Dalit Feminism: Voices from the Margins of Caste and Gender

In India, being a woman is one form of oppression. Being Dalit is another. But being a Dalit woman means experiencing both simultaneously – in ways that neither mainstream feminism nor Dalit politics has historically been willing to fully acknowledge. Dalit feminism is the movement that names this double bind, refuses to let it be erased, and insists that caste and gender cannot be understood in isolation. It is not a subset of Indian feminism, nor simply an extension of Dalit politics. It is a distinct, radical standpoint that has reshaped how we think about identity, power, and justice in South Asia.

Understanding Dalit feminism 🔗

The term Dalit – meaning “broken” or “oppressed” in Sanskrit – refers to communities formerly classified as “untouchables” and placed outside the four-fold Hindu caste system entirely. Officially recognised as Scheduled Castes under the Indian Constitution, Dalit communities have historically been confined to the most degrading forms of labour, denied access to public spaces, and subjected to systematic violence. Dalit women sit at the sharpest end of this exclusion.

Dalit feminism is a political and intellectual movement that centres the specific experiences of Dalit women, who face overlapping forms of oppression rooted in caste, gender, and class. As feminist scholars have argued, caste and gender are not two separate problems that happen to coexist – they are structurally interconnected, each reinforcing the other. The caste system regulates sexuality and reproduction through rules of endogamy (marriage within caste groups), and women’s bodies become the site where caste purity is enforced or violated. Dalit women, excluded from the caste-purity framework altogether, are rendered doubly vulnerable – unprotected by caste honour and unprotected by mainstream feminist solidarity.

This is why Dalit feminism does not treat gender oppression as a universal common ground shared equally by all women. It argues instead that the experiences of upper-caste and Dalit women are fundamentally different in their historical, political, and material dimensions. A Dalit woman is not merely “a woman who also faces caste discrimination” – she occupies a social position that is shaped by the intersection of both from the ground up.

Historical roots and early activism 🔗

Dalit women’s organised resistance has a history that stretches back over a century, even if it has rarely been acknowledged in mainstream accounts. As far back as the 1920s, Dalit women were active participants in anti-caste and anti-untouchability movements, and by the 1930s, they were involved in the Non-Brahman movement. Early Dalit women’s organisations passed resolutions against child marriage, enforced widowhood, and dowry practices. In 1942, an estimated 25,000 Dalit women attended the All India Depressed Classes Women Conference in Nagpur – an extraordinary show of collective political power that is rarely mentioned in standard histories of the Indian women’s movement.

The foundational intellectual influence on this activism came from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader, jurist, and principal architect of the Indian Constitution. Ambedkar was the first major thinker to explicitly link caste oppression with gender, recognising that the caste system’s survival depended on the control of women’s sexuality and reproductive choices through endogamy. His call for Dalits to “Educate, Agitate, Organise” directly inspired generations of Dalit women to enter public life. As scholar-activist Baby Kamble described, Ambedkar awakened a consciousness that turned silence into resistance. Marathi author Urmila Pawar, a pioneering Dalit feminist, later reflected that it was only after reading Ambedkar’s analysis of caste, endogamy, and gender that she understood herself as not simply “a woman” – but a Dalit woman, with a distinct political identity that mainstream feminism could not fully account for.

The tradition initiated by reformers like Savitribai Phule – who defied violent social opposition to educate Dalit girls in the 19th century – also laid crucial groundwork. Phule’s insistence that education was a tool of liberation directly shaped the Dalit feminist conviction that access to knowledge and public voice were political acts, not merely personal achievements.

Key figures and organisations 🔗

The modern Dalit feminist movement took organised institutional shape in the 1990s, a decade that was pivotal for feminist politics in India. The most significant organisation to emerge was the National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW), founded in 1995 by Ruth Manorama as a platform for Dalit women to articulate their experiences of social exclusion, poverty, and violence. The NFDW was formally established on August 11, 1995, in New Delhi – just weeks before the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing – with the declared aim of making Dalit women not just victims in public discourse, but leaders, thinkers, and agents of change.

Ruth Manorama herself is one of the most significant figures in Dalit feminist history. She conceptualised the term “triple-alienated” or “thrice discriminated” to describe the compounded disadvantage Dalit women face on account of caste, class, and gender – a formulation that fundamentally challenged the idea that gender alone could explain women’s subordination. At a feminist gathering, when activist Kamla Bhasin declared “we women are one,” Manorama’s response cut to the core of Dalit feminism’s political challenge: “We are already divided on the basis of caste.” The NFDW went on to train approximately 1,500 Dalit women as human rights defenders across India, established Dalit Women’s Lawyers Forums in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, and represented Dalit women’s concerns at the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, where they successfully elevated caste discrimination to the level of international human rights discourse.

Other crucial voices include Meena Kandasamy, poet, writer, and activist, whose literary work has been central to naming the intersections of caste and gender oppression with unflinching clarity. Scholar-activist Dr. Sharmila Rege made foundational theoretical contributions, drawing on Ambedkar’s analysis to argue that caste determines not just the division of labour but the sexual division of labour and the division of sexual labour – meaning that caste shapes who has control over their own body and who does not. Writers like Challapalli Swaroopa Rani, Bama, and Gogu Shyamala brought Dalit women’s lived realities into literature through poetry, autobiography, and fiction, creating a body of work that is inseparable from political activism.

Internal and external patriarchy: the concept of dual oppression 🔗

One of Dalit feminism’s most significant analytical contributions is its identification of what scholars call dual patriarchies – two overlapping systems of male dominance that Dalit women must navigate simultaneously.

Brahmanical patriarchy 🔗

The first is Brahmanical patriarchy, a concept developed most influentially by historian Uma Chakravarti in her landmark 1993 essay. Brahmanical patriarchy refers to the system through which caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy are co-constructed and mutually reinforcing. The maintenance of caste purity depends on controlling women’s sexuality – specifically, upper-caste women must only reproduce within their caste group. Dalit women, positioned outside this system of “purity,” are treated as sexually available and unworthy of protection. Violence against Dalit women by men from dominant castes is not simply gender violence – it is a mechanism for asserting caste supremacy, for punishing communities that challenge caste norms, and for maintaining social hierarchies through terror. The devadasi system, under which Dalit girls are dedicated to temples and subjected to sexual exploitation under religious sanction, is one of the starkest examples of how Brahmanical patriarchy operates on Dalit women’s bodies specifically.

Patriarchy within Dalit communities 🔗

The second form is patriarchal oppression within Dalit communities themselves. Dalit feminists have been careful and courageous in naming this, even as it has been a source of significant tension with Dalit male activists. As Dalit feminist writer Challapalli Swaroopa Rani stated directly: Dalit women face domestic violence and public humiliation from within their own communities, and it is not accurate to claim that democracy prevails in any patriarchal household, regardless of caste. Dalit politics has often tried to dismiss or minimise this, arguing that all Dalit oppression originates with Brahmanical structures, and that Dalit men’s aggression should be attributed solely to their own caste-based victimisation by the system above them. Dalit feminists do not entirely reject this analysis, but they insist it cannot be used to silence Dalit women’s experiences of violence from Dalit men. The debate over how to conceptualise this internal dimension – and whether the term “Dalit patriarchy” is analytically useful or misleading – remains active in feminist scholarship. What Dalit feminism insists upon, however, is that Dalit women’s oppression is not one-dimensional, and that any politics which ignores its internal dimensions will be incomplete.

How Dalit feminism diverges from mainstream Indian feminism 🔗

The Indian women’s movement from the 1970s through the 1990s was largely driven by upper-caste, middle-class women, whose concerns – dowry deaths, sati, widow remarriage – were then universalised as the problems of all Indian women. Caste was systematically omitted from this framework. Feminist scholars and activists made gender-based oppression the central category of analysis, which had the effect of constructing a homogeneous “Indian woman” whose experiences erased Dalit women’s reality entirely.

This exclusion was not merely theoretical. When Bhanwari Devi, a Dalit woman working as a government social worker, was gang-raped in 1992 by upper-caste men in retaliation for her role in preventing a child marriage, mainstream feminist commentary focused on the gender dimensions of the assault – but, as Dalit feminists pointed out, the rape was fundamentally an act of caste violence. Bhanwari’s lower-caste status was central to why she was targeted, why the courts initially failed her, and why the attack was framed as a response to her transgression of caste norms. A caste-blind feminist analysis simply could not account for this. The case eventually led to the landmark Vishakha guidelines on workplace sexual harassment in 1997, yet even that outcome came through a feminist lens that largely erased the caste dimension of what had happened to Bhanwari Devi.

Dalit feminism’s challenge to mainstream feminism is not a call for separatism. Dalit feminists like Ruth Manorama and the NFDW were careful to frame the creation of autonomous Dalit women’s organisations not as a rejection of solidarity with non-Dalit women, but as a recognition that a movement cannot claim universality while ignoring its own internal exclusions. The call was – and continues to be – for a feminism honest enough to dismantle its own caste privilege.

Dalit feminism’s impact on gender and caste discourse 🔗

The intellectual and political contributions of Dalit feminism have permanently altered the terms of gender debate in India. By demonstrating that knowledge systems themselves are caste-inflected – that feminist theory produced from upper-caste standpoints carries its own blind spots – Dalit feminism has pushed for an epistemological shift, not just a policy one. The demand is not simply for Dalit women to be included in existing frameworks, but for those frameworks to be rebuilt from the standpoint of those most marginalised.

At the policy level, Dalit feminist organising has contributed to the passage and strengthening of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, and to greater recognition of caste-based violence as a human rights issue in international forums. The NFDW’s participation in the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban was instrumental in framing caste discrimination as a form of discrimination based on “work and descent,” placing it on a par with racial discrimination in the global human rights lexicon.

Dalit feminism has also reshaped intersectionality as a framework in the Indian context. While the term is often attributed to American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on race and gender in the US context, Dalit feminist thought had independently developed an intersectional analysis rooted in the specific realities of caste – and had done so through grassroots organising decades before the term entered Indian academic discourse. The parallels drawn between Dalit women’s experiences and the structural discrimination faced by Black women in the United States – both navigating systems of race/caste, class, and gender – have enriched feminist theory globally and underscored that these are not isolated local problems but expressions of structural hierarchies that take different forms in different societies.

Today, the movement faces new challenges. Digital spaces have opened platforms for Dalit feminist voices through campaigns like #DalitWomenFight, but they have also exposed Dalit women activists to intensified online harassment and caste-based abuse. The political climate has made organising increasingly difficult. Yet as the NFDW’s 30th anniversary in 2025 made clear, the assertion that Dalit women are Dalits among Dalits – that they occupy the very base of every hierarchy – remains both the sharpest critique of social inequality and the most urgent demand for change in contemporary India.

What do you think? If mainstream feminism claims to speak for all women, but its frameworks consistently erase the experiences of those most marginalised by caste – what does that reveal about whose knowledge counts as universal? And given that Dalit women face oppression both from dominant-caste society and from patriarchal structures within their own communities, how should feminist movements build solidarity without silencing the internal contradictions they need to address?

References

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7. https://m.thewire.in/article/caste/beijing-un-conference-dalit-women
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