Dalit feminists share a definite sense of identification with many basic articulations raised by the Dalit movement and the feminist movement due to the shared historicity based on experiences of oppression and discrimination.
Dr. Ambedkar responded strongly to the age old religious and social practices of Sati, enforced widowhood and girl marriage in the paper ‘Castes in India, their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’. He believed that the Varna system had not only subjugated untouchables but also women. He attacked the scriptures that granted social sanction to such practices by tracing the genesis of discrimination and degradation of the Indian women to the Laws of Manu and his Manusmriti.
“There can be no doubt that there has been an utter downfall in position of women in India from what it was once was. One cannot say much about the part they played in ancient time in the state craft. But there is no doubt they did occupy a very high position in the intellectual and social life of the country.”
According to him a caste was an enclosed class that existed before Manu. However, Manu’s codification of caste rules reinforced all these practices.
Later, Ambedkar’s introduction of the Hindu Code Bill to liberate the upper caste women laid the keystone for an attack on feminist causes by the religion based identity politics. The battle lines remain multi-layered and meaningful even today in religious identity-based politics that has become a dominant feature of Indian politics now. He critiqued the Brahminical centre of Hinduism by emphasising that the lower caste women did not suffer from as much inequality as compared to the higher caste women. As he said, “It would however be a mistake to suppose that only the wrongs of men are a religion to him. For the Brahmin has given his support to the worst wrongs that women have suffered from in any part of the world. Widows were burnt alive as suttees. Widows were never allowed to remarry.” To save those women the Hindu Code Bill was brought to parliament.
Ambedkar was way ahead of his time and this was reflected when he drafted the Hindu Code Bill. However he resigned from the cabinet after the Hindu Code Bill could not be passed as visualised. His fight for a woman’s right to divorce was fiercely opposed in the Parliament by the right wing Hindus like Shyama Prasad Mukharjee.
The parallels of this polarisation between these two camps came to the fore much later, when on September 4, 1987, 17-year-old Roop Kanwar consigned herself to flames or was burnt alive on the funeral pyre of her husband Maal Singh Shekhawat at Deorala village of Sikar district in Rajasthan. This infamous incident came to be referred to as the “sati” case. Sixteen years later, 11 persons, including Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator and then State party vice-president Rajendra Singh Rathore, nephew of Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and Narendra Singh Rajawat of the Rajput Mahasabha were let off for lack of evidence. They were among 16 persons accused of participating in the protests glorifying the practice of sati against the alleged police action in the wake of the incident.
Dalit feminists share a definite sense of identification with many basic articulations raised by the Dalit movement and the feminist movement due to the shared historicity based on experiences of oppression and discrimination.
The question of communalism has been fore grounded in the discussions about identity. This predominant strand within the thinking of the women’s movement is evident as defined by Jana Everett for analyzing the relationship between gender and identity politics. This frame identifies contemporary contexts which have shaped much of feminist notions of identity politics in India. According to Everett, ‘The upsurge of fundamentalism and communal violence in India over the past decade has led feminist scholars to analyse the interrelationships among the state, identity politics and gender.’
Zoya Hasan has also pointed out, ‘In the final analysis, the reaffirmation of religio-cultural distinctions constricts the articulation of gender interests within the terms of reference set by a specific communitarian discourse, and whatever rights may have been achieved in earlier political moments are sacrificed in the interests of identity politics’
Both texts raise different questions, the solution is obviously premised on the belief that a woman’s identity and her rights can be disassociated from the religious, ethnic, national or cultural context of her existence. These contexts do not shape her identity as a woman. However, they overlook the fact that it is in the realm of the culture that a ‘woman’ exists and it is in the cultural realm that alternate and feminist identities are sought to be constructed.
Different identity movements are indeed patriarchal. But the question for feminist politics really is: Is patriarchy the only lens through which to view women’s identity? The women’s movement has to find other ways of engaging with identity movements, specially, in India rather than focus only on the patriarchal dimension of the movements and denounce them.
