ABSTRACT
The Introduction asks and answers the question, Why Dalit Feminist Theory? It argues that this emerging subdiscipline of feminism needs to be canonised in order to not merely supplement but also to significantly alter the nature of Indian feminism; further, it posits that Indian feminism must be reoriented so that it is more able to function adequately for gender justice. However, there are severe challenges in the methods of doing feminism in India, and thus the Introduction sketches these challenges in the main, and lays out how the Reader as a whole operates to address them. The Introduction, then, serves as a comprehensive introduction to Dalit feminist theory as a subdiscipline of feminism more broadly, as well as to Dalit Feminist Theory as a Reader.
