ABSTRACT
Dalit communities today continue to experience violence from and to be affected by cultural stigmatisations promulgated by caste-based communities. In the very first documentation of violence against Dalit communities published by Human Rights Watch (1999), Smita Narula declares: ‘As this report demonstrates more than 160 million people in the world’s largest democracy remain at the risk of systematic human rights violations on the basis of the caste into which they are born’ (205). Dalit women, specifically, experience the most violence among the Dalit community because their identities are affected by additional variables of oppression, including those due to social views of their gender and sexuality that render them especially vulnerable to all strains of domination. As evidenced in several publications and news reports internationally, Dalit women are firmly establishing and grounding their own claims to human dignity and social justice within the global cry for human rights for every human being.
