Reading anti-caste feminist narratives: a study of the writings of Mukta Salve and Savitribai Phule

In the context of global South feminist writings, anti-caste feminist articulation from India since the eighteenth century has created a critical conceptual space. This space cannot be explained in terms of two dominant frameworks of knowledge production that have been defined by Connell as mosaic epistemology and Northern ethnocentrism. Located within the colonial and later within the post-colonial state, this space was defined by anti-caste struggles that lead to the emergence of the untouchable as a positive political subject. Gender and caste were crucial to this resignification. The article employs Dalit feminist standpoint theory to read four Dalit feminist texts from the archive of anti-caste feminist narratives to argue for an understanding of patriarchy, caste and gender relations related to broader struggles for social justice and democracy within an intersectional framework. Moving to enlarge the scope of global South feminist theorisation, this perspective calls for an engagement with the complex history of lower caste women’s intervention in the anti-caste movement, which has been ignored in the global South feminist theory field. Within this framework, this article reads four early anti-caste feminist writings from Western Maharashtra to understand the caste-gender complex in the broad canvas defined by humiliation, exclusion and subordination.