Feminist Theology

http://fth.sagepub.com Dalit Women and the Struggle for Justice in a World of Global Capitalism
Mary Grey Feminist Theology 2005; 14; 127 DOI: 10.1177/0966735005057806 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/1/127

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[FT 14.1 (2005) 127-149] DOI: 10.1177/0966735005057806

Dalit Women and the Struggle for Justice in a World of Global Capitalism1 Mary Grey ABSTRACT
This article tackles caste-based poverty by a focus on the position of Dalit women in India. Of 200 million Dalits (= former Untouchables), nearly 50% are women, often referred to a thrice Dalit, as they suffer from the triple oppressions of poverty, being female and being female Dalits. They are frequently let down by both the Dalit movement itself as well as the womens movement in India that focuses more on social problems like dowry deathsmore relevant for caste women and not those outside the caste system. Many Dalit women are denied access to education, to meaningful employment, health provision and are the first to suffer the negative effects of globalization. Access to upper caste wells is forbidden. Worst of all, Dalit women are exposed to many forms of violence (including temple prostitution) and are frequently raped as a way to humiliate Dalit men. The degrading work of scavengingremoving human excrement- falls mostly on Dalit women, since men are more likely to be upwardly-mobile. Despite all of this, a new strength now emerges in challenging caste boundaries, contributing to self esteem and a stronger sense of identity. The strong spirituality of Dalit women has sustained strength through songs and stories, and in some cases by subverting patriarchy through ironically re-shaping traditional myths. The article ends by suggesting forms of action from Church, society and feminist theology to show solidarity and effect social change for Dalit women.

Introduction Readers of this Journal may remember my attempt two years ago to reflect theologically on my experience in the desert of Rajasthan for the last 16 years, in Gender, Justice and Poverty in Rural Rajasthan
1. This subject is treated more fully in Mary Grey, The Unheard Scream: The Struggles of Dalit women in India (New Delhi: Centre for Dalit Studies, 2004). Obtainable from Sarum College Bookshop, Salisbury.
2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks CA and New Delhi)
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Moving Beyond the Silence2 This new article takes that attempt a step further, in reflecting on the new struggles for Dalit women in India in a context of unregulated global capitalism. Involvement in Wells for India has meant visiting three very different drought-stricken areas of rural Rajasthan, in North-West India every year, meeting village people and field workers, participating in drought relief projects, as well as in more long-term social change issues. Slowly we have begun to understand the complexity of the struggle the village people are engaged in; that it was not just drought and poverty, harsh though these realities are: when caste issues and the burden of patriarchy are factored into the situation, the odds stacked against the people we are involved withtribals (Bhils, Meena, Garasia), scheduled castes like the Meghwals, as well as other low caste and former Untouchables themselvesbegin to appear insuperable. In the Thar Desert (one of the areas most severely hit by the relentless five-year droughtjust relieved by the recent monsoon), our Gandhian partners from an organization called Gravis (Gramin Vikas Vigyan Samiti) struggle daily with the realities of caste in implementing their projects. In fact when they began work in Rajasthan in this area in 1987, all their offices were burnt down, so great was the fury of the caste people that they had made low-caste and tribal people the focus of their work.3 In January 2003 a small group of us followed up our visit to the projects by studying Dalit theology with James Massey at his new Centre for Dalit Studies in Delhiwhere we also visited some Dalit colonies in the city. The Centre possessed many books which the team had written on Dalits and the Dalit strugglebut nothing on women, although again and again they had told us that women were the Dalits of the Dalits, the thrice-Dalits, and represented the area of greatest suffering. They claimed they had tried but had not as yet found a Dalit woman to write hers and their story, so out of commitment and solidarity I promised, although a westerner, to make this now the focus of my work. I was also keen to do this since the desperate position of women in Rajasthan was already of deep concern to many of our team in Wells for India, and caste, as I have just said, is high on the list as a seemingly insuperable obstacle to the well-being of the entire community. Thirdly, I wanted to be actively involved with the Dalit struggle: my teaching area at Lampeter University is
2. See Mary Grey, Gender, Justice and Poverty in Rural RajasthanMoving beyond the Silence, in Feminist Theology 25 (September 2000), pp. 33-45. 3. See William Dalrymple, The Age of Kali (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).

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Liberation Theology and Globalisation and I had already seen that the Dalit struggle is a neglected area within the consciousness of Liberation Theology, the struggle of Dalit women going almost completely unmentioned. In the long run, Dalit women will liberate themselvesbut if we can help the process by raising awareness and by our global solidarity, then that is something that must be done from many contexts, not only Asian. The question is: Is it possible from this distance, from this comfortable situation, then, to step into the chappals (sandals) of a Dalit woman? How do all the issues of untouchability, purity and pollution, endogamy4 and access to the essentials of life adversely affect specifically the lives of Dalit women in a way different from men? And thirdly, what are the specific actions of solidarity needed for the liberation of Dalit women? 1. The Plight of Dalit Women Why highlight the plight of Dalit women as such? If I take the statistics that are now well-known, there are 200250 million Dalits in India,5 or Dalit bahujans (including tribals, scheduled castes and Other Backward Castessome include sudras too),6 and 75% (some figures say 80%) are below the poverty line (BPLthe government statistics reference to all who do not earn the minimum wage). Among these, womenalmost 50% of the total and 16.3% of the total female population of the countryare commonly referred to as the least among the Dalits, the Dalits of the Dalits, Thrice-Dalitsenduring discrimination through caste, class and gender. It is commonly said that in every area of life Dalit women are in a worse position than Dalit men. Yet, information on the true situation of Dalit women is far from easy to find. Women are even ignored by many who write about the oppression of Dalits. Theologians subsume women under the generic conditionfar from surprising! Some researchers say that the story behind the story is even harder to tease out. Vimal Thorat (Assistant professor at Indira Gandhi Open Universityin Delhi) claims that,
4. Endogamy refers to the practice of restricting marriage to within the same caste and even the sub-caste and forbidding inter-caste marriage. 5. The document Dalits and Development Aid (London: Voice of Dalit International, 2003), p. 16, paragraph 5.1 gives the figure as 300 million, or 30% of the total population, of which 90% are below the poverty line. That means 270 million people. 6. Scheduled castes and Scheduled tribes are those Scheduled or recognized by the government as qualifying for certain advantages in employment, political system and education. Sudras are the fourth and lowest rung of the caste system.

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Dalit women have been left behind by both the Dalit movement and the womens movement.7 Even though India now has two generations of articulate, committed Dalit women professionals who are lecturers, professors, activists, he says, their articulation threatens the Dalit male leadership. They will find no place on their committees since their presence itself will be a threat to articulations that refuse to address the issue of brutal violence against Dalit women, gender violence, and nuts and bolts issues like the right to water and a life of dignity. These tensions are poignantly expressed by the Dalit poet Taressama:
We go to work for we are poor But the same silken beds mock us While we are ravished in broad day light. Ill-starred our horoscopes are. Even our tottering husbands Lying on the cots in the corner Hiss and shout for revenge If we cannot stand their touch.8

Forty years after the beginning of the political Dalit movement, what changes have been achieved for Dalit women? I do not deny for a minute that there have been some changes and improvements: but ask why havent there been more? Why still such an intolerable level of discrimination in a country that outlawed Untouchability in 1955? What are the structural inhibiting factors? Vimal Thorats accusation begins to express the specificity of the situation of Dalit women. Within Dalit womens groups, 90% are poor rural women and these are the most disadvantaged of all, with least possibility for education and literacy, more daily struggles for sheer survivalas I have seen in Rajasthan. Sadly, even policies meant to raise the status of Dalit women may not reach those who are most in need. To give one example, the official female Scheduled Caste literacy rates in the 4 poorest states of India in 19891990 (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan), are under 2% in all areas. In Rajasthan, easily the worst, the figure drops to 0.51% in the poorest areas. This happens to be the Barmer District where our project oper7. Vimal Thorat, in Communalism Combat (Sabrang Communications and Publishing, Delhi, May 2001). 8. Cited by Gabriele Dietrich, The Relationship between Womens Movement and Dalit Movements: Case Study and Conceptual Analysis, in A New Thing on Earth: Hopes and Fears Facing Feminist Theology (Delhi: India Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge for Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary, Madurai, 2001), p. 216.

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ates. What is an even more depressing statistic is that in a study of the Bhangi caste, which traditionally has been engaged in night scavenging and removing the skin of dead animals, in 1961 female literacy was 1.5% and in 1981 it had moved only to 3.92%. So when India as a whole was experiencing a rise in literacy, the Bhangis of Rajasthan only made a 2% gain.9 In fact, 76.24% of Dalit women are illiterate. However, if poor rural Dalit women experience huge difficulties in gaining access to education, it is not vastly different in the cities: yet another survey in the city of Jaipur tells of a colony of Dalit people where from 700 families only 3 children went to school. The reasons why access by girls to education is so difficult is a critical issue needing further examination. The issue of womens work is also critical and needs special attention: fewer women are in paid employment, and those who are earn lower wages than men for the same work. Women are also under-represented in government and the decisionmaking process: in 2003 less than 8% of parliamentary seats and less than 6% of cabinet positions and 4% of positions in the High Court and Supreme Court were filled by women. Again, though I have focused more on rural Dalit women, obstacles remain for educated Dalit women in employment, wages, appointments, promotion, political representation and personal relations.10 Through the government reservation policies the major beneficiaries for Scheduled Tribes and Castes are, unsurprisingly, men:
Further, as a result of persistent casteism and corruption, many seats in colleges and positions in government reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled tribes go unfilled, though qualified Dalit candidates do apply. Thus, if a qualified Dalit woman applies for a job or college seat reserved for an SC/ST, she is told to apply as a woman; if she applied for a job or college seat reserved for women, she is told to apply as an SC/ST.11

All sources express the painful truth that Dalit women suffer from multiple discriminations of class, caste, gender and cultural traditions, at every level of societyvillage, district, state and nationally as well as in their own homes and most intimate relations. Perhaps the most serious point to stress is the internalisation of the social
9. S.K. Singh, Dalit WomenSocio-economic Status and Issues (Lucknow: New Royal Book Company, 2000): pp. 36-7. The source for the statistics is National Commission for Women, Goverment of India, Delhi 1998. 10. Moses Seenarine, The Education of Dalit Women, 29 October, 1996: see www. saxacali.com and check publications of Moses Seenarine. 11. Singh, Dalit Women, pp. 36-37.

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stigma of being Untouchable: this lack of self-esteem or low selfesteem is the single most inhibiting factor for womens transformation and achievement of dignity. Healthwise many Dalit women are anaemic and undernourished, often suffering also from TB, eye problems and problems of pregnancy, post-delivery complications and maternal mortality. Scheduled Caste women are prone to occupational heath problemslifting of heavy weights, and contact with hazardous material. And now, the structural effects of the economics of global capitalism have worsened their situation. This is due to the overall deterioration of economic policies, the privatisation of forest resources and the beautification of the city projects that remove the informal sector of employment on which Dalit women depend, forcing their evacuation to the suburbs where there is little or no employment. Work in the informal sector also offers no legal protection. Globalization has meant industrialization of farming techniques, the introduction of cash crops by huge agro-businesses for export with consequent unemployment for women.12 We need to understand precisely how the intersection of the caste system with patriarchy, plus the misunderstandings and discrimination from both the feminist movement and Dalit movement as a whole already referred toall contribute to the burden of suffering and injustice of the lives of Dalit women. This is not in any way to reduce Dalit women to the level of victim: I hope to highlight some of the many remarkable stories of resistance, courage and hope. There are two main problems concerning the feminist movement and Dalit women. According to Gabriele Dietrich, feminist theologian and activist working in Tamil Nadu, there is a tendency to assimilate and identify the problem of Dalit women with the problems of Hindu women. Although these are seriousand many injustices like female infanticide, domestic violence, child marriage, dowry, cruelty of mothers-in-law, problems of widows, crippling work load, poverty and health, are common to all Indian women, to assume that patriarchy is the cause of all of these is to hide the specificity of caste issues and caste oppression for Dalit women.13 The truth needs to be sought at the point of origin of the caste system and the way patriarchy became necessarily interwoven with it.
12. Ms Burnad Fathima, National President, Tamil Nadu Womens Forum, Speech at UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Geneva, 89 August, 2002. 13. Dietrich, The Relationship between Womens Movement and Dalit Movements, pp. 203-27.

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Secondly, there is what one writer calls the aggressive wing of the feminist movement, that:
often denies the compensatory satisfaction women derive through practising the virtues of service and self-sacrifice. And the traditionalists tend to deny women a life independent of the traditional roles she [sic] is expected to play. However, when one gets down to the individual, one often finds that she wants both.14

The rejection of the model of the self-sacrificing wife, a contemporary European and North American assumption, may fail to grasp the total reality of the Dalit woman and how she negotiates her areas of freedom and moments of joy. Yet the precise way that patriarchy permeates the way caste operates negatively and differently for both Hindu and Dalit women is a crucial issue and has to be addressed to find a way forward. 2. Lives of Dalit women An overview of the lives of Dalit women always concludes that they experience discrimination in every area: the lack of control over their own bodies and sexuality being the most acute area of suffering. I will now explore specific areas. Areas of work Burnad Fatima, President of the Tamil Nadu Womens Forum, herself a Dalit, spoke at the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD: Geneva, 89 August, 2002) of the toil of rural Dalit women in the fieldsin addition to unpaid domestic workwork for which they earn less than 1 US dollar a day. In a working day that can last between 17 and 24 hours, Dalit women do all kinds of menial work: as well as agricultural work, casual labour in road construction, which often involves laying tar in the hot sun often without sandals, or in brick kilns, or breaking stones, manual scavengingwhich means handling human excrementcleaning sewage and sweeping roads. Their daily chores include long journeys for water, food and fodder. Fatima showed how Dalit women work harder than both bullocks and men. Bullocks and men work in a hectare (about 2 acres) in a year for 1,064 and 1,202 hours respectively, and women for more than 3,485 hours.
14. Sumitra Bhave, Pan on Fire: 8 Dalit Women Tell their Stories (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute 1988), p. xxxix.

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In an urban context Dalit women have been seriously affectedas mentionedby slum clearance. Sweeping and cleaning jobsconsidered polluted areasare now in danger of being steadily privatized, and Dalit women will again be the first victims of job loss. The closeness of Dalit women to organic life both in city and village raises many questions, especially as regards natural resources. Dalit women and the environment: access to water and land Dalit womens unique situation as regards natural resources has failed to raise global awareness, both of the negative aspects as an area of great suffering and of the positive aspects, so that their wisdom, skills and initiatives are seldom acknowledged. First, the search for water is fraught with danger as access to wells of caste-people is forbidden. Countless stories of violence, beatings and rape, even murder are too numerous to recount. I will tell two, a negative onesadly, more commonand a positive. Luke Harding, a Guardian reporter, relates the story of Ms Devi who told that when she drew water from the uppercaste well, some thugs beat her 11 year-old daughter unconscious. When she went to the Police station to complain, she was thrown out and called a whore. A gang of upper caste locals then sexually assaulted her in her hut that night.15 (We need to return to the role of police in the oppression of Dalit women). A similar story with a more happy ending was told to me by a friend, an educated Dalit woman. Growing up in a village in Tamil Nadu where her father was a teacher in a caste school, she, the young daughter, had to fetch water from the Dalit well, a long way away, which always meant a degree of danger from harassment. One day an upper-caste boy threw a snake down the Dalit well, deliberately so as to pollute it. She then decided to draw water from the caste well and immediately there was protest from upper caste women who tried to prevent her. She persisted and a large delegation confronted her father with the offence of his daughter. Her father held his ground, supported her action, and threatened that the entire community would draw water from the upper caste well until their own well was purified. The well was cleaned double-quick! But the access question is still not tackled.16

15. Luke Harding, The Guardian (www.guardianunlimited.co.uk), New Delhi, 9 May, 2001. 16. Personal story from Jasmine Jebakani, Christian Dalit theologian, Sarum College, Salisbury April 2003.

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The second story witnesses to the immense strength of Dalit women in the face of oppression. Gabriele Dietrich, cited earlier, tells of a water struggle of Telengana in Andhra Pradesh.17 This is an area which ought to have abundant water, but because of unsustainable politics of canal building, and a steady increase in water hungry cash cropschillies, cotton, sunflower rather than dry crops like jowar and basrahas now become drought-prone. The struggle was carried on by an NGO called Jabasadhana Samiti (JSI) around the Srisailan Canal. There were many non-violent demonstrationsor satyagrahas. 6 lakhs18 signatures (600,000) were collected and sent to the President of India. These excluded males between 1855 years as the women felt this agegroup were responsible for the mal-development. This is a long story, and caste politics make it complex. But it was largely the efforts of Dalit women and children that succeeded in keeping the Canal issue on the agenda. This story is paralleled by other land-related struggles in context of the growth of agro-businesses on a national scale. Dalits are largely landless (frequently bonded-labourers, including child labourers), thus dependent on waste-land for grazing. When industries or tree plantation schemes encroach, land gets fenced in, and people cannot graze their goats or, again, have access to water points. Yet Gabriele Dietrich gives many examples of Dalits and Adivasis acquiring new skills in regenerating waste-lands (Maharashtra), watershed management, and of Dalit women developing skills in biomass. I have sat on top of a loose stone check dam in Rajasthan in the Aravalli hillspart of a watershed harvesting schemewith tribal (Adivasi) women, who wanted us to admire their work, insisting it was their own and not the men folks. Access to water and land is the difference between life and death. Dalit Women, even given all the statistics on illiteracy, and the daily struggle against violence, are at the forefront of the land struggle, developing alternative systems, struggling against the injustices of prawn farming and so on. But now they need to be at the forefront in an economic context where new farming techniques and increased mechanisation will take away their jobs. Dalit women and scavenging Formerly the traditional occupation of the Bhangi, in some cases the Chamar caste, I mention this separately as scavenging still represents
17. Gabriele Dietrich, Dalit Feminism and the Environment, in In Gods Image 19.3 (September 2000), pp. 21-26. 18. 1 lakh = 100,000.

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an acute area of suffering for many Dalit women.19 Over 70 million still use dry latrines and more than 100 million Dalits are involved in these jobs, handling solid waste and industrial waste, lifting and flaying fallen carcasses, handling hides, collecting rubbish. Since 1992 the Government has been committed to the Liberation and Rehabilitation of the Scavengers. This affects women as they are mostly responsible for waste from private homes, while men are usually responsible for industrial waste. Unfortunately, some of the governments reforms, like introducing the wheelbarrow instead of the humiliating vessel that had to be carried on the head, did not work for women as these were too heavy. A recent study of the Bhangi people in Rajasthan in 1992 showed that of 2,856 cases, 89% were still occupied in scavenging20. It is an issue for women specifically because where men become more occupationally mobile, with increased opportunities denied to women, they leave scavenging behind and women pick up the shortfall. In Delhi, for example, in 3 generations of women, occupational mobility had not improved.21 We need to remember that attention to the position of women in India nationally only commenced with the sixth Five Year Plan, in 19801985. The second issue for women about scavenging is vulnerability to sexual harassment on the way or during work. Thirdly, scavenging over and above any other activity, condemns families to live in a socially and economically discriminatory situation: their excluded situation makes it very difficult to organize politically for change. The work of liberation of Sulabh International is here important in constructing thousands of Public Toilets complexes that also function as health centres and, in so doing, achieving the liberation of Dalits and Dalit women in particular. S.K. Singhs book outlines the complex political action necessary for the removal of these gross injustices.22 Both the fact of journeying for fodder and water, and the need to travel to work in the cities such as cleaning, sweeping or scavenging makes women constantly vulnerable to sexual harassment and exploitation and even rapeas we have seen in connection with water. So sexual exploitation is one of the key differences between in the situation of Dalit women and men. At best, living life continually
19. 20. 21. 22. The information is from S.K. Singh, Dalit Women, ch. 2. Singh, Dalit Women, ch. 2. Singh, Dalit Women, p. 38. Singh, Dalit Women, pp. 140-42.

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fearful, Dalit women grapple with brutal caste violence, caste driven gender violence, violence within their own homes and even caste enforced prostitution. Hence the next area of examination of the current scene has to be the worsening crimes of violence against Dalit women. 3. Violence against Dalit Women Dalit women suffer violence on a spectrum ranging from insults, accusations of low morals and loose living, sexual harassment of many sorts to beatings and gang rapes. Even when a Dalit woman is raped it is often not called rape. According to the report of the SC/ST Commission (Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Commission) of 2002, there has been an 8% rise in crimes against women, especially Dalit women. Three Dalit women are raped a day and are victims of caste violence. Luke Harding says that less than 5% of cases make it to court.23 The evidence suggests that although Dalit women suffer violencewife-beating is very common and frequently acceptedfrom their own men folk, it is upper-caste violence that is the real threat, especially in the rural areas. Suffering within marriage is common for poor Dalit women who have frequently to cope with alcoholic or drug-addicted husbands: the poverty of women and children is often insuperable where the money disappears for drink or opium. In the Thar Desert I have seen this related to the depression or even despair of poor farmers because of the drought. Family violence against women in connection with dowries is more systemic in the case of upper-caste Hindus than with Dalits (who may fight back) and backward castes, unless they become prosperous, and begin a process of absorbing caste marriage practices (or Sanskritisation). As Gabriele Dietrich writes, Against such violence, the men of the Dalit community can often not protect their women and it is therefore perceived as a collective weakness and vulnerability.24 Rape, she says, may now be considered as a weapon in the caste war. Dalit women are raped as a way of humiliating Dalit men. Violence may be even taken as normal and women end up doubly desertedby the Womens Movement, who may not be functioning
23. Luke Harding, The Guardian, 9 May, 2001. 24. Dietrich, The Relationship between Womens Movement and Dalit Movements, p. 204.

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in the countryside, and by Dalit men, who may have their own patriarchal interests in using or suppressing an assault on women.25 A particularly shocking example is the caste Hindu backlash against Dalit women in Karnataka:
In Karnataka, the atrocities that occur in the backlash against Dalit femalesrape, public humiliation, and violence are used as coercive forms of domestic terrorism. For example, on September 6th 1988, in a village in Karnataka State, the powerful caste Hindus went to a Dalit household, beat up the son, looted the house, and dragged out the teenage daughter Geeta, and raped her in front of Dr Ambedkars statue. The reason cited in the Indian Express was that the upper caste Hindus do not tolerate the prosperity of Dalits.26

Given now the policies of the BJP/RSS27and the systematic Hinduisation of all institutions in India, such violence is increasing. Another form of violence is the control of womens bodies by making them special targets of population control. Moses Seenarine writes of the horror stories related by Dalit women as to how they and their sisters have been butchered in family planning camps:
often without their knowledge of what had been done to them. Injectable contraceptives and other hormone drugs are tested on these powerless, voiceless women by unscrupulous multi-national businesses.28

Pregnant women have been attacked by the police, their genitals mutilated and miscarriages caused when they appealed to the police for help. These stories can be multiplied many times over, and are further proof of Gabriele Dietrichs claim that violence against Dalit women is a powerful tool of the caste war. If women resist they receive further violence. To give one example: Azhagammal, a 27 year old woman, from the district of Sivaganga, faced resistance from the panchayat (district council) in her attempts to gain a divorce from her husband two years ago. She was then ordered to hand over her child to her
25. Dietrich, The Relationship between Womens Movement and Dalit Movements, p. 204. 26. Moses Seenarine, Dalit Women: Victims or Beneficiaries of Affirmative Action Policies in Indiaa Case Study (Brown Bag Lecture, S. Asian Institute, Columbia University, 10 April 1996), pp. 1-12. 27. BJP = Bharata Janata Party, the majority Hindu party, now forming the majority party, and the RSS is the right-wing arm of this. Hindutva refers to the controlling policies making Hinduism the exclusive religion, re-writing educational and historical programmes to reflect this, and forbidding any conversion attempts by Christians. Christian Dalits are also discriminated against constitutionally. 28. Seenarine, Dalit Women: Victims or Beneficiaries, p. 5.

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husband. A campaign of humiliations and fines followed her refusal to do so. Eventually, when the matter was referred to the District Collector, plain clothes policemen entered her house, beat her unconscious, then outside beat her with a log. When she regained consciousness she was in a police station, from where she was taken to a Government Hospital where she received only first aid. Eventually a Womens Legal Aid Centre had her admitted to the hospital for extensive treatment for multiple injuries to her thighs and back. The case was submitted as a human rights violation, following the comment that the police need not have used forcebut what hope of justice is there?29 Dalit women as temple prostitutes But historically the most shocking area of violence against Dalit women is their being forced to become temple prostitutes or devadasis. Temple prostitution differs from the many other sorts of prostitution which women and young girls are exposed to, including trafficking in the flesh trade. Many tribes in Northern India employ their women as prostitutesBancharas, Rajnats, Nuts, Sansis, Kanjars. Among the Bedias and the Bancharas prostitution is practised openlyby the others, covertly. The Bedias forbid marriage within the tribe and initiate their daughters into prostitution, actually celebrating their loss of virginity. 30 Sad to say, seen from the standpoint of British responsibility for Indian suffering, these tribes made a livelihood in the princely courts, before the British came, by entertaining (singing, dancing, juggling, acrobatics) or spying. With the British conquest the Rajahs lost most of their power, and this form of patronage largely ceased: consequent poverty became the driving motif for prostitution. But temple prostitution, practised by Dalits on their women and girls, is violence sanctioned by religion. Burnad Fatima describes this as the most serious violation of human rights and gives the example of the shoemakers, Arunthathiar, who practice Mathammaor dedicating their Dalit girl children to the goddess Mathamma:
Due to lack of medical services, people go to Mathamma temples believing that the goddess has healing powers when the Dalit girl is sick. She is taken to the temple and left there, till her sickness is cured Once the 29. See R. Llangovan, A Dalit damned for defying her Village, http:// hinduonnet.com/theHindu/2002/08/04 30. See Debashis Mukerji, Brothel Buster, in The Week, 25 January, 1998. This tells the moving story of one man, Ram Sanehi, himself of the Bedia tribe, who struggled to free the women of the tribe from prostitution.

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child is cured, the child is named after Mathamma, and married to the goddess with the pottu Thali (wedlock). After she becomes a dancer and belongs to the temple. During temple festivals she dances and earns her livelihood. She is not treated with respect and is publicly humiliated by men who harass her sexually.Once the girl is married to Matthamma she cannot marry others to lead a family life. Men take her as a partner, exploit her and leave her with a child.31

Again, desperate poverty is the main reason lying behind this practice: Yellama is a Dalit woman from Karnataka, from the village of Manvi where there is a Hindu temple.
Yellama was 9 years old when her parents sold her for 4$ to an uppercaste man. He gave her a sari and a blouse, and paid for the alcohol at the initiation celebration. After that, she became his unpaid concubine.32

Yet even now, aged 50, she wont take off the gold and black beaded necklace that is the symbol of dedication, even though her blood boils at what was done to her. Poverty is still the driving force, despite the Governments and dedicated NGOs attempts to eradicate the practice. But these few stories do not highlight sharply enough what the practice has meant for Dalit women and girls all these years. North Karnataka has practised temple prostitution among four Dalit subcastes for many years. There are many justifications, ranging from the claim that if the parents are childless the child was dedicated before her birth, to the excuse that the girl has developed jat or matted hair, which signifies her call to the goddess Yellama.33It is claimed that the system pre-dated the Aryan invasion and is associated with matriarchal traditions of the Dravidians. In any case it seems to have an ancient origin generally in South India, providing parents of the child a ritualistic/legendary excuse to turn the girl into a prostitute and make a living through her, although this may have occurred at a later stage, the first stage of the system being a dedication of the girl to the earth goddess Yellama. With the Aryanisation of this custom the Devadasis were born. Yet, when we consider that one of the alterna31. Statement of Ms Burnad Fatima, UN committee on the Elimination of Descentbased Discrimination (CERD) 61st session. Geneva, 8-9 August, 2002, p. 3. 32. Carla Power, Becoming a Servant of God! Devadasis are Dalit women sold into sexual slavery, in Newsweek, 25 June, 2000. From website of Centre for Justice and Peace in South Asia: www.egroups.com/list/cjesa 33. The source for this section is JWP team in northern Karnataka, The Devadasi System in northern Karnataka, in BANHI 1981/2. BANHI is an occasional journal published by the Joint Womens Programme. The Director of the programme is Jyotsna Chatterji. The Joint Womens Programme has its main office in New Delhi.

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tives for the girl child is infanticideand still isthen the question is, is this a better or worse option? Rather than an extensive historical study, the most important task is to discover precisely the situation now. One of the worst consequences today is that becoming a Devadasi is very likely to end in commercial prostitution, as many women leave for the brothels of Mumbai. For example, one of the main points in transit in the girl traffic pipeline is Nipani in the Begaum district. Another is Athani. Nipani has a working class population of 25,000 of whom a majority are womenlarge numbers are Dalits. There are 800 prostitutes of whom 200 are Devadasis. In Athani, according to one spokesman, 98% families practised prostitution and had up to 3 girls to trade. Formerly, this practice may have been used by Dalit parents to achieve upward mobility by a liaison between their daughter and an uppercaste man. It may also have been forced on lower caste people to secure desirable and good-looking women for their pleasure. It is also possible, say the JWP, that, The system was designed to kill whatever vestiges of self-respect the untouchable castes have in order to subjugate them and keep them underprivileged.34 Now the practice has to be put in context of the economic policies and environmental crises mentioned earlier. The Devadasi Beltthe strip including the border districts of Karnataka and Maharashtrais drought prone and has been neglected for centuries. But grinding poverty and hunger here have coincided with a vicious system by which upper-caste men get access to lower caste women with religious sanction. For women themselves, it is possible that the sense of being devoted to the goddess Yellama helps them, since they do not endure social stigmaand even bestows a certain prestige as they are asked to be present at auspicious functions in the homes of the higher castes. Compared with urban prostitutes the incidence of disease is not as high in Temple prostitutesyet the women tend to look much older than they actually are. But even if the mothers have managed to eke out some kind of dignity, their children are suffering, as the social stigma attaches to them when, increasingly, more communities do not want to marry into a Devadasi family. The Bill outlawing this practice came into being in 1982the progress in its implementation is another story.

34. JWP team, The Devadasi System in N. Karnataka, p. 19.

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4. Dalit Women and Pollution I want tackle now some underlying notions. Why is it that Dalit women continue to suffer to such a terrible degree even given a certain degree of progress, in education and attainment of professional positions? Why do they continue to internalize their inferiority and subjugation? Why do notions of purity and pollution affect the lives of Dalit women more than men? It is here that we see the intersection of patriarchy and caste oppression. Whereas it is true that Dalit women see liberation in terms of removing caste oppression, since the heavy burden of patriarchy helped to shape the way caste is experienced, overcoming patriarchy is a crucial part of removing caste oppression. As I have said, Hindu high caste women also experience extreme restrictions in their lives and control of their sexuality. But the maintenance of the ritual purity of high-caste women is attained at the expense of the degradation of the sexuality of their Dalit sisters. So, I ask, how did patriarchy enter Indian cultural life? The usual explanation of this is to say that through the code of Manu, written down in a long process ending around 700 CE, the inferiority of women was institutionally inscribed and their lives surrounded with restrictions. The question of the origins of Untouchability is beyond the scope of this article: as many of you know, there is great dispute as to whether it arose through the Aryan Conquest of indigenous peoplesaround 1500 BCE, or through the clash of Aryans with Dravidian culture of south India, or as Dr Ambedkar believed,35 as arising from the process of a primitive tribal society passing from nomadic life to the life of a settled village community. He thought that to protect the village from outside attack, guards and watchmen were hired: these were broken men who had strayed from the tribe and lived as individuals. They would be given food and protection in return for their services. This would also explain why Dalits live in separate colonies, some distance from the village. But what is important is the extent to which patriarchy is built into the caste system. Thus, Kalpana Kannabiran argues that the feminine power principle is built into Hindu religion but the worship of the goddess in no way contradicts the oppression of women.
35. Dr Babusaheb Ambedkar is a highly important figure for Dalits, struggling for their rights within the formation of the new Indian constitution. In the end he despaired of Hinduism and became a Buddhist so as to be free of caste oppression.

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She understands that the subjugation of women is very ancient and concludes,
It is my thesis that patriarchy is in fact the basis of the caste system and that the patterns of hierarchy, power and authority which characterise the caste system are derived from earlier forms of genderbased oppression.36

The restrictions on the movement of high-caste women, the prohibition of widow re-marriage, the insistence on marriage within the caste and jat (= sub-caste), and the prohibition on interdining are based on notions of exclusion, hierarchy and caste purity.37 That the Dalit woman is seen as a threat to all this is to a large degree a fiction, as the use made of her body by high-caste men renders the notion of Untouchability hypocrisy, a smoke-screen. I think the notion of scapegoat is relevant here. It is often said that Dalit women are freer, to some extent, of the restrictions of caste patriarchy, in the sense of being able to move around more freely. This of course is linked with economic necessity. On the one hand the Dalit woman gains a grudging respect from her family for being a wage earner, but on the other she is accused of being a loose woman with no morals and is prey to sexual harassment as we have seen. Patriarchy, then, is inextricably bound up with caste oppression although not as its sufficient cause. Poor Dalit women have frequently internalized patriarchal norms: as I have said, preservation of caste purityendogamyalthough breaking down in certain contexts, is still achieved at the price of stigmatising Dalit women. 5. The Religion of Dalit Women Traditionally, the lives of Dalits have been lived close to the earth, as the struggle for water and land has shown. The story of the Chipko movement illustrates the importance of trees for tribals, and the fact they make the difference between life and death.38 So the earth and
36. Cited in Dietrich, The Relationship between Womens Movement and Dalit Movements, p. 217. 37. interdining refers to the prohibition on Dalits from sharing meals with castepeople. 38. The Chipko movement arose in response to the murder of the bride Amrita Devi and the women of the wedding party in the nineteenth century, in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan. When the Maharajahs soldiers arrived to chop down the trees for a palace, the women refused to allow them and hugged the trees. They were cut down

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earth goddesses were worshipped as mother: energy, nourishment and life were drawn from her, although this relationship has been lost to an extent through Dalit alienation from the land. Their spirituality could be described as cosmic, involving an identification with nature, and not an attempt to transcend in terms of otherworldly existence.39 So an otherworldly God, Heaven and Hell, find no placein fact goddesses dominate, although Dalits are quite capable of appropriating and changing the dominant religion for their own struggle. The ancient goddesses survive and may be worshipped alongside the rituals of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and even neo-Buddhism. Transcendence is much more a question of daily experience of struggle and protest. Religion, then, is not opiate, but a means of finding strength to survive and protest. Conversion to Christianity for Dalits was entered on in the hope of breaking free from the caste system, but, to Christianitys shame, discrimination even followed them into the Christian Church. And now both women and men are denied the constitutional privileges given to other Dalits, a grave human rights issue. There are about 20 million Christians in India and 75% of these are Dalits (about 14 million). sixty percent of all Catholics in India are Dalits. But the experience of Dalit women as Christians to a large extent simply repeats their socialisation into inferiority. They had to encounter the deep ambiguityputting it at its best!of Christian theology towards women. Although in some of the early (missionary) conversion stories there is evidence of womens leadership, after 1947 there was a transfer of power to the urban Christian elite and women largely lost this initiative. Caste Christianity (beyond the scope of this paper), increases the separation of the Dalit people from caste Christians in general and womens discrimination in particular. According to Sister Shalini:
Dalit women long for dignity and respect in society and in the church. Being economically poor and being Dalits they feel excluded and discriminated. When we go to meet the parish priest, says Sahaya Mary, Father does not even ask us to sit down.40 and murdered. The Chipko movement has arisen internationally in their memory and to protect trees. Chipko means tree-hugging. In the field centres of Wells for Indias partner, Gravis, in the Thar desert, there is always a dramatic poster depicting the killing of Amrita Devi. 39. Here, I am grateful to the unpublished paper of Sister Shalini, Dalit Women in India Today, delivered at a Dalit Theology study week, New Delhi, January 2003. 40. Sister Shalini, Hunger for Food and Thirst for Dignity: Well-being as Herme-

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Further, this particular parish, where Sister Shalini conducted her research, operates on caste lines: the Basic Christian Communities (BCCs) that in Latin America operate as grassroots solidarity amongst the poorer people work here in a discriminatory way. A monthly fee is demanded for Church membership. And the whole thrust of the spiritual dimension of faith observance ignores the desperate economic poverty of the Dalit community. Dalit women were heard to say here that it was easier to approach a goddess than a Christian priest! Yet, in other places, research offers some positive messages. The work of John Webster and his teamalso in the Chennai (Madras) areashows how the stories of the love and compassion of Jesus and the courage of some of the Biblical women offer hope to Dalit women.41 The cultivation of a life of prayer was experienced as giving inner strength to them. Further, when the team examined the comparative practices around childbirth among Christian and Hindu Dalits, they found that where the practices were almost identical, there was less girl infanticide among Christian women as well as a stronger sense of self-esteem in younger Dalit Christian mothers. This must be a sign of hope for the future. Another study in a specific area of Gujarat, where female infanticide is widely practiced, by a research team from St. Xaviers College, Ahmedabad, shows Dalit Christians as practising a much lower rate of girl infanticide compared with Hindu and tribal women.42 The same study points to the influence of religious sisters on Dalit women: their convent was regarded as a place of welcome and hospitality, offering an important safe space for women to meet. This is without estimating the enormous activist contributions of some communities of religious sisters to struggling with Dalit women for justice, for example, in the area of child prostitution. Safe spaces are key to understanding how Dalit women negotiate areas of freedom in their lives: other spaces for womens interaction are while collecting water and

neutical Key to a Feminist Soteriology. Unpublished paper, based on the authors research into the Catholic parish of Thiruvetriyur, a suburb of Chennai, formerly Madras. 41. John Webster, Deborah Premraj, Ida Swamidos, Rashilda Udayakumar, Chandra Yesuratnam, From Role to Identity: Dalit Christian Women in transition (New Delhi: ISPCK 1997). 42. Fernando Franco, Jyotsna Macwan and Suguna Ramanathan (eds.), The Silken Swing: The Cultural Universe of Dalit Women (Calcutta: Stree, 2000), pp. 28-29.

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fodder (of course these may be far from safe!), going for ablutions, social occasions and festivals.43 Dalit Feminist Theology It has to be said that this is in its infancy. Articles are beginning to appear in, for example, In Gods Image, an Asian Womens Theological Journal, but in general the specificity of caste has been given little attention as an area for feminist theological reflection. This calls to mind the cry of womanist theologians to western feminists that racism is a neglected category.44What I attempt here is the broad outlines I observe developing. As Gabriele Dietrich writes:
Dalit theology finds itself at the cultural crossroads between popular village religion and folk culture, Christianity and neo-Buddhism.45

If the same can also be said for Dalit feminist theology, what gives the latter specificity is the determination of Dalit women no longer to accept the degradation forced upon her by Brahminical culture, patriarchal norms, her own men folk and grinding poverty. Again, to cite Dietrich, If the victim refuses to be a victim, the power at the top of the hierarchy gets destabilised.46 Of course Dalit women have always been creative in negotiating areas of freedom within the system, as I have been explaining. But a new strength now emerges in challenging caste boundaries. And this contributes to creating self esteem and a stronger identity. The strong spirituality of Dalit women has meant that they have been able to create and sustain a vitality through their songs, stories and, in some cases, by subverting patriarchy through ironically re-shaping traditional myths and narratives.47 Some of these stories become a means of rearranging the world, relating how women can outwit men. If Christian theology is to play any part in enabling the liberation of Dalit women it has to be willing to place social transformation at the heart of its theology. If there is a willingness to recast traditional terms like salvation and redemption with images of well-being, flourishing
43. Franco, Macwan and Ramanathan (eds.), The Silken Swing, p. 113. 44. Readers of Feminist Theology may want to recall the challenge of Mukti Bartons article, The Skin of Miriam Became as White as Snow: the Challenge of the Darker Sister, in Feminist Theology 27 (May 2001), pp. 61-80. 45. Dietrich The Relationship between Womens Movement and Dalit Movements, p. 242. 46. Dietrich The Relationship between Womens Movement and Dalit Movements, p. 239. 47. See Franco, Macwan and Ramanathan (eds.), The Silken Swing, chs. 46.

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and dignity of Dalit women, putting the struggle for survival and sustenance of the most vulnerable categories of the community as the highest priority of Church, then there is a hope that Church can become authentic following of Christ. For feminist theologians this means drawing on our methodologies of resistance, empowerment and visions of flourishing and making them work for communities and contexts of Dalit women. Feminist theologians have done important work in unmasking the misogyny surrounding menstrual blood, on myths about virginity and purity, but have not brought these into the struggle for justice for their Dalit sister. Nor has the extensive work on gender identity, on hearing into speech the silenced voices been put into practice. We urgently need to develop a listening, not only to the voices of pain and protest, the scream of Dalit women, but to the richness of Dalit womens spirituality, a spirituality that offers,
Community instead of individualism, simplicity instead of opulence, helpfulness instead of selfishness, creativity instead of enforced mimicry, celebration instead of mere enjoyment, openness to transcendence instead of pragmatism, wisdom instead of information and naturalness instead of artificiality.48

Secondly, the Church has to embark on a journey of repentance from its replication of discriminatory structures in its own organisation, especially where these have further oppressed Dalit women. Thirdly, the Church has to develop the humility and sense of urgency to cooperate with secular movements already working far more effectively for the empowerment of Dalit women. 7. The Way Forward The overall picture is that, while progress is being made, much more needs to be achieved, especially in the new suffering spawned by the policies of global capitalism. It is important to recognise certain achievements through government initiative, the work of NGOs and solidarity of some Church organisations. This article has already stressed the need for access to education, especially basic literacy, and to basis sources of sustenance like water and fodder. Education needs to be focused on what will actually empower Dalit women as well as making education a safe experience for Dalit children. In our own projects in Rajasthan the single most effective change is the creation
48. Dr Sanjay Paswan and Dr Pramantha Jaideva, Encyclopedia of Dalits in India, Vol 9, Women (Delhi: Kalpax Publications, 2002), p. 158.

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of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) for women. Seen as vital for incomegeneration, they are also a means of building confidence, self-esteem and leadership among rural women. I have also observed them functioning to overcome caste barriers. It is also important, as I have been arguing, to applaud and encourage the numerous movements of Dalit women mobilised in their own struggle for human rights. Basically, the struggle for liberation will be achieved by Dalit women themselves: the role of outsiders is to be in solidarity, and to facilitate the voices, stories and struggles of Dalit women in being heard at an international level. As Vimal Thorat wrote:
Nevertheless, the Dalit womens articulations are growing. After the formation of the NFDW [National Federation of Dalit Women]in 1995, there have been two conferences in Dhule and in Mumbai, 1997three in Delhi and two in Chennai. Our ranks are swelling. There is great enthusiasm for the movement. We believe that only after these distinct articulations are made and space created for our voices and issues that a broader alliance will get forged again. We have been kept out, left behind, denied by our own movement [the Dalit movement] and also by the womens movement.49

What is referred to here on an national basis also occurs in every Dalit colony. Countless Dalit womens groups are mushrooming. But not all of them are equally effective. First, the attempts of Dalit women to be active in the political arena are fraught with danger: Vimal Thorat again:
In Sonipat, Haryana the elected sarpanch [District Council leader] who is a Dalit woman has been forcibly denied entry by caste bullies. She will pollute the panchayat office [District Council Office] if she enters, they say! What is the Dalit political leadership, the rest of the political leadership and the womens movement, doing about this? No one has even raised the issue let alone supporting it Two years back, in a similar incident in Madhya Pradesh, an elected Dalit woman sarpanch was stripped and paraded around the village for daring to hoist the Indian flag. Civil liberties organisations took up the issue but where were the RPI, the BSP [two Dalit freedom movements], the womens movement then?50

Secondly, what may also happen is that rural less-educated women may be active in picketing, write the authors of The Encyclopaedia of
49. Vimal Thorat, in Communalism Combat. 50. Vimal Thorat, in Communalism Combat.

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Dalits in India, whereas Dalits in higher echelons favoured political participation but non-violent methods. 51 They note the tendency to leave politics for other women to continue the pursuit of achievement of higher status.52This points to the many kinds of solidarity needed for effective social change, not the least being the awareness of the Womens Movement that the issues being campaigned for are not the crucial ones for Dalit women. What needs highlighting is the fact that Dalit womens progress to full participation in Indian society is now blocked by new violence caused by a mixture of Hindu rightwing nationalism, giving patriarchal norms a pernicious virulence, and the damaging effects on Dalit women of globalization policies. These two factors alone make the issue of survival, dignity, and basic Human Rights for Dalit women an international one. But I want to give the last word to the courage and protest of Dalit women themselves:
Woe to you the politicians, You sided with the upper-castes; Your power will be curtailed; Woe to you the police, You harassed us unnecessarily; You will be buried alive. Woe to you the Dalit leaders, You sold us for your survival, Your security will be shattered Blessed the Dalit women, For you will mother the martyrs of Dalitsthan. Blessed are you the activists, You shall be rewarded for your commitment. Blessed are the Dalits, For you will create a Dalitsthan, From your burnt-out ashes.53

May there be justice and flourishing for Dalit women, but without further martyrs, without ashes and without further violence!
51. Encyclopedia of Dalits in India, Vol 9, Women, p. 143. 52. Encyclopedia of Dalits in India, Vol 9, Women, p. 149. 53. Encyclopedia of Dalits in India, Vol 9, Women, pp. 161-62.

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