ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to contextualise Dalit women's claims to inclusiveness and critically engages with their agendas of anti-caste politics. It investigates how micro-processes of transformation have led to a series of contestations and negotiations by Dalit women, whose strategies and agendas reveal both the possibilities and limits to their micro-politics of collectivisation. The chapter argues that micro-politics of Dalit women's continued absorption in agricultural work, in context where Dalit men now choose to abstain from working in agriculture, and the incorporation of poor Dalit women into new development schemes, especially micro-credit programs, play significant roles in Dalit women's contestation of caste discrimination and in their collective mobilisation against caste oppression. It underlines the importance of foregrounding the subjective experiences and narratives of resistance of Dalit women and highlights the striking caste-based differences between Adidravidar Dalit women and Arundhathiyar Dalit women in their resistance to, or acquiescence in, male control, both within their own castes and from landowning Naidu dominant caste.
