ by the Dalit woman activists – rather women who happen to be Dalits, represent a strive for ‘de-linking’ the women ‘agency’ from Dalit identity. This signifies a re-presenting of the Dalit woman image to convey the emergence of a new “gendered subject of political modernity.” However, detachment from the Dalit legacy of exploitation and humiliation is not disownment or disengagement from the Dalit cause but an attempt to recast identity around a gender axis – by eliminating ‘victimization’ as “suffering dalit women.”

Herein lies a paradox of identities: where an individual lies at a cross section of multitudes, with circumstantial determination of which identity will be held more proximate in relation to others.

This is lined with what Christopher Jaffrelot, in “Case and Politics”, which showed the  general tendency of the new low-caste bourgeois to disassociate from caste identities and milieu, preferring instead to join the privileged classes, and thereby discarding consequences of dalit subalternity and fully assimilating into the mainstream. Here economic mobility and class transformation has resulted in abandonment of the traditional, ascribed Dalit identity. This has impelled Dalit elites to impute the ‘Dalit authenticity’ to refer to the vast illiterate, financially weak and unrepresented status, who continue to face untouchability conventions and atrocities – the ‘asli dalits’.

Identifying as women beyond Dalit identity

Yet the dissenting opinion of these Dalit activists to refute caste-based identity to self-recognize as women cannot be boarded to all Dalit-women. The preferences of upwardly mobile Dalit-women activists from the ‘creamy layer’ of Dalit society cannot be considered the unanimous pulse of low-caste women. While the Dalit-women activists prioritize their female identity, the parent party, BSP, under ‘Dalit Queen’ Mayawati invokes ‘troubled’ caste denominations of ‘Chamars’, ‘Kumar’ and ‘Bharatiya’ in its politics of presence to inspire political allegiance by emphasizing “caste-as-suffering”. Thus, efforts to renegotiate the gender-caste nexus is threatened by party attempts to co-opt the feminist cause away from Dalit activism.

If the Dalit-women is held in the crossfires between caste and gender, why would these Dalit women activists adamantly refuse to acknowledge an identity of apparent disadvantage while accepting another?

An answer may be borrowed from second wave feminists and their criticisms of a presumed ‘unified’ female voice. A principal actor had been bell hooks’ “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, rejecting the manner in which mainstreaming of feminist narratives as co opted by the white heterosexual, able bodied woman, leaves behind the experiences of the marginalized.  Simone de Beauvoir’s introduction of phenomenology in feminism redefined the manner in which the feminist sisterhood began to be perceived. Phenomenology prevents feminist to be diluted to the oversimplified hardy perennials of a critique of patriarchy and its public-private divide on the basis of gender norms between the sexes, to launch a movement for equity and dignity for the female sex.

Feminism trumps other identities

So much of feminism is about the ‘lived experience’ and the ‘shared experiences’ that women embody, those experiences that constitute womanhood. So much is iterated in the gendered salutation of a ‘Ms.’ and a ‘Mrs.’, immediately identifying ‘her’ proprietor, whether she is available for him or not? The practices of wearing ‘vermillion’ on her forehead, a ‘mangalsutra’ (auspicious thread worn by married women in their husband’s name) around her neck, a ‘laal bindi’ (sign that a woman is married) and changing her name to include the name and/or the surname of her patriarch. The claims of patriarchal superiority thus come to embodied in her body, identity, entity, and space. This transcendental nature of feminism as a necessary biological, from preventing the female from sitting with legs apart, to expecting sacrifices, mercy and care, makes the female experience relatable to women across space and time.

The Dalit women’s choice of identifying as women rather than Dalit shows the ingrained nature of feminism, both as identity and as a source of empowerment. Thus, even if patriarchy is subordinating, feminism provides a more ingrained, more timeless, more borderless allies in the struggle to go beyond discrimination. The #MeToo movement, action against sexual hierarchies and harassment in public spaces was initiated by Raya Sarkar in India, showing the manner in which feminist identities have potential to transcend borders, going far beyond its western genesis is a prime example of the mobilizing and vocalizing power of female subject. Thus, raising questions over the primacy of physical distinction over historical disadvantage by those who can held to be ‘archetype’ subalterns raise speculation on whether the woman identity is more rigorous even when females are subject to intersectionality of disadvantages? If so, does this answer add to the manner in which there has been rising policy consensus over populist welfare attracting women. 

Foremost has been the cash dole outs to female voters, to gain attraction from the previously untapped female vote bank. Lokkhir Bhandar (Rs. 500 per month) in West Bengal by the Trinamool Congress since 2021, Ladli Behenna (Rs. 1,250 per month) in Madhya Pradesh by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2023, with Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe women being imbursed greater amounts. The recent replication of the same scheme (Rs. 1,500 per month) by the BJP-led Mahayuti coalition in Maharashtra, just months before the 2024 Maharashtra legislative polls prove this tactic of treating the women electorate as a clientelist vote bank be a sustaining and effective electoral strategy, solidifying the ability of gender mobilization to seek benefits for the deprived female gender. This is the feminist moment; a moment where feminism has trumped other identities.

(The author is a postgraduate student pursuing M.A. in Political Science at St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata (University of Calcutta). He is a contributor to Student Research Committees under the International Association of Political Science Students, an editor at the A Different View blog, and an associate publisher at The ArmChair Journal, with deep interests in South Asian studies. Views expressed are personal. He can be reached at allendavidsimon2003@gmail.com or linkedin.com/in/allen-david-simon)