ABSTRACT
Caste and gender are co-constitutive and inextricable categories. Intersectionality is an important tool invested in ‘recovering’ marginalised voices of lower caste women. Caste has acquired a new economic interest and political identity in India in the 1980s. This resulted in the Hindu Right accommodating many lower caste members in the Hindutva fold, despite the pervasive Brahmanical culture in their ideology and practices. The unexpected coalition posed newer challenges to Indian women’s movements and feminist politics. The essay focuses on Uma Bharati, one of the lower caste women who joined hands with Hindutva forces, to study how her caste and gender subjectivities were shaped by intersection of both privilege and oppression in complex ways in the Hindutva fold. The chapter compares ways in which feminists and the Hindu Right deal with the challenges posed by the interface of gender, caste and community. While the feminists use intersectionality as a category of analysis to understand the complexities and recognise experiences of social marginalities of caste and gender to chart a challenging journey towards social transformation, the Hindu Right manipulates differences to mask casteism and sexism inherent in their belief system to consolidate and entrench hegemonic social formations.
