REWEAVING MARGINALITY: CASTE, PATRIARCHY, AND THE INTERSECTIONAL POLITICS OF DALIT WOMEN’S LIFE-WRITING

Abstract

Dalit women’s personal narratives provide an important literary space for examining the complex relationship between caste and gender in Indian society. This paper explores how Dalit women writers represent their experiences of discrimination, marginalisation, and resistance within social structures shaped by both caste hierarchy and patriarchy. Focusing on the personal narratives of Pawar, P. Sivakami, and Yashica Dutt Gidla, the study examines how their writings bring to the surface forms of oppression that cannot be understood through caste or gender alone. Their narratives reveal the everyday realities of social exclusion, unequal labour, domestic restrictions, humiliation, and the struggle for dignity and self-respect. At the same time, these writers do not portray Dalit women merely as victims of social oppression. Through memory, testimony, and self-narration, they question established social values and assert their individual and collective identities. The paper adopts an intersectional approach to understand how caste, gender, class, family, and social status intersect in shaping the lives of Dalit women. A comparative reading of the selected narratives demonstrates that Dalit women’s experiences often remain inadequately represented within both mainstream feminist discourse and Dalit social narratives. Their personal accounts therefore function as counter-narratives that challenge dominant representations of history, society, and womanhood. The study argues that Dalit women’s life-writing is not only a record of suffering but also an expression of agency, resistance, self-assertion, and the continuing struggle for equality and dignity.