Content area
Full Text
Introduction
A recent incident that took place at a metropolitan city in India, of a university assistant professor being attacked and criticised online for being a Dalit has come under heated debate and discussions as to the prevalence of the caste system in the present era. The traumatic episode faced by the Dalit woman, who is an accomplished academician, and who met with this casteist wrath based on her identity, is a display of deep-seated malice and prejudices that exist in our societies in various forms and spits out a host of unanswered questions -What are the experiences of being a Dalit in modern, postcolonial India? What are the experiences of being a Dalit woman? Despite the presence of major constitutional provisions and social reforms, what power structures systematically subjugate the Dalits in educational and work spaces? Sagarika Ghose writes:
"Unlike racial minorities, the dalit is physically indistinguishable from upper castes, yet metaphorically and literally, the dalit has been a "shit bearer" for three millenia, toiling at the very bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy" (83).
Untouchability has been one of the major forms of subjugation and oppression of the Dalits in India. The other forms of this inhuman segregation and practice have been the degrading jobs that the Dalits were/are made to carry out, such as, manual scavengers, cleaning of drains, collector of garbage, domestic workers, and so on. Education and respectable employment were denied to the lower-castes to restrict them from climbing up the social and economic ladders of the society. Reports of discrimination against the Dalits can be regularly found in various parts of India. Maria Preethi Srinivasan asserts that both the practices of race-based and caste-based prejudices and bigotry leave "dehumanizing" impact on the victims (112). Dalits have been subjected to institutionalised subjugation within the caste system prevalent even in the contemporary times. Ghose contends that the caste system, a structure of dividing labour in the society without the tenet of competition in it, shapes the occupation and production in the country (Ibid 88). The inadequate structural changes have fostered the continuation of caste discrimination over several generations of the Dalit communities.
An Intersectional Approach to the Dalit Women's Trauma
Caste and gender intersect in multiple ways in our daily lives-...