ABSTRACT
Broadly speaking, interventions on Dalit women over the past decades have almost exclusively focused on exploitation, marginality and violence.3 The urgency of (under)development and the resilience of untouchability in twentieth-and twenty-fi rst-century India – and the scholar’s obligation to document them – are undeniable. For example, drawing on an ‘advocacy-research study’ on a sample of Dalit women from four Indian states (Irudayam et al. 2011: xviii), a recent volume has offered a phenomenology of different forms of violence experienced by them. This study ‘highlights their [Dalit women’s] specifi c reality of violence, which functions to constrain their agency and voice, and to subjugate both them and, through them, their communities’ (ibid.: xviii).4 While over a decade ago, Dube cautioned against celebrating Dalit studies solely ‘as a domain that inherently generates ethical inquiries into marginality and inexorably engenders critical knowledge of the dispossessed’ (Dube 1998: 90), interventions on Dalit women show the signifi cance of this warning even more cogently. No longer is an account on Dalit women found which speaks of them as all-round persons or as non-victims. Nor are there accounts which interrogate the challenge posited by Dalit women’s population size, caste variation, and the regional diversity which this population conjures up. To sum up, in this monolithic picture, we no longer know what else is part of women’s lives when they are not the victim of one form of violence or the other, or where they are not part of multiple layers of marginality and exploitation.
