ABSTRACT
The previous studies have shown that the caste system in India constitutes and structures social and material locations, impacts institutional practices, and shapes social identities by legitimising social and material hierarchies. Dalits, who were treated as Untouchables in the caste hierarchy were hence forced into the most oppressive and exploitative social-material locations, indignities, multiple forms of discrimination, subordination, and poverty in modern India. For Dalit women, whose lives have been impacted by caste-gender social-material orders, the experiences of discrimination, subordination, and violence have been severe and brutal; they experience multiple forms of discrimination and violence in everyday life situations and in the context of institutional practices. By drawing on the social experiences of Dalit women in the city of Mumbai, this chapter attempts to explore how the intersections of caste-gender impact the social and material locations and reproduce the traditional caste-based hierarchies, inequalities, oppression, and violence in the modern, cosmopolitan urban context of Mumbai. This chapter attempts to explore and examine the category that I call “casteised boundaries” and the consequent notions of “confinement,” and “humiliation” the Dalit women encounter in the city as well as their resistance and negotiations in the urban context. Such an exercise offers an understanding of the situated, contextual, and complex character of Dalit women’s life world in the urban space.
