The village and the city: Dalit feminism in the autobiographies of Baby Kamble and Urmila Pawar

Abstract

As a reaction against mainstream Indian feminism that tended to ignore the problems of caste, Dalit women and those who advocate their cause have been making a valid case for Dalit feminism. This standpoint acknowledges both the patriarchal oppression from outside the caste as well as within it. Both Baby Kamble and Urmila Pawar have been activists as well as writers, whose autobiographies and creative works are vivid elaborations of the same. Showing how Dalit autobiographies have broken the conventional notions of autobiography coming out of the post-industrial revolution West by locating the individual firmly within the community, Sharmila Rege has pointed out that the Dalit women’s “testimonios” are also their protest against a “communitarian control on the self” (Rege, 2008). Baby Kamble’s autobiography brings out the blatant caste exploitation and violence against women in pre-Ambedkar rural Maharashtra, while Pawar’s begins with the village but focuses more on subtler urban forms of oppression. The latter text reflects on the story of postcolonial India’s development as, even in an urban milieu, caste and gender only change forms of oppression. Both authors’ lives make interesting studies for Dalit gynocritics. Kamble seems to completely submerge the self in the community, living as she does in a feudal patriarchal milieu in the countryside. Writing from a generation later that has felt the impact of urban modernity and feminism, Pawar brings out the self in a bolder way, inviting criticism from established Dalit writers like Sharan Kumar Limbale and others. In a broader sense, both autobiographies are significant as women’s writing and as contemporary Indian literature.

In the 1970s, the Ambedkarite and the Dalit Panthers movements in Maharashtra together gave rise to a new genre of Marathi literature which numbered among its writers some outstanding Dalit women authors. In their autobiographies they depicted their experiences as women trapped within the layers of patriarchal and caste oppression. Dalit feminism is a new concept in women’s studies, which has yet to be fully developed and articulated as a feminist theory. Dalit activists belonging to the Ambedkarite movement have themselves not agreed to call their struggles Dalit feminist; feminist analysts have coined this term after coming to the realization that mainstream feminists have ignored caste and mainstream Ambedkarites have, in practice, shrugged aside gender. Another strain in this line of thinking is rather akin to Alice Walker’s womanism, ¹ whereby Dalit women activists feel that many Dalit men, humiliated as they are by the upper castes and classes, transfer this domination onto Dalit women. If they could only come together, a unity of the genders would actually lead to Dalit emancipation. ² Baby Kamble’s (1986/2009) autobiography Jeena Amucha (loosely translated as “Our Kind of Living”, but published as The Prisons We Broke in English), reflects the state of the community and the plight of women in a part of rural Maharashtra at the turning point of B. R. Ambedkar’s movement. By contrast, Aidan (2003) by Urmila Pawar, translated as The Weave of My Life by Maya Pandit (who also translated The Prisons We Broke), moves into the post-Ambedkar period and the author’s encounter with the urban feminist movement in Bombay/Mumbai. Referring to Dr Ambedkar, Pawar writes: “‘Leave the village,’ he had told his followers. ‘The village will never help you progress. Go to the city!’” (Pawar, 2008: 159). ³ However, although Pawar’s journey to city life helped her grow as a writer and activist, both the autobiographies show that caste and gender discrimination merely take different forms in the village and the city.

The various theories and historical controversies regarding the origins of caste in India are outside the scope of this essay to explore. The Manusmruti or the Law Code of Manu, probably drafted in the first or second century AD, are usually cited by Dalits as the ideological grounding of caste and women’s oppression. This code blatantly justifies the exploitation of the shudra caste, as well as denying equality or any respect to women of all castes. Barbaric punishments are recommended for shudras and for women who revolt or simply question the status quo. Not only did the caste hierarchy help the local rulers of the tribal and feudal society in ancient and medieval India to exploit the people, but also the invaders who ruled India — in spite of their egalitarian religions of Islam and Christianity — continued to maintain the caste system for their own convenience. As such, even in today’s era of globalization, a feudal Brahminical caste culture coexists with the so-called modernization processes.

In Maharashtra, the mahar caste comprises about 70 per cent of the Scheduled Caste population and is the caste to which the two writers under consideration belong. Traditionally, the lower castes were members of the bara balutedars or 12 assigned occupations (servants) of the village. The mahars were the gatekeepers, the messengers, and those who served village officials, for example carrying away and disposing of dead cattle. In return they were given watan land and food grains. ⁴ The yeskar mahar, whose work is described in detail by Baby Kamble, was assigned to work for the village, especially the patil or administrative officer. The bara balutedars were strategically located within or on the borders of the village depending upon the work they did and their rules of pollution. Mahar bastis (dwellings) were often outside or on the village boundaries. Strong notions of pollution and defilement regulated mahar lives and governed their relations with other villagers. For example, they were prohibited from touching sources of drinking water such as wells or pitchers; they would have alms thrown into their hands; a brush might be tied to their posteriors so as to wipe away their footprints and a mud pitcher tied to their neck to spit in; they were not allowed to let their shadow fall upon higher-caste people and had to take precaution not to touch anybody accidentally. Baby Kamble describes their food intake as largely relying on stale and putrid leftovers, which is also the title of the late Dalit male writer Om Prakash Valmiki’s autobiography, Joothan (2003), meaning scraps of food left on a plate, that signifies pollution through the saliva, a concept in Hindu Brahminical culture.

In the nineteenth century, new administrative and revenue structures introduced by the British led to important changes in the lives of mahars. While many of their traditional duties were cancelled, they were still kept on the watan lands so that they could serve the village. They also had opportunities to seek other employment sources such as joining the army, migrating to cities to work in the mills or railways, and so forth. Since literacy was compulsory in the army, schooling was provided for mahars in the military (Ghandy, 2011: 104). Even before the rise of Dr Ambedkar some social reformers from among the mahars, like Kisan Phaguji Bansod and Kalicharan Nandagawli of Nagpur, had been campaigning against superstition and for the education of mahars. B. R. Ambedkar, the son of a subedar-major in the mahar regiment of the army, was the first mahar to get a PhD from abroad. Being a liberal, and inspired by the likes of J. S. Mill and Edmund Burke, Dr Ambedkar had faith in parliamentary democracy and the constitutional means of struggle, believing that a strong lobby of the Depressed Classes would facilitate reforms leading to equality. He was disillusioned by the resistance of some Hindu nationalists to the Hindu Code Bill, which he had introduced as a reform law favouring inheritance rights for Hindu women. Further disillusionment led him to convert to Buddhism as a way of life or dhamma. Realizing that landlessness was a major factor behind Dalits’ backwardness, Dr Ambedkar advocated the nationalization of land. He also advocated the renunciation of idol worship, Hindu rituals, and the role of Brahmins as priests in marriages and ceremonies. Both of the autobiographies under discussion describe Dalits’ drowning of Hindu idols and ensuring that marriages are performed according to contemporary Buddhist rites. Dr Ambedkar’s philosophy, work, commitment, and personality has been a driving force for most Dalit literature.

A significant movement giving rise to modern Dalit Marathi literature was the Dalit Panthers movement of the 1970s. Inspired by the Black Panthers’ movement and radical communist groups of that period, Dalit youth in and around Bombay as well as Dalit prose writers and poets gave a militant turn to the Dalit movement. This is evidenced, for instance, in Raja Dhale’s 1973 excoriation of the Indian flag being raised on Independence Day since it had given neither peace nor democracy to Dalits, or the later burning of the Bhagavad Gita, the holy book of the Hindus (Ghandy, 2011: 109). Since theirs was a political movement, activists formulated a Dalit Panthers manifesto in which the word Dalit was explained in a broad way to denote the oppressed and marginalized, not simply the erstwhile untouchable castes. As Anuradha Ghandy explains:

A literature of protest burst forth, attacking all forms of discrimination, mocking at those “immersed in plastering withering leaves”, expressing the anguish of the “injuries ploughed into their backs,” calling upon “countless suns aflame with blood […] to advance setting afire town after town.” Namdev Dhasal, Yeshwant Manohar, Daya Pawar, Keshav Meshram and others achieved overnight fame. The literature of revolt vowed to take revenge for the centuries of oppression: it sprang up on notice boards, in slums, in small magazines and posters. Taking inspiration from the Black Panthers, this movement gave itself a name, Dalit Panthers. (Ghandy, 2011: 109)

Ghandy quotes the subversive poetry of Namdeo Dhasal, the foremost Dalit poet of those times, whose images of flaming suns, blood, and fire along with the use of expletives and obscenity for the first time in Marathi poetry shook the middle-class morality of the time. This generation laid the foundation of what was to be termed Dalit literature and cleared the terrain for writers like Kamble and Pawar.

Another contemporary social movement that has influenced at least one of the writers, Urmila Pawar, is the urban women’s movement in Maharashtra of the 1970s and 1980s. Influenced by the feminist movement in the US and UK in the 1960s, and like this Western group comprising different political and feminist strains, this movement centring around Bombay and Poona took up campaigns such as “Equal Pay for Equal Work”, reproductive health, dowry deaths, domestic violence, and rape. Activists tried to change the cultural milieu in which they lived by breaking tradition. Giving up the mangalsutra, to which Pawar refers in her autobiography, was one such symbolic act (2008: 116, 179). This chain of black beads is a sign of marriage to be worn only by Hindu women, while men need not have any kind of indication of their marital status. The drawback of these feminist groups was that they attracted women from intellectual, upper-caste backgrounds, while the majority of lower-caste women were influenced by mainstream political parties that did not have a feminist agenda. After working with such groups, Pawar came to the realization that these feminists were quite untouched by caste, whereas the Ambedkarite movement to which she belonged was extremely male dominated. It is this double bind which she grapples with in The Weave of My Life.

In order to understand the process through which these two remarkable Dalit women became writers one needs to reflect upon the politics behind Dalits’ and shudras’ education in India. Anand Teltumbde summarizes this well:

Education occupies a unique place in the emancipation schema of Dalits. Until a couple of centuries ago, education was forbidden to them. It was this lack of education which was primarily responsible for holding them in the state of bondage and humiliation. Education was the basic catalyst to germinate consciousness of their being and impel them to agitate against their oppression. (Teltumbde, 2014: 8)

Teltumbde goes on to write that after centuries of deprivation of education due to the laws of Manu, it was Christian missionaries who opened up education to the shudras. Jotiba Phule, who pioneered the non-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra, started schools for shudras, ati-shudras (untouchables), and women, training his wife, Savitribai Phule, to work as a teacher in a girls’ school. Such early Dalit activists as Gopal Baba Valangkar and Shivram Janba Kamble motivated Dalits to get educated. Dr Ambedkar himself pioneered educational institutions like the People’s Education Society. In the villages where Baby Kamble and Urmila Pawar were raised, schools were held inside the houses of Brahmin teachers and Dalits were not allowed to enter. Even when the schools moved to public spaces, Dalit children were made to sit separately, could not touch the water pot, and were humiliated by teachers and students. In spite of this kind of educational deprivation, Baby Kamble reveals in an interview with Maya Pandit that she wrote her memoirs on scraps of paper and hid them from her husband. Being ashamed both of what she wrote and of being a writer — an occupation not expected of women in her society — these notebooks lay hidden until Maxine Bernstein, a researcher, urged her to share them and eventually develop them for publication (Pandit, 2009: 147, 148). For Pawar, a few decades later, writing was a different kind of process: it stemmed from an urge to express, to record, and to resist that emerged in the night time when she would disappear into the kitchen to write, or in the compulsion to pour out words after the tragic and untimely death of her son. Writing meant resisting the taunts of contemporaneous intellectuals about Dalits’ language usage; it meant organizing Dalit women writers’ conferences and associations, speaking publicly alongside men and mainstream political figures, feeling ignored and made fun of. But it also meant recognition, honour, and immensely gratifying friendships with other Dalit women writers and activists.

The direct role of the state in the lives of Dalits in villages in post-Independence India was conspicuous by its absence. The feudal Brahminical culture prevailed as a system of norms and traditions; a mesh of superstitions, religious beliefs, and hierarchies. While Baby Kamble’s autobiography focuses entirely on village life, Pawar’s narrative flashes back and forth between the town and the village. Memories flow through experiences of poverty, hunger, caste discrimination, and domestic violence. These are interspersed with descriptions of Dalit traditions and culture, as disease is warded off with superstitions and children’s hunger distracted by stories. Baby Kamble expresses the destitution and sickness when she writes: “The maharwada symbolized utter poverty and total destitution. Epidemics, especially cholera and plague, were extremely fond of mahars; a couple of mahars would die like flies every day” (Kamble, 2009: 80). ⁵ Sordid descriptions in Kamble’s book of naked children with bodies coated in dust and dribbling noses, and of the ravaging hunger in the bellies of women who have just given birth being sated by soup made of boiled cacti, are disturbing and shocking. As a woman writer, Kamble puts much effort into describing memories of women’s work, marriages, childbirth, housework, and cooking.

Indians are known to be publicly coy about sex, as the dominant Brahminical culture, coupled with the Victorian prudery of the colonial rulers, erased earthy Indian folk songs and dances, instead promoting the classical culture of the elite class. Baby Kamble’s autobiography unabashedly describes the weddings in her community’s villages, where the songs were full of sexual jibes at the parents of the bride and bridegroom (since marriages were virtually child marriages in Kamble’s childhood). Referring to the groom’s mother and father in the wedding procession, one song would go:

Here comes the rukhwat, come and watch,

Our Inibai’s got an itch in her crotch.

Give her a couch, she’s on heat…

Get up, Iwan, take off her clothes,

Show her the house, give her a bath. (91)

Descriptions of women, apparently possessed, dancing all night with abandon as a sexual release under the cover of religious rituals, are presented in a nonjudgmental way. Some of the folk songs that draw their imagery from nature express the anxieties of the village people: the new bride is compared to the jujube tree, the jasmine vine, and the white champak flower, carried off by the thief — the son-in-law — while the parents of the girl are urged not to weep. The chapter on the month of Ashad describes rituals and festivities quite unknown to upper-caste Indians, rituals that involve people rather than being performed by single priests, where the potraja, the eldest son, is dressed in traditional garments and presented to the village to lead the rituals with drum beating and dance. With her characteristic wry humour, Kamble writes:

That’s how the screaming epidemic spread, creating a huge commotion all over. Meanwhile a potraja started beating rhythmically on his dimdi! That would excite the women all the more. They would just sprint towards the chawdi like excited she-buffaloes, completely unaware of what they were wearing or the people around. They would dance around the potraja screaming all the while on the top of their voices. These possessed women were called goddesses or mothers. When they started dancing, the potraja too slipped into his element […] The potraja would get tired, but the women? No way! (22)

Ultimately, this ritual takes a kind of feminist turn, as the women, in the guise of the goddess, vent their grievances, make their demands, and express their wishes until the men literally fall at their feet begging for forgiveness and assuring them that they will fulfil their desires.

Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life begins with a vivid description of a group of Dalit women from her village crossing the mountains to go from their rural world to the town to sell firewood and to buy salt and dried fish on their way back. It is an arduous journey and they tell each other stories to keep their spirits up while a young mother remembers the child she has left at home as milk rushes to her breasts. The harshness of life, especially for children, is again recalled when Pawar writes about a trip to her grandmother’s village. The journey involves an unending walk, barefooted, in the scorching sun; as blisters form on the children’s feet, leaves are tied to them like shoes. Although Dalit women’s autobiographies tend to negate personal experiences in favour of the community, Pawar’s autobiography does have a narrative about her own feelings of love. She examines her relationship with her husband as her life evolves, even if that relationship is not portrayed as the predominant story that she wants to tell. Most of this personal narrative is written with a sense of irony or humour: “After this the love fever came down and I returned to studies once again. But just like malaria, the fever of love too stays dormant for a while and again begins to rear its head from time to time and makes the afflicted one shiver” (136). Her tongue-in-cheek attitude continues in her description of her wedding night:

My jaau Mai had turned the middle room into our bridal chamber. My husband’s face glowed but I felt a little embarrassed. However, I entered the room as if it was nothing special. My husband followed behind. The moment he came in he bolted the door. All the people were awake outside. The wooden door had big crevices. I blew the light out in spite of my husband’s protest. Light had no place in the embrace. (186)

This is followed by an account of the next morning in true feminist style: Pawar discovers that she is bleeding and tells her mother-in-law that she has her period. But to her surprise the bleeding stops; her husband laughs and wants to announce the proof of her virginity. Pawar, as a city woman, is so embarrassed that she stops him and follows the pollution rituals of menstruating women by sitting apart for four days, even though she is not menstruating. When her period actually comes, she hides the fact and mingles freely with everyone else.

Both Pawar and Kamble write about their experiences of caste discrimination in the city and countryside. The Prisons We Broke shows the clear demarcation between the spaces allocated to Dalits and to high-caste Hindus. The autobiography indicates how Dalits had to bend before the savarnas (caste Hindus) so that they and their clothes would never brush against them, and how goods that they bought were thrown into their hands as were the stale food items that they were given as alms. As Gopal Guru points out in his afterword to Kamble’s book, the body language of the yeskar changed between the two spaces from folding to flowing: he became a confident leader in his own world and cringing slave in the other (Guru, 2009: 159).

Both Pawar and Kamble write about their experiences of caste discrimination in school and in the process of education. Kamble describes the radical attempt of herself and her schoolmates to sneak into a temple forbidden to Dalits. The sight of the black stone idols is so frightening that these icons appear to be demons from the Dalit girls’ terrified perspective. This image seems to invert the prevalent culture in which Brahmins “demonize” Dalits as crude and ugly individuals. Urmila Pawar too describes the casteism at work in her village, as is highlighted by Dalit women having to wait and beg to have water poured into their pitchers because they are not allowed to touch and pollute the water source. Urmila’s migration to the city brings out the irony that caste discrimination just takes different forms in “modern” spaces. Getting accommodation in Ratnagiri town is a major hurdle for Urmila and her husband because of their caste and they are often abruptly humiliated and asked to leave. Even in Bombay, Pawar’s neighbours reprimand her for inviting their children to her daughter’s birthday party, as eating in a Dalit house is forbidden. However, the exposure to Dalit activists and intellectuals in the city is transformative for Urmila:

Until this time, I considered our local leaders as great and modeled my speech on theirs. But when I listened to the impressive speakers at this programme, I was afraid even to open my mouth. The import of Dr. Ambedkar’s words, “Leave the village and go to the cities” dawned on me afresh. I was getting an entirely new perspective here. (244)

Pawar’s city life and her brush with feminism and the Dalit writers’ movement ultimately leads her, along with another Dalit poet, Hira Bansode, to found a Dalit women writers’ organization.

In her afterword to Pawar’s work, Sharmila Rege argues that “the testimonio is for a Dalit woman a powerful medium to protest against adversaries within and without” (Rege, 2008: 323). Rege argues that Dalit autobiographies do not resemble Western autobiographies as the “self” is submerged by the desire of narrating the stories of a community. She writes: “In a testimonio, the intention is not one of literariness but of communicating the situation of a group’s oppression, imprisonment and struggle” (Rege, 2006: 13). While the adversary of a Brahminical Hindu social order is described as the adversary without, the oppression of women within the community is also frankly explored. Understanding it as a chain of oppression whereby the humiliation of the Dalit people by caste Hindus is transferred onto other women within the community, Baby Kamble declares:

The other world had bound us with chains of slavery. But we too were human beings. And we too desired to dominate, to wield power. But who would let us do that? So we made our own arrangements to find slaves — our very own daughters-in-law! If nobody else, then we could at least enslave them. (87)

Her depiction of the young adolescent girl tortured with the burden of cooking on a wood fire for the family, fetching water, washing clothes by the river, being dragged by her hair if found lacking, cursed along with her mother if untrained, the fragments of her burnt bhakri (hand-beaten bread) displayed for neighbours to examine, and the girl bride woken up before dawn to fulfil all her responsibilities, is truly heartrending. Then comes an evocation of the thrashing of a girl who tried to escape and make her way alone through the risky forests and meadows to her parents’ house. Once caught, she was entrapped with a wooden block tied to her bleeding and sore foot — this appears little less than a form of medieval torture. The grand finale of this gory vignette is the chopping off of the nose of a truant wife, a custom that seems to have found social sanction from the Ramayana itself, where Ravana’s sister Soorpanakha’s nose was chopped off by Laxman, the brother of Rama.

Though Urmila Pawar mentions cases of intoxicated men in her village beating their wives, her own experiences of patriarchy in married life are less violent. Rising early at about three in the morning to finish domestic chores, working in an office, raising the children, and finding time to write and be an activist were the main challenges. Her relationship with her husband shows the boldness of her personality as she chooses him herself, falls in love, defies parental authority to spend time with him before marriage, and marries him against their wishes but with their consent and cooperation. But in the midst of marriage and motherhood, this romantic relationship turns into drudgery as her husband takes to habitual drinking and resents her fame as a writer and her activism. Pawar also writes, sometimes with ironical humour, about the patriarchal attitudes of male writers and Dalit event organizers towards her, because she is a woman.

In his afterword to The Prisons We Broke, Gopal Guru differentiates between the autobiographies written by upper-caste women and Dalit women, stating that the narratives of the former were about their confinement and discrimination within the four walls of their homes, while Dalit women have spoken out about both the home and the world (Guru, 2009: 159). Aside from the fact that they were not restricted from the public space by patriarchy but rather by caste, their involvement in the Ambedkarite movement has also given them this privilege. Guru points out that the chawdi, the village square of the Dalit locality, was an important centre of debate and discussion, as well as being a symbol of democratic space and decision-making for Dalits. One example of this comes in a debate between Baby Kamble’s grandfather Malhari, a follower of Dr Ambedkar, and the traditional leader, the karbhari, about religious practices, superstitions, and pollution. Guru argues that to believe that Dr Ambedkar’s decision to convert to Buddhism was a personal one imposed on the Dalit community would be inaccurate, because Ambedkar’s followers were quite involved in the process. The conversion of religious spaces like fairs and processions into sites of Ambedkarite propaganda can be interpreted within the ambit of Dalits’ aspirations for modernity. The entire process was not simply a movement for self-respect but an attempted transition from feudal to democratic thinking, taking Dalits far ahead in their radicalism, as compared to other backward castes, especially the women.

As mentioned earlier, both Pawar and Kamble write about the drowning of Hindu idols as an important ritual to break the shackles of Hindu caste ideology from the psyche of Dalits. As K. Satyanarayan and Susie Tharu aver:

According to modern Hinduism, caste divisions and hierarchies are created by God, and caste order is therefore divine. The ideas of Karma and divine retribution make the mobility of oppressed castes almost impossible. The idea of “Dalit” breaks with the Hindu identity and offers a new liberating identity. (Satyanarayan and Tharu, 2013: 22)

Kamble resolved from an early age to lead her life according to the principles of Babasaheb Ambedkar. Outlining how she strived to do so and elaborating on how Buddhism is not a religion but rather a way of life, Kamble says that she would never worship Ambedkar with flowers and incense but would instead fight bravely with the weapons of sheel and satwa (character and truth). Similarly, Urmila Pawar upturns the negative meaning of “Dalit”, usually denoting the crushed and oppressed, by writing that the term “also signals rational, secular people who have discarded the oppressive system and concepts like God, fate and the caste system” (275).

Baby Kamble’s was one of the first marriages to be performed according to the Buddhist rituals drawn up by Dr Ambedkar to make marriage a simpler and more egalitarian process in which the priest has no role. This kind of marriage had become quite prevalent among mahars by the time Urmila Pawar got married. Her autobiography takes up the period after conversion where she honestly examines whether the community has been following the principles of Dr Ambedkar and Buddhist dhamma in a true sense. She questions the custom of haldi-kunku (the ceremony in which a red dot is applied to a married woman’s forehead, excluding widows) as a discriminatory practice (255). She questions why she was wearing the mangalsutra, the black necklace worn by Hindu women as a sign of marriage. She mentions how Buddhism had become institutionalized through the Bauddha Jana Panchayats that laid out rules and some monetary obligations for marriage. When questioned about marrying a man with the same surname, generally a taboo, she replies that Buddhists should give up Hindu beliefs surrounding marriage taboos (174−75). After her husband’s death Urmila Pawar refused to perform the widow ritual of breaking her glass bangles and wiping off the vermilion dot from her forehead, which even Buddhist women usually performed. She learnt that after such struggles this ritual was made an optional one by the Bauddha Jana Panchayat in 2002. Pawar bravely refused to accept a literary award that she had won because the official ceremony would follow the Hindu tradition of praying to the goddess Saraswati. A reading of the autobiographies of these two remarkable Dalit women reminds us of the fact that religious conversion can remain merely a symbolic change until the torchbearers of society at the grassroots struggle at every level to implement these changes creatively.

Reading these texts in the light of Dalit feminism is also an attempt to understand what this political standpoint is. While the autonomous women’s movement in India grew and spread in the 1980s, Dalit women’s groups began to assert themselves from the early 1990s onwards. Prior to the Beijing Conference of 1995, conferences were held in various cities initiated by Dalit women who were influenced by this autonomous women’s movement and also by Satyashodhak Mahila Aghadi. Writing about this process in 1995, Gopal Guru, in his essay “Dalit Women Talk Differently” (1995), argues that the need for Dalit women to assert themselves existed because the Dalit leadership had not taken up their issues and because the feminist movement had also not understood their needs. He mentions Gail Omvedt’s assertion that leftist movements let down Dalit women and Rajni Kothari’s description of how Indian political institutions and public policy betrayed these women. The growing farmers’ movement in Maharashtra between 1985–1995 also failed to take up the issues of Dalit women, who were mainly agricultural labourers. Guru argues that due to their social location, Dalit women can represent themselves better than upper-caste women:

Dalit women’s claim to “talk differently” assumes certain positions. It assumes that the social location of the speaker will be more or less stable; therefore, “talking differently” can be treated as genuinely representative. This makes the claim of Dalit woman to speak on behalf of Dalit women automatically valid. In doing so, the phenomenon of “talking differently” foregrounds the identity of Dalit women. (Guru, 1995: 2549)

Taking up where Guru left off, in her 1998 essay, “Dalit Women Talk Differently”, Sharmila Rege expresses concern that where multiple or plural feminisms co-exist and the politics of difference and identity politics prevail, the onus is put on Dalit women to develop a political position for themselves. Rege would rather formulate an ideological standpoint located in the history of Dalit struggles, from the Satyashodhak movement of Mahatma Phule to the writings and struggles of Dr Ambedkar. Rege argues that although the notion of “difference” brought into focus the concepts of race and caste within feminist discourse, the need to examine the “social relations that convert difference into oppression is imperative for feminist politics” (Rege, 1998: 39). She then traces the history of the Satyashodhak movement led by Phule and the contribution of non-Brahmin women in it, both in the field and the discourse, as well as the Ambedkarite movement. Rege mentions how small socialist/leftist groups in Maharashtra tried to grapple with the Dalit question far more sincerely and successfully than the mainstream communist parties and the autonomous women’s movement. Though these movements did try to “mobilize” Dalit women, they did not tackle the phenomenon of Brahminism. Further, Rege describes the various new Dalit women’s organizations and conferences that had sprung up in the 1990s and explores how an Indian Women’s Day was declared by Dalit women activists at a conference in Chandrapur in 1996, on Christmas Day, 25 December, the day Dr Ambedkar burnt the Manusmriti in 1927.

Rege argues that a Dalit feminist standpoint “places emphasis on individual experiences within socially constructed groups and focuses on the hierarchical, multiple, changing structural power relations of caste, class, ethnic, which construct such a group” (Rege, 1998: 45). A reading of the texts under consideration by Pawar and Kamble also reveals the multiple layers of oppression knotting together the class, caste, and ethnic cultural patterns with the manipulations of gender.

In her introduction to another text, Against the Madness of Manu, a compilation of Dr Ambedkar’s essays on caste and gender, Rege (2013) recalls Urmila Pawar’s autobiography. Pawar describes a seminar of women activists that she had attended, where a woman activist had said that Dr Ambedkar had done nothing for women, that his Hindu Code Bill was a political stunt, and he had done nothing to educate his wife. As Urmila’s jaws fell open, she was more shocked to see that no other women contradicted the speaker. In this introduction, Rege takes up the question of the “personal” and the “political”, the pet concepts of the 1960s women’s movement, to explore the life of Dr Ambedkar, his relationship with his two wives (he married a Brahmin woman 13 years after his first wife died), their roles, and the public reception and imagination of these women (Rege, 2013: 13−56). Baby Kamble and Urmila Pawar have also been authors navigating the “personal” and “political”. Baby Kamble lived and wrote at a time and in a place untouched by the women’s movement. Although thousands of women actively participated in the anti-colonial movement, in both the non-violent and violent streams of it, and although the Communist Party of India led many peasant women’s struggles (such as Tebhaga, West Bengal) for land rights (for example the Telengana armed struggle) and the agitations of women industrial workers, the impact of such movements had not reached her village or community. She and her extended family had participated in the Ambedkarite movement and it is from Ambedkar’s thoughts and his interpretations of Buddha’s dhamma as a way of life and not a religion that she derived the writer’s ironic vision through which she narrates her “testimonios”. Although her descriptions of patriarchy, with its violence against women, tend to focus on the “internal” rather than the external, it is difficult to draw these lines.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, Dalit women activists who have been working in the field and have encountered other women’s movements, be they Marxist or feminist, have produced many accounts of their experiences and observations. The texts of Kamble and Pawar have functioned as a catalyst in this process. Whereas, as Guru observes, male Dalit literature does not focus on female characters or portrays them as subservient and suffering, female Dalit writers depict strong, intelligent, compassionate, and rebellious women. Dalit women writers and activists boldly criticize the patriarchy within their community. Yet, having not found a space within the broader women’s movement and mainstream communist movement, Dalit women have decided primarily to identify with Dalit politics and their community. Pawar writes:

One thing was, however, very clear to me. Women’s issues did not have any place on the agenda of the Dalit movement and the women’s movement was indifferent to the issues in the Dalit movement. Even today things have not changed! (260)

Similarly, the Telegu Dalit woman writer M. M. Vinodini asseverates: “Feminism made me overlook the fact that there was a problem worse than patriarchy: caste. […] In the context of our lives, the cold war between husband and wife that feminism talks about seems so thin, so empty” (qtd. in Satyanarayan and Tharu, 2013: 32). Dalit women’s collectives have explored these ideas. A statement published by the Dalit Women’s Network for Solidarity (DAWNS) in 2006 at Bangalore prefers to use the term Dalit womanism, because it is in keeping with the views of Black feminists (Stephen, 2009: n.p.). The Dalit Women’s Solidarity Network drew attention to a similar link between racism and casteism, presenting a paper on this issue at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001.

As women writers, both Kamble and Pawar use rich, suggestive images of domestic life: in Kamble’s text these include the chavdi (the space of discussion and debate), the Ashad month with its rains that clean the environment and bring festivities into the homes of Dalits; the cast-off shrouds that make clothes for mahars which the women wear in caste Hindu styles to taunt savarna culture, the abundance of vermilion and turmeric in Hindu customs, contrasted with the purity of white used in Buddhism. Urmila Pawar’s text abounds with detailed descriptions of nature: the beautiful scenery around the road leading up to her ancestral village, of clothes people wore and the food that was eaten, as well as the houses they lived in — always contrasting the Dalit and non-Dalit culture. Water becomes a sign of exclusion in this area surrounded by sea water; potable water is not accessible to Dalits because of pollution taboos. The mental hospital where her relative works makes Urmila wonder who are insane, the Hindus or the inmates. The Devhara or household altar becomes a symbol of change and regression as, on her return to the village, she finds her brother back in the old profession as community priest having reinstated the drowned Gods.

Using a metaphor drawn from the story of Dronacharya, the untouchable Eklavya’s guru from the Mahabharata, who demanded Eklavya’s thumb as a fee for the teaching he had refused to impart, K. Satyanarayan and Susie Tharu observe that the contemporary guru or Dronacharya is the state — the apparatus that in the name of Dalit upliftment has in fact been hindering the progress and equality of Dalits. As land reforms led to the strengthening of the agricultural castes and their inclusion in the state machinery, caste atrocities such as those in Karamchedu and Kilvenmani were perpetrated by those belonging to these middle castes.

Village tank, well, cinema hall, school, public road: all of these locations that were formerly out of bounds “turned out to be sites of violence against Dalits” (Satyanarayan and Tharu, 2013: 16). The autobiographies of Baby Kamble and Urmila Pawar emphasize that the Indian state, which in the Nehruvian era aimed to be a welfare state, actually excluded Dalits from development. Due to reservations a small section got the opportunity for education and government jobs, but in India, a largely agrarian country, land reforms or Ambedkar’s dream of nationalization did not occur, keeping Dalits as largely landless agricultural labourers or owners of petty holdings. Even today the first generation of students continue to struggle for equality and against discrimination in educational institutions and workplaces. Even now students like the University of Hyderabad’s Rohith Vemula commit suicide; the lynching of Dalits, their rape and murder go on unabated. Writing with the stubs of chopped-off fingers Dalit writers continue to inspire and prick the consciences of readers. Their literature is now expanding due to the demands of translators and a growing interest in its publication the world over. Ambedkarite thought, Marxism, feminism, and other ideologies of social justice inspire Dalit writers and they in turn inspire new movements.