Psychosocial Determinants of Dalit Identity: Evidence from Dalit Women of Tamilnadu in South India

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Pallickal Jose ◽  
Shanuga C.
Keyword(s):  
South India ◽  
Psychosocial Determinants ◽  
Dalit Women

scholarly journals ‘Mirrored in God’: Gramsci, Religion and Dalit Women Subalterns in South India

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 666
Author(s):  
Karin Kapadia
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
South India ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Authoritarian Populism ◽  
Dalit Women ◽  
Cultural Movements

The Tamil Dalit Pentecostal conversion movement that has been active in Chennai’s slums and low-income settlements for the last four decades is also a political movement. It is, moreover, a women’s political movement. Normally both Dalits and women are ignored in India, they are considered people of no importance and irrelevant to the issues that grab the headlines. But it is important for us to recognize both the political nature and the importance of this Dalit women’s conversion movement, because we are at a time of great peril in India, where, as elsewhere, populist nationalism has swept an authoritarian leader to power and the fascist tendencies of an overbearing state are becoming increasingly obvious. In such a context Gramsci’s theorizations provide important suggestions for how to understand religio-cultural movements as political movements and how to evaluate both their importance and what they can teach us about the possibilities for religio-cultural-political resistance to authoritarian populism, and the crucial importance of low-income, low-status women in political processes of grassroots resistance.

Book Review: Sukhadeo Thorat and Nidhi Sadhana Sabharwal (eds), Bridging the Social Gap: Perspectives on Dalit Empowerment and Jayshree P. Mangubhai, Human Rights as Practice: Dalit Women Securing Livelihood Entitlements in South India

Social Change ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-635
Author(s):  
Suryakant Waghmore
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
South India ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dalit Women ◽  
Oxford University Press

Sukhadeo Thorat and Nidhi Sadhana Sabharwal (eds), Bridging the Social Gap: Perspectives on Dalit Empowerment, New Delhi, SAGE Publications, 2014, xxvii + 279 pp., ₹995 (hardback), ISBN: 9788132113119. Jayshree P. Mangubhai, Human Rights as Practice: Dalit Women Securing Livelihood Entitlements in South India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2014, xiii + 295 pp., ₹850 (hardback), ISBN: 9780198095453.

scholarly journals Tracking obscenities: Dalit women, devadasis, and the linguistically sexual

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-69
Author(s):  
Teresa Hubel
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Present Article ◽  
South India ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Dalit Women ◽  
Feminine Sexuality

In his 1993 Dalit Panpaadu, Raj Gauthaman declares that Dalit writing should “outrage and even repel the guardians of caste and class” (qtd. in Holmström, 2008: xii). Writing by Dalit women has been exceptionally successful in achieving this goal, particularly in its representation of the sexuality and sexually-charged language of Dalit women. For instance, in Sangati, Tamil author Bama describes the difficult and deeply moving lives of Dalit women in south India. Although multiply subversive, Sangati is the most outrageous in its exposure of the sexual violence that often underpins the language of her female characters. Similarly, in her oral autobiography Viramma: Life of an Untouchable, Viramma repeatedly speaks in ways that suggest her embrace of that which, from an upper-caste and middle-class perspective, might seem vulgar, especially since it issues from the mouth of a woman. The present article theorizes this use of sexual language, arguing that it can be read as a powerful disruption of the feminine in that it refuses to play to patriarchal expectations about feminine decorum, and, as such, it models a defiance that mainstream feminism, rooted as it has been in predominantly middle-class values, might very well copy. To understand the contours of this defiance, I compare Dalit women’s bodily language, including that found in Sukirtharani’s poetry, to other expressions of Indian feminine sexuality: in Kamala Das’s biography and poems, and in the lyrics to devadasi songs.

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