Exclusionary feminist discourse in India, past and present

It was 2017 and Trump had just been elected. Women’s marches had sprung up in many places and on my television screen. The image of thousands of women standing shoulder to shoulder, coming together to advocate for shared goals — could feel inspiring; it could look like solidarity. In reality, such marches and the discourse that accompanies them can very well marginalise and alienate some of the most vulnerable groups in our societies. There is a history of feminist discourse, where specific demographics of privileged women are uplifted at the expense of others. If feminism as an ideology is about challenging power structures, then privileged feminists, (particularly those in the ‘west’) as a first step, must be aware and critical of the limitations of their feminisms. Otherwise, it would be pity for feminism itself to push vulnerable groups even further to the margins, their positions extremely precarious. Such is the case of dalit women in India who face triple alienation due to their caste and class, on top of their gender. A fourth layer is that they continue to be alienated by upper caste or savarna feminist discourse.

This essay explores the exclusionary forces of feminist discourse as it relates to India using three key texts by Antoinette Burton, Claire Midgley, and Krupa Shandilya. First, I examine the significance of the British imperial relationship with India in modern western feminism.     When we consider how significant Empire was in the development of modern British feminisms, it becomes obvious why their narratives push some groups even further to the margins rather than to the centre. Historicising and thus contextualising modern western feminism is one way for us to become self-aware and critical of its limitations. In the context of the British Empire, the feminist discourse of different groups of British women was often at the expense of the generalised ‘Indian woman’. Here, I draw on two historical monographs: Antoinette Burton’s Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (1994) and Clare Midgley’s Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (2007). Burton and Midgley both establish the foundational role that the British Empire played in shaping the origins of modern feminism in Europe. Midgley considers case studies across the empire, showing that the British Empire played a significant role not just in the development of British feminisms, but of modern Western feminisms in general. Burton focuses on India and writes on the relationship between white middle-class women, Indian women, and imperial culture.

Then, I move to a more contemporary discussion of feminist discourse in India today, where it is equally important to provide context. Here, I am guided by Krupa Shandilya’s “Nirbhaya’s Body: The Politics of Protest in the Aftermath of the 2012 Delhi Gang Rape” and her cutting discursive analysis of responses to the said rape incident. With added clarity from the Hathras Case in September 2020, it can be seen that dalit women today remain alienated, in this case, not by British feminist discourse, but by upper-caste or sarvana feminist discourse.

India in the development of modern British feminisms

Burton’s work focuses on the discourse of English middle-class feminist organisations in the secular sphere of the women’s suffrage movement. She argues that most, if not all, liberal feminist ideologies produced in the Victorian era identified with the civilising mission of their imperial nation: one of the grounds for advocating for women’s votes and women’s employment was women’s involvement in the improvement of Indian women in particular, the “white feminist burden” (Burton, 1994, p. 7). Because nation was tied up with empire, calls for women’s participation in national political culture were also predicated on the image of a ‘backward’ Indian woman that needed saving by a British feminist sister, who was free to vote, travel, and work. This was despite the fact that contemporary Indian women were active in social and political reform and were well-known both in India and the metropole. Therefore, even emancipatory feminist ideologies that emerged in this era operated in an imperial framework and propagated the logic of its civilising mission at the expense of the Indian woman. The cause of the Indian woman was so significant that it unified women activists, whether feminists, suffragists, evangelists or not. Midgley similarly takes a discursive approach in examining an earlier era, but unlike Burton’s sole focus on India and British women’s suffrage, Midgley’s area of interest is larger: in separate chapters, she examines the role of imperialism in British women’s involvement in the anti-slavery campaign and the boycott of slave-grown sugar, the campaign against sati, the practice of widows burning themselves at their husbands’ funeral pyres, as well as in philanthropy and missionary work.

Her broader scope of discussion illustrates the complex legacy of women’s activism and yet still highlights the significance of India and the campaign for the abolishment of sati to British women. In her analysis of the ‘abolish sati’ campaign, she illustrates how the self-image of middle-class white women in Britain was constructed in contrast to the image of the victimised Indian woman that needed saving. British women “[asserted] their ‘maternalist’ power to speak on behalf of ‘other’ women, creating distorted pictures of their lives and aspirations, and imposing their own visions of freedom.” (p. 148) Midgley shows that in this way, British women contributed to the moral justification of empire, and simultaneously justified their own demands for political participation in the form of petitions to Parliament and engagement in missionary work overseas. She also meaningfully contrasts discourse in the anti-sati campaign with that of anti-slavery, highlighting that women anti-slavery activists stressed the need to reform the white coloniser oppressing the black slave woman, while women anti-sati activists pressed for the reform of colonised Hindu men. Therefore, while English women’s activism once contributed towards emancipation through the abolishment of colonial slavery, women activists later represented Empire as a social mission instead of exploitation and violence. In surfacing this contrast, Midgley shows the varied implications of women’s activism while reinforcing the pointed centrality of the cause of the Indian woman to the development of feminist ideology and its complicity with imperial ideology.

To contextualise modern feminism in European imperialism is to understand the asymmetrical power conditions it emerged from and how they shaped the end-product.  Burton’s and Midgley’s work help us understand how the feminist discourse that developed in England overwhelmingly depended on the image of an inferior Indian woman and did not extend emancipation to the colonised, largely collaborating with, rather than opposing, the imperial enterprise. Recognising the plurality of feminisms and their respective contexts should help us overcome ‘universal’ discourses of feminism, which are likely, to some extent, to be exclusive. Indeed, Burton and Midgley acknowledge that their projects of historicising modern Western feminism arise from an awareness that the modern British women’s movement was, and became, hegemonic in its understanding of the experience of womanhood, the analysis of the oppression of women, and the political and societal changes necessary to overcome this. Even though their feminist discourse was based on their experiences as white middle-class women, they claimed it had a universal validity (Midgley, 2007, p. 9).

A brief look at exclusionary feminist discourse in India today

Recognising the context of different feminisms and the women left out as a result is especially pertinent in today’s India, where the position of women is complicated by intersections with caste, class and religion. There was an 18.6% increase in the incidence of rape of dalit women from 2018 to 2019, with the real number likely much higher given unreported cases. (Perrigo, 2020) On top of dalit women being most vulnerable to rape and sexual assault, dalits are now also at greater risk of contracting COVID-19. Their segregation is legitimised by social distancing and hygiene measures while they remain far from healthcare and essential services (Sur, 2020). Apathy, prejudice, and intolerance continue to haunt dalits.

In her article, Shandilya examines how diverse public media and public actors have portrayed the figure of Jyoti Singh Pandey, the victim of the 2012 Delhi gang rape that sparked global outrage. She notes that representations of Pandey across various media depicted her to be ‘everywoman’, yet also Hindu and upper-caste at the same time. For Shandilya, this is symptomatic of how the Hindu, upper-caste, middle-class woman has become the “de facto subject of Indian feminism” (p. 465).

Shandilya discusses those ‘mainstream’ representations of Jyoti and what they imply for who deserves justice in cases of sexual assault and violence. Despite intersectional feminist interventions, non-Hindu, lower-caste, lower-class women are “excluded from protest movements” (p. 466). This is especially the case for dalit women who lack access to the legal system. She notes that the gruesome rape and subsequent murder of not one, but two dalit women in a small town in September 2006 did not capture public imagination as did Pandey’s. Neither did the rape of four dalit girls by upper-caste men in March 2014, after Pandey’s rape. This was despite the victims’ dalit neighbours from her hometown marching to the seat of parliament in Delhi, hoping to galvanise mass protests similar to those that erupted in 2012. The double standards that Shandilya points out are even more poignant in 2020, when just in September, a 19-year old dalit woman died after being gang raped in her hometown, Hathras.

The Hathras Case

According to multiple reports, the 19-year old dalit woman was gang raped and tortured by four upper-caste, Thakur men who were her neighbours. Her injuries were so severe that she died two weeks later in a hospital in New Delhi, where she was rushed to just a day before. Her tongue had been cut and damage to her spinal cord meant that her lower body was paralysed. She was raped and attacked when she went to gather fodder for her animals.

The four alleged rapists are Thakurs, who have a large presence in the police and state government. While many in the world have to contend with white supremacy, the dalit community in the victim’s hometown have to contend with Thakur supremacy. According to Kiruba Munusamy, a dalit lawyer who works on caste discrimination and gender violence cases, the police officials and magistrate are all Thakurs. “Most dalits in rural areas work on the agricultural lands of upper caste groups. So if they lodge a complaint they have to risk their very livelihoods and safety,” says Munusamy.

After a two-week fight for survival, the victim succumbed. On the night of her death, the police returned to the family’s village with her corpse. But they did not hand her over to the grieving family. Instead, they insisted she be cremated there and then. Tanushree Pandey, a journalist from India Today, was present as police hastily cremated the victim without her family present. Her real-time videos from the scene posted live to Twitter brought wider attention to a case that activists say would likely have gone unrecognised otherwise.

For seasoned dalit activists, the Hathras case is a brutal, yet unexceptional example of everyday sexual violence perpetrated on dalit women and the complicity of the state in doing so. Even though the victim first told police that she was raped on Sept 14th, shortly after the attack, her allegations were filed more than a week later. (Perrigo, 2020) Additionally, India’s exhaustive 73-page guidelines and protocols for medical examination of victims of sexual violence state that if a woman reports the incident within 96 hours of assault, all evidence including swabs should be collected. However, forensic examinations in the Hathras case were only conducted eight days after the assault— too late, according to guidelines, for an accurate conclusion of rape to be drawn (Biswas, 2020).

Delhi 2012 vs Hathras 2020

The role of caste in the Hathras case cannot be understated. The victim, who had multiple fractures and injuries, was in the normal ward of a local hospital for more than a week before being transferred to ICU. In the case of Pandey in 2012, the victim had died in a hospital in Singapore after being flown there by the Indian government. In fact, one report mentioned that the Hathras victim did not even have an ambulance to take her to the local hospital. A grieving brother drove his paralysed, injured sister to the hospital on a motorcycle. (Chander, 2020) Surfacing these differences is not meant to pit one life against another. Rather, it shows the stark role of caste in how cases of sexual violence are treated by the state. “The Hathras offense was very similar to Nirbhaya,” says Munusamy. “In the case of Nirbhaya, the state tried its best to make her survive. But in the case of Hathras, she was admitted to a local hospital. Even after she died, she was not given the respect of her body (Perrigo, 2020).

Even in light of a case like this, there are still media sites that do not identify this case as caste-based rape, likening the case to those experienced by any other woman. On CNN, a news reporter had asked the dalit activist she was interviewing, “But we saw similar gruesome cases in other cities as well? … And [Hathras] cannot be seen as another crime against women?” One writer noted that prominent television news anchors like Barkha Dutt and Faye D’souza took pride in giving ‘representation’ to dalits by asking them to join in their debate on the barbaric Hathras crime. “While their earnest effort is appreciated, intellectuals and social scientists from marginalised communities should not be invited only during discussions on caste-based violence” (Ganeshan, 2020).

Nevertheless, the significant public attention that the Hathras case has garnered has not gone unnoticed by dalit activists. In one report, Manjula Pradeep, a dalit human rights activist and former executive director of the Navsarjan Trust, one of the largest dalit rights organisations in India, says, “It has brought us into center stage. And it has created spaces for the issues of dalit women and girls, which have most of the time been marginalised, not only by the feminist women’s rights movement, but also by the dalit movement, which is quite male dominated.” (Perrigo, 2020) In 2012, Khabar Lahariya, a pioneering organisation for rural women’s journalism, urged its readers to take action, to demand accountability from both the police and women’s rights groups. (p. 481) Amid the 2020 frenzy, they chose to step to the sidelines and cover instead the media reporting of the case. This was not a new story for them, but they could not ignore its public prominence. “For close to 20 years, we have been the only women reporters at the silent site of crimes against women, especially caste-based crimes, which are often not recognized as crimes at all. We were taken aback by the scene of the crime in Hathras where the media mobbed the tired family,” one journalist reported (Mullick, 2020).

Recognising the limits of feminist discourses is an important first step towards solidarity. In a video statement condemning the Hathras case and other forms of violence, philosopher and political activist Angela Davis urged for critical self-awareness of “our own failure to produce meaningful and transformative solidarity with dalit people.” (Davis, 2020) Burton similarly urges a critical awareness of “cheery, triumphalist narratives” that may seem more attractive as the foundation of feminist theoretical critique (Burton, 1994, p. 21).

This essay began with an anecdote from 2017. But my struggles with solidarity in feminist discourse began in a pointed encounter earlier in 2014, when I visited a rural hamlet in Rajasthan. I had visited with a volunteer organisation that focuses on minimising displacement in rural to urban migration. There, I felt the acute sense of not being able to stand in solidarity with the women I met. While I could clearly hear what volunteers were saying about the change needed in that hamlet, I could not make out what I saw in the women’s eyes. Worse, they did not speak. I didn’t know what they did out of their own will or out of some form of coercion. How would I know what they wanted or aspired to? Was I looking at ‘the subaltern’? I always smiled and hoped they knew that I just wanted to begin to feel who they were. While acknowledging limitations of our respective feminist discourses is a first step, perhaps the next would be to listen. In her article, Shandilya asserts that “It is important to listen to the voices of dalit women who do speak out as feminists, even when their politicisation takes forms that are not readily visible to the state or to women’s movements” (p. 480).