Emerging South Asian Dalit Feminists Voices of Dissent and Empowerment

Abstract

South Asian Dalit women’s writings are a new emerging phenomenon that places pertinent concerns of Dalit women on an international platform and addresses a wide range of audiences by using the English language as a medium of expression. They use Dalit identity as a trope of marginalization at the global level to establish a phenomenological relationship with various intersections of marginalities by drawing similarities based on structural discrimination and prejudice. Their writings engage with history from a Dalit feminist perspective to explore the nexus of caste, class, gender and patriarchal ideology. Recent studies have established that both Yashica Dutt and Sujatha Gidla’s writings subvert patriarchal values and, through various intersectional experiences of discrimination and marginality, ‘the new aesthetics of caste tries to develop synergies with other marginal subjectivities to globalize the discourse of caste’. This article attempts to look at how Dalit diasporic writers bridge the gap between different ethnicities based on marginalized experiences and discrimination that place them outside the mainstream. It reads three South Asian Dalit women’s writings, Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants (2017), Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit (2019) and Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s The Trauma of Caste (2022b), as new empowered South Asian Dalit women’s voices who undermine the notion of victimhood, establish phenomenological relationships with other marginalized communities and document the issue of caste as a transnational phenomenon.