Dalit Feminism in India: Fighting Caste and Gender Discrimination Simultaneously

In India, the experience of being a woman is shaped not just by gender but also by caste. For Dalit women, oppression arrives in layers – as women within patriarchal households and as Dalits within a rigid caste hierarchy. Dalit feminism is the political and intellectual response to this dual reality. It refuses to treat caste as a backdrop to gender or gender as an afterthought to caste, insisting instead that the two are tightly woven and must be unraveled together.

What is Dalit feminism? 🔗

Dalit feminism is a distinct strand of feminist thought and activism in India that focuses on the lived experiences of Dalit women, who face simultaneous oppression on the basis of caste, gender, and often class. The word “Dalit” – meaning “broken” or “oppressed” – refers to communities historically classified as “untouchable” and placed outside the four-fold varna order, today recognised as Scheduled Castes under the Indian Constitution.

Mainstream Indian feminism, especially through the 1970s and 1980s, was largely shaped by upper-caste, middle-class women whose framing of “sisterhood” assumed a universal womanhood. Dalit politics, meanwhile, was often led by Dalit men who centered caste discrimination but treated gender as secondary. Dalit women found themselves invisible in both spaces. As activist Ruth Manorama has put it, Dalit women are “Dalits among the Dalits” – thrice alienated by caste, class, and gender.

The intersectional foundation 🔗

Sociologist Sharmila Rege gave Dalit feminism much of its theoretical vocabulary. Drawing on Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s writings, she argued that caste and patriarchy are not parallel systems but mutually reinforcing ones. The caste order survives through endogamy – marriage strictly within caste – which depends on controlling women’s sexuality and reproductive choices. In a much-cited essay, Rege argued that “caste determines the division of labour, sexual division of labour, and division of sexual labour”, making it impossible to separate caste from patriarchy.

This insight gave rise to the concept of Brahmanical patriarchy – a gender order rooted in caste purity, where upper-caste women are placed on a pedestal of “honour” and Dalit women are denied even basic dignity. Rege’s later work, Against the Madness of Manu, anchored this critique in Ambedkar’s ideological fight against Brahmanical patriarchy and the graded violence the caste system enables against women.

Why Dalit women needed their own movement 🔗

To understand why Dalit feminism emerged as a separate strand, it helps to look at the late 1980s and 1990s, when Dalit women began organising autonomously. Two political moments crystallised the rupture.

The case of Bhanwari Devi 🔗

In 1992, Bhanwari Devi, a Dalit saathin (community worker) in Rajasthan, was gang-raped by upper-caste men in retaliation for her work against child marriage. Mainstream feminist mobilisation around her case eventually led to the landmark Vishakha Guidelines on workplace sexual harassment. But Dalit feminists pointed out something crucial: by reading the case purely through the lens of gender, the caste dimension of the violence was erased. Bhanwari was attacked not only as a woman but as a Dalit woman who had dared to challenge upper-caste authority.

The anti-Mandal moment 🔗

During the anti-Mandal Commission agitations in 1990, many young upper-caste women publicly opposed caste-based reservations. Rege noted that they were celebrated as feminist subjects – assertive and protesting – even as they defended caste privilege. This contradiction made it impossible for Dalit women to continue assuming a shared “womanhood” with savarna feminists.

By the mid-1990s, Dalit women had begun building independent platforms. The most important of these was the National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW), founded by Ruth Manorama in 1995 after she organised a 1993 public hearing on violence against Dalit women in Bangalore.

Ruth Manorama and the politics of dignity 🔗

Few figures embody the Dalit feminist movement as visibly as Ruth Manorama. Born in 1952 in Chennai to parents who had converted to Christianity to escape caste oppression, Manorama trained as a social worker and began her activism in the slums of Bangalore in the late 1970s. She founded Women’s Voice in 1982 to organise women in informal settlements – domestic workers, construction labourers, and slum dwellers – many of whom were Dalit.

Her sharpest contribution has been to insist that Dalit women’s liberation cannot be separated from material questions of land, housing, labour, and bodily safety. At a recent regional workshop, she framed land ownership for Dalit women as “a revolutionary act that disrupts centuries of exclusion”. For Manorama, dignity is not an abstract ideal – it is built on the right to live, work, and own.

Building a transnational voice 🔗

Under Manorama’s leadership, the NFDW carried the issue of caste discrimination into international forums. The organisation participated in the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, it translated caste discrimination into a global human rights concern. In 2006, Manorama received the Right Livelihood Award – often called the “Alternative Nobel” – for her commitment to achieving equality for Dalit women and building committed women’s organisations.

Her work also reshaped the Indian women’s movement. By federating Dalit women across regions and including domestic workers’ unions, she made it harder for any feminist conversation to ignore caste and class.

The double battle: caste and patriarchy 🔗

Dalit feminism fights on two fronts at the same time. From the outside, it challenges the caste system. From within Dalit communities, it pushes back against patriarchal norms that silence Dalit women.

Confronting caste-based violence 🔗

Violence against Dalit women is not an accident of poverty or geography – it is structural. Sexual violence, in particular, is often used as a weapon by dominant-caste men to assert hierarchy and “discipline” Dalit communities. Research on gender-based violence has shown that gang rape is sometimes deployed as a tool by oppressor-caste men to reinforce caste hierarchies and collectively dishonour Dalit communities. The criminal justice system frequently fails Dalit women: complaints are dismissed, FIRs are not registered, and convictions remain rare.

The historical practice of the Devadasi system, in which Dalit girls were dedicated to temples and forced into sexual servitude under religious sanction, is another reminder of how caste and gender intertwine to produce specific forms of harm.

Challenging patriarchy within 🔗

Equally important is Dalit feminism’s critique of patriarchy inside Dalit movements and households. Dalit women have pointed out that male-led caste politics often used the language of community honour in ways that mirrored upper-caste patriarchy. Domestic violence, restrictions on mobility, and denial of inheritance are realities that Dalit women face within their own homes, even as they fight caste oppression outside.

This is why scholars argue that Dalit feminist scholars such as Sharmila Rege, Gopal Guru, and Ruth Manorama see the Dalit women’s standpoint as both a site of knowledge and resistance – born from lived experience, not academic abstraction.

Solidarity, not absorption 🔗

A common misunderstanding is that Dalit feminism is “anti” mainstream feminism. It is not. What it demands is honesty – that any feminist project in India must reckon with caste before it can claim to speak for all women.

Manorama’s famous response to activist Kamla Bhasin’s declaration that “we women are one” captures this perfectly. She replied that Dalit women are already divided by caste before they can be united as women. The call, therefore, is for solidarity built on recognition of difference – not on the erasure of it.

This has practical implications. It means upper-caste feminists must examine their own caste privilege, support Dalit-led organisations financially and politically, and push for caste to be treated as central rather than peripheral in policy debates on women’s safety, work, and education. It also means broadening the feminist agenda to include questions of land, housing, manual scavenging, and the unorganised labour sector – issues that disproportionately shape Dalit women’s lives.

The road ahead 🔗

The challenges remain enormous. Dalit women continue to face the slowest gains in literacy, the highest exposure to violence, and the deepest economic precarity. Funding for grassroots Dalit feminist movements is shrinking, with donors often expecting a 2,000-year-old system of caste-based discrimination to be eliminated within three-year project cycles. Yet the movement persists, building leadership at the grassroots, pushing law and policy, and shaping how India understands gender itself.

Dalit feminism’s most lasting contribution may be conceptual: it has forced Indian feminism to give up the comfort of a singular “woman” and instead think in terms of intersecting structures. In doing so, it has aligned with a global current of intersectional thought – much like Black feminism in the United States – while remaining firmly rooted in the soil of Indian caste reality.

What do you think? If a “universal sisterhood” ignores caste, can it still be called feminism? And in what specific ways can students, workplaces, and policymakers around you make space for Dalit women’s voices to lead – rather than merely be invited to the table?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit_feminism
2. https://indiatogether.org/ruthmano-society
3. https://www.india-seminar.com/2018/710/710_sharmila_rege.htm
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharmila_Rege
5. https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2978&context=jiws
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Dalit_Women
7. https://landportal.org/blog-post/2025/07/campaign-strategy-land-and-dalit-rights-activist-dr-ruth-manorama
8. https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/ruth-manorama/
9. https://cofemsocialchange.org/sexual-gbv-dalit-women-girls-india/
10. https://www.creativeflight.in/2025/10/dalitism-and-feminism-locating-women-in.html
11. https://gender.study/issues-of-gender-and-development/dalit-feminism-voices-margins-caste-gender/
12. https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/dalit-feminism-in-india-a-movement-built-to-last-but-hard-to-fund/