The Double Subordination: Women’s Struggles Across Caste Lines

In India, caste and gender have historically operated as twin pillars of social control, with women at every rung of the caste ladder paying a price. The form of this oppression differs sharply between upper-caste and lower-caste women, but the underlying logic is the same: women’s bodies, labour, and sexuality are governed to preserve a hierarchical social order. This is what feminist historians call the “double subordination” – being controlled as women, and being assigned a place by caste.

Caste and gender as interlocking systems 🔗

Caste does not just rank communities; it also organises gender. Scholar Uma Chakravarti’s framework of Brahmanical patriarchy argues that the collective subordination of women and lower castes was essential for upper-caste men to retain control over wealth, labour, and lineage. Women, in this scheme, became the “gateways” of caste – the points through which caste purity could either be preserved or breached. This is why women’s sexuality has been so heavily policed across centuries.

B.R. Ambedkar made a similar argument decades earlier. He saw endogamy – the rule of marrying within one’s caste – as the mechanism that keeps the caste system alive. Without strict control over whom women marry and reproduce with, caste boundaries would dissolve within a generation. So patriarchy is not an accidental companion to caste; it is the engine that sustains it.

Women as gateways of caste 🔗

Because women carry the next generation, their sexual choices threaten the entire system. A man who marries outside his caste does not destabilise lineage in the same way a woman does, because descent is traced through the father. This is why anuloma marriages – upper-caste man to lower-caste woman – were tolerated, but pratiloma marriages were forbidden. The same logic still shapes much of contemporary marriage politics in India.

The subjugation of upper-caste women 🔗

Upper-caste women occupy a paradoxical position. They benefit from the privileges of caste – better access to education, property, social respect, and economic security – yet their autonomy is heavily restricted. Their sexuality and mobility are tightly managed precisely because they are seen as the bearers of caste purity.

Historically, this control took the form of practices such as child marriage, sati, enforced widowhood, and strict notions of chastity and pativrata dharma. The widow who lost her husband was expected to remain a “sumangali all her life,” meaning she was expected to die before her husband rather than survive him. Practices like purdah, seclusion within the household, and dependence on male family members for property and decisions all reinforced this.

The patriarchal bargain 🔗

Upper-caste women are not simply victims; many comply with patriarchal rules in exchange for material and symbolic rewards. Sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti called this the “patriarchal bargain.” By being chaste, modest, devoted wives and mothers, upper-caste women earn social respect, protection, and access to the family’s wealth and status. The woman who upholds caste rules is celebrated as the ideal – even as she gives up freedoms that lower-caste women, ironically, sometimes possess by default.

This bargain has a darker side. Because upper-caste women derive status from caste, they have often been complicit in enforcing it – by opposing inter-caste marriages, by upholding untouchability in their homes, or by remaining silent on the violence done to Dalit women. Privilege here is conditional. Step outside the patriarchal order, and the protection vanishes almost instantly.

Sexual control within the home 🔗

Even within marriage, upper-caste women’s sexuality is channelled into “legitimate motherhood within a tightly controlled structure of reproduction”, as Chakravarti puts it. Marriage is arranged, mates are prescribed, and reproduction is monitored to ensure patrilineal succession. The strictness of these codes is itself a marker of caste status – the higher the caste, the tighter the restrictions on women’s bodies.

The double burden on lower-caste women 🔗

If upper-caste women trade autonomy for privilege, lower-caste women – particularly Dalit and Adivasi women – bear oppression on multiple fronts at once. They face caste oppression at the hands of upper castes, class-based oppression as labourers under upper-caste landowners, and patriarchal oppression at the hands of all men, including those of their own caste. This is what scholars call the triple burden of caste, class, and gender.

Labour without dignity 🔗

Where upper-caste women are confined to reproductive work inside the home, lower-caste women perform both reproductive and productive labour – in fields, in others’ homes, in sanitation, in construction. Their work sustains entire households and communities, yet their labour is devalued precisely because of caste. Domestic work done by an upper-caste wife is seen as “pure”; the same physical work done by a Dalit woman becomes “impure” by virtue of who is doing it.

Economic dependence on upper-caste landlords and employers makes them especially vulnerable. Many Dalit women cannot refuse work or report abuse without losing their livelihood. This dependency is structural, not accidental – it is how caste-based labour has always worked in rural India.

Sexual violence as caste enforcement 🔗

The most disturbing dimension of caste-gender oppression is the systematic sexual violence Dalit and Adivasi women face. According to NFHS 2015-16 data, sexual violence rates were highest among Scheduled Tribe women at 7.8 percent, followed by Dalit women at 7.3 percent, compared to 4.5 percent for women outside marginalised groups. A separate analysis estimated that ten rapes of Dalit women and girls were reported every day in India on average – and these official numbers are widely understood to be a fraction of the actual incidents.

The violence is not random. A study of 40 rape cases in Haryana found that at least 80% of sexual violence cases against Dalit women and girls were committed by men from dominant castes, and only 10% of cases ended in successful conviction of all accused. The same report noted that 62.5% of cases were gang rapes, drastically higher than the 11-12% gang rape rate in cases involving women generally. This pattern indicates that rape is often used as a collective tool of caste enforcement – a way for dominant-caste men to “teach a lesson” to a Dalit family or community.

Journalist Yashica Dutt, drawing on the study Dalit Women Speak Out, has documented how upper-caste men in some villages historically claimed sexual entitlement over Dalit women, including the practice of raping young Dalit brides on their wedding nights. While such practices are not uniform across India, they reveal an ideology in which Dalit women’s bodies are treated as the property of dominant-caste men.

Why justice is often denied 🔗

Conviction rates remain dismal because the institutions meant to deliver justice – police, courts, local administrations – are themselves dominated by upper-caste men. Social pressure, threats, withdrawal of complaints, and intimidation routinely block cases from progressing. The Hathras gang rape of 2020, in which a young Dalit woman in Uttar Pradesh died after being assaulted by four dominant-caste men, became a national flashpoint precisely because it exposed how state machinery often closes ranks against Dalit survivors.

Controlling women’s sexuality across castes 🔗

While the experiences differ, both upper and lower-caste societies converge on one thing: the control of women’s sexuality. Marriage is the chief instrument of this control. Endogamy – marriage strictly within caste – is the rule that keeps the entire hierarchy intact. According to the National Family Health Survey, only about 10 percent of marriages in India are inter-caste, and within these, just 4.97 percent are pratiloma marriages, where an upper-caste woman marries a lower-caste man.

Honour killings and the policing of choice 🔗

When women defy these rules, the response is often violent. Honour killings – where family or caste members kill a woman (and often her partner) for marrying outside caste – are the most extreme expression of this control. Khap panchayats and caste councils, dominated by men of dominant castes, sometimes order or sanction such killings under the guise of upholding community honour. Researchers describe these killings not as crimes of passion but as calculated acts within a social logic that treats women’s autonomy as a threat to caste order.

The targets are usually women who choose partners across caste or religious lines. Recent scholarship calls these incidents the “biopolitics of caste” – a system in which inter-caste love itself is treated as a political crime against the purity of the dominant caste order.

The same logic, different forms 🔗

Notice the symmetry. Upper-caste women are denied autonomy so caste purity is preserved from “above.” Lower-caste women are subjected to sexual violence so caste boundaries are enforced from “below.” In both cases, women’s bodies become the battleground on which caste hierarchies are maintained. Brahmanical patriarchy is graded – stricter codes for upper-caste women, more brutal violence for lower-caste women – but the structure is one and the same.

Resistance and the road ahead 🔗

It would be wrong to read this only as a story of victimhood. Dalit feminist movements, organisations like the National Federation of Dalit Women, the Dalit Human Rights Defenders Network, and countless grassroots collectives have pushed back, demanding both legal accountability and a rethinking of mainstream feminism that has long centred upper-caste, urban experiences. Inter-caste marriage, though still rare, is slowly increasing in urban India. Education, especially of girls, has begun to shift expectations across castes.

But the structural foundation – endogamy, honour, control over women’s sexuality, devaluation of Dalit and Adivasi labour – remains largely intact. As long as caste shapes whom one marries, where one lives, and how one is treated, gender justice in India will remain incomplete.

What do you think? If caste survives mainly through control over women’s sexuality, what would a genuine dismantling of caste look like in everyday family decisions? And how might Indian feminism better centre the experiences of Dalit and Adivasi women without flattening their distinct struggles into a single “women’s issue”?

References

1. https://www.epw.in/engage/article/building-blocks-brahmanical-patriarchy
2. https://feminisminindia.com/2022/05/25/how-continuous-caste-based-honour-killings-in-india-prove-that-mere-love-is-not-enough/
3. https://janataweekly.org/power-of-patriarchy-and-the-caste-system/
4. https://velivada.com/2020/07/13/indian-patriarchy-an-intersection-of-caste-class-and-gender/
5. https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/conceptualising-brahmanical-patriarchy-in-early-india-gender-caste-class-and-state/
6. https://feminisminindia.com/2021/07/26/how-the-caste-system-subordinates-the-lives-bodies-and-agency-of-women/
7. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/8/india-why-justice-eludes-many-dalit-survivors-of-sexual-violence
8. https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/80-of-sexual-violence-against-dalit-women-committed-by-dominant-caste-men-report
9. https://www.analystnews.org/posts/for-some-indian-women-caste-is-still-a-matter-of-life-and-death
10. https://www.jmc.ac.in/uploads/staticfiles/jmcreview/vol6/The%20JMC%20Review%20Mahima%20Varma.pdf