The rise of new Dalit women in Indian historiography

Abstract

Especially since the political turmoil of the 1990s, scholars have focused on the marginalized histories of Dalit ("Untouchable") communities in India. Yet these investigations also concentrated exclusively on the male Dalit community. Only recently, however, scholars have focused their attention on Dalit women as "subjects" of study. Dalits are dominated and dominating at the same time. My article examines Dalit women's lifeworlds under double patriarchy in colonial and post-colonial India to highlight the contributions of scholars in understanding how different Dalit women are negotiating, challenging, politicizing, and transforming conditions of their discriminated Dalit status: as sexed women and caste Dalit. I theorize and focus on ways "new" Dalit women engaged with the incremental intersecting technologies of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and community to carve out their subjectivity, agency, respectability, and honor in modern India. To this end, I dwell on a variety of themes-generative gender and "new" Dalit women, upper-caste prejudice, community, patriarchy, honor, and formal education to illuminate the changing sociality and complexities of Dalit women's worlds. My review article demonstrates that Dalit women's universal perspectives and historical and political practices are deeply democratic and as such have the potential of engaging in inclusive and productive politics, building solidarities, and actually reshaping the larger fields of South Asian Studies, India Studies, Dalit Studies, and Gender Studies.

Eurocentric Historiography: An Analysis of International Politics in the 21st Century and Its Effect on Changes in Historiography of Countries in Europe

“…The historian embarks on the task of writing a national history based on the official archives of the state and putting the state in the center. Western European historians naturally write the history of the colonial empire in the same perspective (Paik, 2018).…”

Class, Caste, Gender, and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India

“…Moreover, as Banju laments, in addition to being marginalised by patriarchy within the household, Chamar women also get routinely discriminated against in new spaces of paid work outside the house due to the intersection of their gender and caste identities. They suffer from what Paik (2018:2) calls “double patriarchy”. Data suggests that new jobs in India are still mediated by gender and caste identities (Oxfam India 2019).…”

Role of Social Media in Promoting Feministic Consciousness

“…This concept of feminism will simply delay the known growth and slow in wished justice for half of the human beings. Paik (2018) said in his article that since the political chaos of 1990, the learnt have mainly focused on the demoted history of Dalit societies in India. Furthermore, we find that these surveys also focused mainly on the male Dalit groups.…”