Global Feminist Movement Must Engage Critically With And Centre Caste

Dalit women’s leadership not just reshaped the feminist movement but drove powerful alliances. Why then do we still have to answer the question: ‘What is caste?’

As I reflect on the recently concluded flagship event of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, AWID Forum 2024, as a Dalit feminist, I  grapple with the contradictions of global feminist spaces. One of the largest global gatherings of feminists, activists, and allies held in Bangkok in early December, it is a pivotal space for envisioning transformative feminist futures. It did manage to weave myriad global feminist voices. Yet, beneath the surface, gestures of solidarity rang hollow, exposing the uneasy contradictions of power, privilege, and performative politics in spaces meant to challenge those very hierarchies.

For the first time, AWID placed the ‘anti-caste’ movement as a separate category in its agenda. While hailed as a breakthrough by most Dalit feminists and allies, it also raised the important question: is the integration of caste as a theme in such spaces genuinely transformative or does it risk tokenism without sustained engagement and systemic change?

There were discussions on global and local anti-caste feminist perspectives, how to resource caste equity and justice, on structural inequalities that women and girls from Dalit and Roma communities faced, and anti-caste pedagogy, among others.

While these sessions provided valuable insights and space for anti-caste voices, I noticed a troubling pattern as I looked at the audience. There were familiar faces — predominantly Dalit feminists, South Asians and a few regular allies. It appeared to be an insular engagement that failed to attract the broader feminist movement and engage critically with questions on caste.

This is a familiar scenario at other global feminist platforms as well. The message is clear — caste is not their priority, even in spaces that claim to champion systems-change and intersectionality. What does this say about the global feminist movement when something as fundamental as acknowledging caste, a system of oppression as old as patriarchy and one that  has dehumanised and dismembered 260 million Dalits across the globe, is treated as a groundbreaking achievement in 2024? What does it mean when this ‘milestone’ comes decades too late, after generations of Dalit feminists have tirelessly fought systemic violence and discrimination and advanced anti-caste pedagogy and scholarship?

The AWID Forum 2024, under the theme “Rising Together: Connect, Heal, Thrive,” brought together a wide range of thematic areas, addressing women’s rights, gender equality, LGBTQIA+ advocacy, and intersections with broader social justice movements. The inclusion of anti-caste movements as a category felt siloed, as though caste is an isolated issue rather than an axis of oppression that intersects with gender, race, class, sexuality, labour, disability among others.

There was a glaring absence of structural interrogation of caste within other critical themes—gender-based violence, labour rights, climate justice, and more. The reluctance to universalise caste analysis within feminist frameworks reveals a troubling discomfort in addressing entrenched privilege and power dynamics within the movements themselves.

This is not just about representation; it is about redistributive justice, feminist accountability, and dismantling power structures within feminist movements. The lack of cross-movement solidarity was alarming, exposing the deep fractures within the larger movement.

A Movement Refuses to Learn

In 1995, a group of 80 Dalit women took to the stage and presented their collective vision for emancipation at the Fourth World Conference on Women at Beijing. They organised the first-ever international seminar titled ‘Dalit Women: Life Struggles and Aspirations’. This wasn’t just a session but a reclamation of the feminist space, a powerful act of centering their struggles in a discourse that marginalised them. Through personal testimonies and political demands, Dalit women exposed caste as the world’s oldest system of oppression and demanded it be treated with the same urgency as race and gender. They built alliances, mobilised resources and stood defiantly in the face of erasure by dominant caste feminists who had long monopolised such platforms.

Post-Beijing, the Dalit feminist movement influenced India’s mainstream feminist landscape in profound ways by bringing caste to the forefront and challenging entrenched hierarchies. It ignited a wave of intersectional activism, paving the way for a new generation of women leaders from marginalised communities, who began fearlessly addressing the layered oppressions of caste, class, ethnicity, and religion. Dalit women’s leadership not just reshaped the feminist movement but drove powerful alliances across movements and brought diverse voices into very elite dominant caste spaces.

As we approach the 30th anniversary of the Beijing conference, these gains seem eclipsed by the global feminist movement’s refusal to engage with caste in critical ways. The unwillingness to mainstream caste across feminist agendas is a betrayal of the radical legacy these Dalit women fought to establish.

Dalit feminists from South Asia have tirelessly organised international workshops, panels, and capacity-building sessions. We have made documentaries and short films highlighting the lived realities of caste. We continue to contribute to all the international processes and protocols–the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) shadow reports, Universal Periodic Reviews (UPR), Beijing Review processes– and give oral statements and testimonies at global policy-making fora, including the United Nations. And year after year, we answer the basic question: “What is caste”?

As a Dalit feminist, it irks me when I have to answer a question as basic as this. Imagine, if you will, African feminists being asked to explain racism every time they walk into a room.

Dalit feminist activists have fought relentlessly for a ‘Dalit Feminist Fund’ with donors, philanthropies, and foundations. Yet, the demand remains stalled, entangled in bureaucratic inertia and smothered by the empty rhetoric of solidarity. All this while the silence on critical conversations on caste continues and it is not a benign silence.

Brahminical Gatekeeping Vs Feminist Liberation

Brahmins, the highest caste within the traditional Hindu caste hierarchy, historically gate-kept knowledge and power for centuries and ensured that Dalits were systematically excluded from education, leadership, and influence. Even today, the feminist movement mirrors this oppressive structure, with dominant caste feminists perpetuating the same power structures, even in ‘progressive’ spaces. Brahmin and dominant caste feminists sidestep the systems that sustain their own privilege. They maintain the status quo because they benefit from it. Therefore, when oppressors monopolise leadership in feminist movements, they become tools to reinforce the same hierarchies rather than platforms for collective liberation.

Dalit women have revolutionised the feminist discourse, including activism, scholarship and pedagogy in South Asia and globally and profoundly enriched the concept of intersectionality. For instance, we demonstrated the link between caste and gender oppression through the lens of labour three decades ago, while contemporary feminists are now talking about unpaid care work as an invisible burden borne disproportionately by women. We demonstrated that Dalit women’s labour is not merely unpaid but systemically devalued and violently extracted within the feudal, casteist structures of rural economies and urban informal workforces.

From forced, generational labour in agricultural fields owned by dominant castes to the dehumanising work of manual scavenging, domestic servitude, and bonded or unpaid labour in brick kilns, Dalit women endure the most brutal and exploitative conditions. They have borne the brunt of caste oppression, providing care and sustenance to households and systems that perpetually deny them dignity and rights.

The structural inequality here is not simply gendered but deeply caste-based, with Dalit women systematically excluded from access to land, wealth and opportunities for upward mobility.

Dalit feminists, through their scholarship and activism, have tirelessly documented and resisted this structural inequality, bringing global attention to these injustices. Dalit writers and activists like Baby Kamble in The Prisons We Broke and Bama in Karukku have vividly captured the lived realities of Dalit women, exposing the systemic exploitation of their labour and the indignities they face.

Sharmila Rege’s work on Dalit women’s testimonies and oral histories has highlighted their resistance and resilience while Gail Omvedt’s scholarship powerfully showcased caste and class struggles within broader feminist and progressive frameworks.

Grassroots Dalit feminist organisations have further amplified these voices by organising campaigns and advocacy to demand justice for Dalit women, particularly in cases of caste and gender based atrocities. These contributions are not abstract. They provide concrete evidence of how caste and gender intersect to perpetuate oppression and serve as a call to action for feminist movements worldwide.

Yet, the feminist movement continues to overlook, trivialise or erase this radical contribution. It is impossible to dismantle patriarchy without the annihilation of caste and global feminist movements must face up to this reality. For how much longer will this truth remain lost on them?

Shifts are only possible if more Dalit women were to occupy these spaces, and are given equitable access to leadership and decision-making spaces in global feminist movements and organisations. Our lived experiences and wisdom carry the power to disrupt entrenched hierarchies and recalibrate feminist movements to drive transformational change for the historically excluded communities.

It is only through the leadership of the historically oppressed communities that the feminist movement can truly embody the radical, inclusive, and just future it envisions.

Caste Is Global

It is imperative, now more than ever, that the discourse of caste, the oldest surviving social hierarchy in the world, must occupy global centrestage. Because it is a global issue and not just a local one.

It has transcended borders with the South Asian diaspora, embedding itself in workplaces, communities, and institutions around the world. From Silicon Valley’s tech giants to Gulf labour markets to global social justice movements, caste discrimination manifests in deceptive ways, impacting hiring practices, labour rights, and social hierarchies.

The global feminist movement must engage with the critical questions of caste interlocking with global systems of power intersecting with capitalism, patriarchy, and racism to sustain exploitation. Consider this: multinational corporations actively exploit caste-based hierarchies to drive their supply chains, relying on the relentless labour of Dalit workers in garment factories, tanneries, sweatshops, and construction sites. This is a perpetuation of a global cycle of exploitation that feminists must urgently confront.

Transforming Pain To Power

While African feminists are advancing calls for reparations, Dalit feminist activists are still stuck in the quicksand of basic explanations of terminologies. This is not just frustrating but violent. It denies us the dignity of broader intellectual engagements. 

We are being denied what one could call an “equal cerebral opportunity”— the space to engage as equals on nuanced issues like the political economy of exclusion and reform among others. Instead, our labour is continually reduced to educating others, over and over, about a system that they don’t see as urgent enough to learn about on their own.

In the run up to the Beijing Conference, Dalit women from across India convened on August 11, 1995, New Delhi, to chart a bold roadmap for their activism and advocacy from the grassroots to the global level. During this historic gathering, my feminist mother, Ruth Manorama, declared, “We Dalit women will transform our pain into power, as we are not mere victims, we are agents of change.” The uphill battle to honour this vision with dignity still leaves me raw with emotion.

This vision remains a reminder of both the possibilities and the profound challenges of navigating feminist spaces which continue to marginalise Dalit voices. Despite this, we Dalit feminists will continue to occupy these spaces, even as we feel tokenistic and lonely. We know the stakes are way too high. We rather have this than nothing at all.

As my dear Palestinian friend said to me, “Even if we boycott global feminist spaces, no one will notice our absence… no one will.” So, we remain — not just to be noticed, but because we refuse to be erased.

Courtesy:Behan Box

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