This article critically reviews the literature on the absence of political activism by dalit women student activists in the context of higher education. The article aims to establish that dalit women activists have been marginalised in student organisations that are present in higher education from progressive left, feminist, as well as anti-caste organisations. The existing review of literature on dalit women has progressed to understanding and analysing educational experiences and social exclusion. However, dalit women are portrayed as victims in the existing scholarship because they are studied from a deficit lens. The scholarly engagement has been unsuccessful in bringing out the active and agentic voices of dalit women. Therefore, in this article, I discuss the trajectories of (a) student activism in India, (b) the emergence and political assertion of anti-caste activism in higher education spaces and (c) the erasure of dalit women student activism in higher education, contrasting it with the above two arguments. The article further explores how dalit women’s activism stems from their everyday lives, as illustrated by Anandhi and Kapadia (2017), ‘we are not in formal politics, but I think politics for us is the way we live our everyday lives’.
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