– Sowjanya T

Gender justice ends with women!

In several cases, the category ‘women’, excludes Dalit women in India. The notion that ‘all women are white and all blacks are men’ becomes ‘all women are upper-castes and all Dalits are men’ in the Indian context. (Rekha Raj, 2014) A case in point relates to the protests around the 2012 Delhi gang rape. The media, while projecting the upper-caste middle class woman figure and invoking the ‘sexual purity’ of the rape victim, overlooked the endemic caste based sexual violence against Dalit women. In this case, the innocence of the rape victim was not overtly asserted, but through projection of the rape victim as an upper-caste/middle class woman whose purity had to be guarded by the caste groups or even by the state. This was also asserted by the upper-castes after the Chunduru caste atrocity. In 1991, Dalit men were attacked and killed by the landowning Reddys in the village of Chunduru in Andhra Pradesh. Reddy men have justified the atrocity against Dalit men as a punishment meted out to them for sexually harassing Reddy women. Though there was no truth in it, the Reddys along with the other upper-castes organized protests which not only took an anti-Dalit tone but also criticized the state for failing to protect the upper-caste woman’s chastity from the Dalit men. The protests around the Nirbhaya rape had also taken similar tones in that it is the state’s responsibility to protect woman’s purity. This signifies merely the upper-caste woman’s purity because the category of Dalit women falls outside these constructions of caste and sexual purity. The silence of mainstream feminists on the Khairlanji caste atrocity against a Dalit woman is a prime example of the feminist movement’s exclusion of Dalit women. (Rege 2013)

Violence against Dalit women is generated by the caste system which constructs a ‘graded patriarchy’ for women along with the ‘graded inequalities’ of castes. Therefore the sexual violence against Dalit women is so normalised in our society that the rape of a Dalit woman is not considered rape at all. Sharmila Rege writes

In almost all regional languages in India the word for ‘rape’ is equivalent to the phrase ‘stealing the honour of’ and since lower caste women by the virtue of their double oppression have no ‘honour’ to speak of the right to redressal is often denied. (1995)

In several cases, upper-caste males have casual access to Dalit women’s sexuality which is not considered as rape or sexual violence. Instead, the Dalit woman is considered ‘impure’, lacking in sexual/caste purity.

Dalit women who take up political struggles often face character assassination as it happened in the case of Rohith Vemula’s mother Radhika. At the height of protests against the involvement of the right-wing leaders in discrimination against a Dalit student Rohith Vemula, questions have been raised about his Dalit identity and the onus of proving his caste identity has fallen solely on the mother of the victim. When Vemula’s father announced that he does not belong to the SC community and he has no idea how his son has become an SC, the media and the right-wing took this as an opportunity to discredit Rohith Vemula’s victimization. However, the life of Radhika has been that of a Dalit woman who experienced caste discrimination not only within her own family, which had adopted her as a child, but also within her matrimonial family. This is a significant opportunity for feminists to rethink the patriarchal family system and to challenge the state’s patriarchy which frames children into the father’s caste identity even in an inter-caste marriage, more so when the father’s caste identity is inadequate to protect his family from caste discrimination. Similarly, it is important for the Dalit movement to rethink Dalit family because inter-caste marriage is politically asserted by many Dalit ideologues as a way of annihilation and diffusion of castes. However, as we have seen, feminist intervention has been minimal in the case of Radhika with regard to rethinking the family as Radhika’s vulnerability at the intersection of caste and gender is different from that in a middle-class woman’s position in inter-caste marriage. On the other hand, if at all Rohith Vemula’s mother had given birth to her children out of wedlock, would the Dalit movement have supported her side, is the question. Can the Dalit movement re-imagine Dalit woman without touching upon her sexual or marital history is another question that deserves an answer.

Many Dalit ideologues have practiced inter-caste marriage in their lives as part of their political struggle. Whether these ideologues or indeed the Dalit movement has thought about the position of Dalit women in inter-caste marriage remains impalpable— reinforcing the sense of the saying ‘all the Dalits are men’. While the upper-caste woman’s marriage with a Dalit man gains more respectability within the Dalit family by the virtue of her caste position, Dalit women end up being exploited by upper-caste men and not given the position of a wife. In several instances, Dalit women have committed suicide after being exploited by the upper-caste men even in the name of ‘love’ and ‘ideology’. The case of Sunita, a post-graduate student who committed suicide on UOH campus, after being exploited by a Reddy male student is an example of such violence against Dalit women. On the other hand in cases like those of Chandra Sri and Radhika, Dalit women faced caste discrimination within the family itself. Chandra Sri has written how she had been discriminated in her matrimonial home due to her caste position. (Gogu Shyamala 2002) Therefore, the acceptance an upper-caste woman receives in an inter-caste marriage by the Dalit family may not be independent of the caste and patriarchal structures. However, the way the upper-caste families perceive their women as the ‘gate ways of caste purity’ (Uma Chakravarti 2008) leads to violence against Dalit men who marry upper-caste women.

The Dalit ideology on inter-caste marriage today has to rethink the Dalit family based on the conditions of Dalit women. The inheritance of caste identity from the father figure is the result of patriarchy. However, casteist patriarchy makes the children of Dalit women unacceptable to the upper-caste families in inter-caste marriage. The argument that the children of Dalit women who marry upper-caste men should not use reservations because they inherit the property of the upper-caste father or that such Dalit women have acted against the interest of their community is based solely on casteist and patriarchal attitudes (Rekha Raj, 2014). Dalit ideology on marriage, therefore, should not only be free from caste but from sexism and patriarchy as well.

Sowjanya teaches at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad and can be reached at sowjanya.tamalapakula@gmail.com

References

Chakravarti, Uma. Gendering Caste: Through Feminist Lens. Calcutta: Stree, 2003.

Raj, Rekha, “Dalit Women as Political Agents” in Deshpande (ed.) The Problem of Caste: Readings on the Economy, Polity and Society, New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2014.

Rege, Sharmila. Against the Madness of Manu: B.R Ambedkar’s Writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy. Delhi: Navayana, 2013

Rege, Sharmila, “Caste and Gender: The Violence Against Women in India” in Jogdand (ed.) Dalit Women in India: Issues and Perspectives, New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1995.

Shyamala, Gogu. Nallapoddu, Hyderabad: Hyderabad Book Trust, 2003.