In India, violence against women cannot be understood through the lens of gender alone. It is deeply entangled with caste – a social hierarchy so embedded in everyday life that it shapes who women can marry, where they can work, how they are treated by the law, and whether their suffering is even acknowledged at all. Caste and patriarchy do not function as separate systems in India; they reinforce and reproduce each other in ways that make gender violence especially systemic and difficult to dismantle. Understanding this intersection is essential to understanding why certain women, particularly those from marginalized communities, bear a disproportionate and largely invisible burden of violence.
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What is Brahmanical patriarchy?
To understand caste-based gender violence, we first need to understand the concept of Brahmanical patriarchy – a term developed and popularized by feminist historian Uma Chakravarti. It describes a social order in which caste and patriarchy are not just parallel systems but are co-constructed – each one requiring the other to function.
Within this upper-caste patriarchal society, honor and shame are ideological concepts closely tied to women’s sexuality. A woman’s transgression of caste boundaries is internalized as a matter of shame. This is why women’s bodies in India are not simply sites of domestic control – they become the literal boundary markers of caste purity.
Endogamy – marriage within the same caste – functions as the most significant mechanism of the caste system. A woman is expected to safeguard the purity of her caste. Since she bears the greatest responsibility for preserving caste order, her sexuality is kept under strict surveillance. She is considered the custodian of caste and family honor.
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s understanding of caste was entrenched in endogamy, which, through its prohibition on intermarriage, provided the basic framework for the development of the caste structure. He argued that Brahmanical ideology both preserved and eulogized the very practices – sati, child marriage, enforced widowhood – that degraded women. In other words, the subjugation of women was not incidental to caste; it was central to its very functioning.
How caste norms regulate women’s lives
The caste system has historically imposed norms of subservience on women. One rule from the Manusmriti (V.147) states: “In childhood, she should remain under the control of her father, in youth under that of her husband, and on the husband’s death under that of her sons; the woman should never have recourse to independence.” While this text is ancient, scholars have documented how its logic continues to shape social norms in contemporary India.
Upper-caste women are treated as symbols of their community’s purity and must marry within prescribed boundaries. Lower-caste and Dalit women, however, face a different but equally violent form of regulation – their bodies are treated as available, exploitable, and expendable. While upper-caste women’s sexuality is tightly controlled because they are seen as bearers of caste purity, lower-caste women’s bodies are subject to exploitation and violence. These gendered expectations serve the larger agenda of Brahmanical patriarchy, which seeks to preserve the power dynamics within the caste system.
Dalit women and dual oppression
Among all women in India, Dalit women face the most acute and compounded form of discrimination. Dalits – historically referred to as “untouchables” – occupy the lowest position in the caste hierarchy, and Dalit women sit at the bottom of that already marginalized group. According to 2011 census data, Dalits represent approximately 16.6% of India’s population – roughly 200-250 million individuals – of whom Dalit women make up 48.59%, amounting to approximately 97.8 million people. For Dalit women, the interplay of caste and patriarchy results in the denial of fundamental human rights and restricted access to vital resources such as land and livelihood.
Dalit women in India often experience triple oppression – sexism, classism, and casteism – that neither Dalit men nor non-Dalit women experience. The intersections between caste, class, and gender make Dalit women more vulnerable to violence, sociocultural discrimination, and subjugation, and less likely to obtain justice.
Violence from outside and within the community
Dalit women have been disproportionately subjected to inhumane treatment and gender-based violence in the form of sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment by those from oppressor castes. These caste-driven atrocities are often perceived as a message to dehumanize Dalit women and “teach the entire Dalit community a lesson.”
As one activist noted in documentation by Human Rights Watch: “Sexual violence is linked to debt bondage in rural areas.” Throughout their fieldwork, Human Rights Watch documented the use of sexual abuse and other forms of violence against Dalit women as tools by landlords and the police to inflict political lessons and crush dissent and labor movements within Dalit communities.
But violence against Dalit women is not only external. Scholar Gopal Guru, in his influential essay “Dalit Women Talk Differently”, argued that Dalit women suffer from both external and internal forces of oppression. Guru asserted that Dalit women are more prone to patriarchal and structural violence, and that they “talk differently” because they suffer “on the basis of external factors (non-Dalit forces homogenizing the issue of Dalit women) and internal factors (the patriarchal domination within Dalits).”
Within Dalit families, domestic violence is bolstered by the internalized dominant caste ideology of wife fidelity (pativrata) and duty of chastity, placing a premium on notions of women’s “honor,” “purity,” and “obedience.” The message effectively sent to Dalit women is that they must “keep in their place” – remaining submissive daughters or wives – and should not assert their rights against Dalit men or other dominant family members.
Invisible in two movements
One of the starkest dimensions of Dalit women’s oppression is that they have historically been made invisible in the very movements that should have represented them. The mainstream feminist movement in India has often been criticized for being Brahmanical in its approach, failing to recognize the specific challenges faced by Dalit women, including issues related to poverty, violence, and caste discrimination. Scholars like Sharmila Rege and Gopal Guru have advocated for a Dalit feminist standpoint, emphasizing the need to account for both caste and gender in feminist theorizing.
As one activist put it: “Within the women’s movement, Dalit issues have not been taken seriously. Within the Dalit movement, women have been ignored. Caste, class, and gender need to be looked at together.”
This exclusion has real consequences for justice. About ninety percent of crimes against Dalit women are not reported to the police due to fear of social exclusion and threats to personal security. Dalits also tend to have difficulty navigating complicated legal proceedings, so many cannot approach courts or other law-enforcing agencies for redress.
Honor killings: when patriarchy turns lethal
If caste patriarchy regulates women’s lives through daily surveillance and economic control, honor killings represent its most extreme and lethal enforcement. These are murders – mostly of women – carried out by family or community members who believe a woman’s choices have shamed them, most commonly when she enters a relationship or marriage outside caste boundaries.
Honor killings in India are not isolated incidents of interpersonal violence. Rather, they are manifestations of deeply entrenched social hierarchies, legitimized through patriarchy, caste supremacy, and communal dominance. The cultural imagination that fuels these crimes treats women as repositories of family honor, thereby rendering their autonomy a site of surveillance and violence.
The role of khap panchayats
Killings of couples by close family and community members for breaking away from caste norms of marriage are given the connotation of “honour” killings. These are ordered in situations of hypogamy and gotra endogamy by members of local caste panchayats, known as khap panchayats in north India. These bodies comprise primarily of dominant-caste men, who rule by resorting to violence to ensure fear of their power and unquestioned conformity to their orders.
As Jagmati Sangwan of the All India Democratic Women’s Association puts it: “To keep the exploitative structure intact, female sexuality is controlled in a patriarchal caste-based society.” Those engaged in the battle for “honor” are economically and politically prosperous farmers with extensive land holdings. These “dominant castes” have vested interests in perpetuating themselves, and endogamous marriages are emphasized to keep intact the power equations.
The geography of honor killings in India is telling. Honor killings have been reported mainly in Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 251 honor killings were recorded in 2015, though activists considered this a significant undercount. In Tamil Nadu alone, 192 cases involved marriages where a woman was higher in the caste hierarchy than the man she married – considered “dishonorable” since women of the caste are seen as responsible for its continuation.
A particularly chilling example is the 2016 case of Shankar and Kausalya: Shankar, a Dalit man, and his wife Kausalya, a woman from the OBC Thevar community, were attacked in broad daylight eight months after marriage in Udumalpet, Tamil Nadu, by Kausalya’s father who felt dishonored by their hypogamous marriage. The attack was caught on video and sparked widespread outrage, but it also illustrated how casually these acts of violence are carried out in public.
The legal gap
India’s legal framework has long struggled to adequately address honor killings. As there is currently no national legislation specifically addressing honor killings, crimes related to honor fall under general penal provisions. These include sections of the Indian Penal Code covering abetment of murder, criminal conspiracy, and culpable homicide. The absence of specific legislation means the underlying motive – caste honor – is rarely addressed in criminal proceedings.
The Supreme Court has intervened on multiple occasions. In 2006, in Lata Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh, the Court affirmed the right to marry a person of one’s own free will and rebuked honour killings as barbaric acts of murder perpetrated by feudalistic mindsets. In 2018, in Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, the Court reaffirmed that the consent of family or community is not necessary for two consenting adults to marry, and held that Khap Panchayats had no authority to interfere in this right.
The enactment of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) in 2023 marked a significant legal shift. Sections 100, 101, and 103(2) specifically recognize and penalize honor killings with life imprisonment or the death penalty – a notable step forward. However, legal reform alone cannot reverse deeply embedded cultural norms without broader societal transformation.
Local police often treat honor killing situations as family disputes or hesitate to act against powerful community figures, thereby eroding the preventive potential of the law. The social context – including caste pride, patriarchal norms, and khap panchayat diktats – is typically excluded from judicial reasoning in lower courts, weakening both prosecution and sentencing.
Why an intersectional approach is necessary
Addressing gender violence in India requires moving beyond a one-dimensional understanding of patriarchy. The work of scholars like Sharmila Rege and Gopal Guru emphasizes that caste cannot be treated as a backdrop to gender but as an active agent shaping women’s experiences. In India, caste and gender are not isolated categories but intersecting axes of oppression that shape the lives of Dalit women in profound and violent ways.
Despite constitutional protections and special legislation such as the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, untouchability practices and atrocities persist. Dalit women continue to encounter various forms of caste and gender-based violence. The law’s existence, as scholars have noted, is necessary but insufficient without genuine enforcement and cultural change.
An intersectional caste-class-gender analysis is necessary to make Dalit women visible in public discourse – exposing their reality of violence and disempowerment, recognizing their selfhood and human dignity, and enabling both policymakers and feminist movements to understand how social relations convert “difference” into systemic oppression and violence.
The struggle against caste-based gender violence, then, is not simply about adding new laws or amending existing ones. It requires dismantling the centuries-old ideology – embedded in institutions, communities, and even within progressive movements – that treats women as bearers of caste honor rather than autonomous human beings.
What do you think? Is it possible for feminist movements to be genuinely inclusive of Dalit women’s experiences without first confronting their own caste biases? And given that both legal reform and cultural change are needed, which do you think India needs to prioritize first – and why?
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