Intersectional Resistance: Reading Dalit Women's Autobiographies Through Caste, Gender, and Identity

Abstract

Despite their enormous contribution to resistance literature, Dalit women's autobiographies have been received in a manner that often falls victim to a caste-centred approach that simply ignores the issues of gender or a feminist approach that simply ignores caste. This paper suggests that such texts cannot be understood adequately without adopting an intersectional lens of the multiple components of caste, gender, class and religious identity as interconstitutive. With reference to the fundamental Dalit feminist critiques, the study builds three arguments by reading Bama's Karukku, Baby Kamble's The Prisons We Broke and Urmila Pawar's The Weave of My Life. It first demonstrates, based on the theory of intersectionality proposed by Crenshaw and the account of brahmanical patriarchy proposed by Chakravarti, that the Dalit woman is located at a point which is not divisible into various axes of oppression. Secondly, as also Rege and Nayar do, it reads these life-narratives as evidence, as testimonios from a collective 'I' that speaks for a collective. Third, it points to a set of formal and thematic patterns (the labouring body, double patriarchy, education, religious disobedience, and vernacular voice) in which resistance is performed in the form of the narrative itself. The paper integrates these insights into an integrative model of intersectional resistance. It ends with a prospectus of research directions that may be helpful for the future of comparative and digital studies and pedagogical research. It introduces a synthesis which attempts to consider Dalit women's life-writing not just as data for other frameworks but as a theory of its own.