“In trying to break out of the oppression we face and move forward in our struggles, we Dalit women have had to roar, resist and really challenge the status quo in our everyday lives.”
—Ruth Manorama, Bangalore-based Dalit activist
On September 14, close to a month ago, I woke up to news of a 19-year-old Dalit woman gang-raped and brutally injured, in Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh. It did not shock me. It was just another Monday, just another news flash that newspapers and TV channels dedicated their last segments to. The incident was one among the many that have occurred in the last few months, in the last few years, in the last decade, in the last century. When the Dalit woman breathed her last, 15 days later, I went through a familiar feeling of defeat and hopelessness.
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A familiar nausea, brought on by a sea of numbers. The National Crime Records Bureau (2019) reports that at least 10 Dalit women are raped every day in India. The figure of three thousand five hundred in a year wells up like a high tide of sickness, but it is still a grossly under-reported number. Voices Against Caste Impunity: Narratives of Dalit Women in India, a report published by the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch in 2018, feels the gap in data is so huge that it almost covers up the extent and magnitude of oppression faced by Indian Dalit women, rather than revealing it. What is not known is bound to be worse. Far more than what we have witnessed in Hathras.
We need to grasp that sheer enormity. That’s why, in response to the media frenzy over this one case of caste-based sexual violence, several activists—a significant number of them Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi—pointed out that there is nothing new or exceptional about what the Thakurs in Hathras have done to a Dalit woman. For instance, there have been at least nine incidents of caste-based sexual violence against Dalit women and girls since July. Each incident is more gut-wrenching than the other, every case more brutal than the last. And a keener scan, a more detailed gathering of facts, would undoubtedly yield a much bigger canvas, a vaster landscape of caste dystopia.
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So, it was of great surprise to me that the Indian media was even interested in covering events around the death of the Dalit woman from Hathras. That news anchors and producers were scouting for Dalit voices to speak on the Hathras horror, as they called it. That editors were looking for Dalit writers to deliver rebuttals against privileged-caste perspectives, which questioned the role of caste in sexual violence. That influencer handles on social media were willing to stand in support of Dalits. It felt unreal.
The awareness mainstream media is bringing to the Hathras case is highly commendable, but we must ask why such coverage is hardly extended to other, equally or more brutal, cases of caste-based sexual violence. When violence is so routine and systematic, as if coming from some assembly line, how can marginalised communities depend on a fourth pillar that makes arbitrary decisions around which cases deserve country-wide attention and which don’t? What psychology governs those accidents of choice? What guarantees does this chance benevolence offer to the next victim? Considering that media coverage can often influence the state machinery’s rapid response, in the form of arrests, setting up of fast-track courts or providing protection to the victim’s family, shouldn’t journalists take all caste rapes seriously? Isn’t it only right and fair to expect that the Indian media respond with similar agility to help all Dalit victims of caste-based sexual violence?
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As a Dalit child who grew up in poverty, but later accrued substantial amounts of class and social privilege, I was convinced that the world was against me. Regardless of how they presented themselves, I was constantly taught to brave myself against the boulders that came my way. My first and foremost objective, as told and retold by women of my community and family, was to survive. That’s how we reassured each other. Even in the face of the worst adversity, we’d say, you’ll get through this, you’re a survivor. It was our way of building resilience. It was our only way.
For this reason, I can, to some extent, try to imagine the agony of the Dalit woman’s family in Hathras. To be what they are and to invest everything in the survival of their daughter, only to lose her to a gruesome death, is an incredibly huge, incredibly sad tear in the cloth of their lives. Far, far beyond what a mere statistic or a video interview can ever reveal. The monstrosity of Hathras, and several other caste rapes across India, is not contained only in the unspeakable violence carried out on Dalit women’s bodies. It is there in the ease, the effortlessness with which privileged and dominant castes deprive Dalit women of their dignity, their resources, their right to life itself. It is there in the perpetrators’ strutting confidence, their conviction that this country will defend their licence to threaten and violate, no matter how inhuman the crime.
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The 2018 report mentioned above offers extensive details on how Dalit women survivors are often forced to withdraw cases, or worse, take their own life in response to the backlash. Suman, a grassroots activist based out of Rajasthan, is quoted as saying that survivors face threats from the accused, the police, the judiciary and the public prosecutor. They are even accused of registering false cases in order to receive compensation: the Dalit woman’s ‘moral character’ is invoked as a tool to intimidate them into silence. In Suman’s words, “The statement that women file rape cases because they need money is not used against dominant caste (non-Dalit) women. Officials already believe Dalit women have no dignity, no izzat (honour), no swabhiman (self-respect). They come from a society that believes this.”
A mountain of evidence exists in the public domain—in the form of reports, interviews, testimonies, tribunals, public hearings, longform articles, documentaries, and such like. Dalit activists, particularly women, have cried themselves hoarse over the years, metaphorically and literally, as they uncovered—layer by layer—the worst casteism in khap panchayats, at police stations, in courts, at government hospitals. They have established, in excruciating detail, why Dalit women’s very lives are defined by socio-economic vulnerabilities, why they are at a much higher risk of being sexually assaulted and killed simply by being who they are. They have amply evidenced the inefficacies of existing laws, in terms of implementation, and India’s oppressive culture of impunity, which makes it impossible for Dalit women survivors to access even the most elementary forms of restorative justice, such as compensation and rehabilitation.
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Yet, every time news of a caste-based sexual crime makes it to mainstream media, savarna/dominant caste individuals instinctually flinch from blame and hastily pronounce that caste cannot have played a role. This insincere, unsound conclusion is usual enough, but in Hathras it took on a more criminal form. Keeping aside what was truly important and urgent—support and protection for the victim’s family, legal intervention, speedy state response—everyone, including media professionals, were compelled to focus on a singular question: Did caste play a role? Dalits—women, in particular—were asked, repeatedly, on social media and TV channels to explain why and how caste is a factor in sexual crimes. This article will purposely not attempt to answer that question.
What savarna/dominant caste individuals refuse to admit is that Indians live in a deeply stratified caste society, which typically determines whose perspectives take centrestage. When those in positions of power and influence are ignorant of how caste intersects with sexual violence, caste-affected communities are invariably expected to dedicate their time and energy to respond to questions that emerge from that ignorance. Lawyers and activists, who otherwise could be investing their labour in assisting victims and their families, are forced to focus on a distraction—in reality, a disruption.
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As a Dalit woman who has been part of corporate India for over 12 years, I have tried very hard to keep my lives separate. I have chosen not to speak about many things at work, caste being one of them. While it was partly because I was scared of further discrimination, in addition to what I was already facing, it was also my deep wariness of ‘devil’s advocates’. Similar to the conversations on Hathras unfolding on social media and elsewhere, I have often been subjected to questions that would prod and probe the reasoning behind Dalit politics. Regardless of the subject at hand, former UP chief minister Mayawati would be brought in and remarked upon, reservation policies would be criticised, and the pros of the caste system tossed in.
These exchanges, although seemingly innocuous, are inherently violent, and often add to the collective and individual trauma of caste-oppressed communities. In the name of open dialogue, Dalits are regularly subjected to politically tone-deaf interactions that don’t seek to learn, only provoke. We are forced to articulate and intellectualise within a framework designed by caste-privileged individuals, who, by virtue of their inability to understand our lived realities, derail our political journeys and cause substantial harm to our mental well-being.
This is the savarna gaze, which in India is held by mainstream media professionals, social media influencers, political analysts, celebrities, academics and public intellectuals. Held overtly or unconsciously, which can be even more damaging. In the case of Hathras, it is they who triggered the public reaction. Their privileged opinions essentially determined the nature and scale of this ongoing selective outrage, which include sharing graphic descriptions and images of physical mutilation, while simultaneously demanding that Dalits provide hard evidence of caste-based sexual violence, hounding the victim’s family for interviews, having extensive public debates on rape and caste, and creating a short-lived turmoil, which, in all likelihood, might fizzle out—or worse, actually instigate a casteist backlash against Dalits.
For Dalit women, this savarna gaze has played an increasingly problematic role: stereotyping and boxing in our existence. We are primarily seen as victims, voiceless and helpless, as though we don’t exist outside the data set of violence. We are reduced to ‘subjects of study’, by academics and intellectuals alike, and are mostly spoken of. And horrific crimes like Hathras are consistently used to embolden this offensive tendency, which in turn solidifies the victim stereotype, and engenders more violence against poor, disenfranchised Dalit women and girls—by naturalising that violence.
Amidst this social media-driven frenzy, I want to remind us of a simple truth: Dalit women are human beings who deserve to live full lives. We can’t perpetually exist as disfigured bodies. We can no longer just be alarming statistics. Or some other static mental category that serves the needs of the public imagination.
For those who buy into the savarna gaze, it is perhaps convenient to relegate Dalit women to an unchanging victim status. It might even seem righteous to feel pity or sympathy towards a Dalit family crying over the dead body of their daughter. But this momentary feeling, this seasonal outrage, does very little to bring about any structural or political change. This transient emotion is still, unfortunately, a component of the intricately interwoven, massive structure of casteist, capitalist patriarchy. This response, this chance benevolence and humanism, is embedded in caste privilege.
The way forward must therefore not only be to eliminate caste-based sexual violence, which is of course extremely critical, but to also create a stable reality where all Dalit women are empowered to experience the many facets of life, unencumbered by trauma. A world where our identities are no longer understood as just a summation of our past and present violence. An existence where our success in life isn’t seen as an exception, but the norm.
At present, only a handful of us are enabled to stay afloat, owing to our micro-privileges of class, educational background, religious location and social standing. And even for us it has been an arduous uphill climb, where we have had to navigate a complex maze of derision and discrimination. We have had to fight the varied manifestations of casteist patriarchy, so stubborn that it is almost humanly impossible to overcome it. And yet, this is our normal; this is what is asked of us—to get up after being beaten, to dust off the dirt after being pushed, to keep trooping against an army of hateful caste soldiers, every day. This might seem inspiring for some, but for us, it’s tiring. It’s wearing us out, like it did our mothers and grandmothers.
In a world where our privileged-caste peers are busy talking about scented candles for self-care, vaginal health for better sex, and trigger warnings to protect their mental well-being, we wake up to realities that are vastly different and challenging in ways that would be foreign to them. Dalit women could, say, watch a movie, run a marathon, eat a nice meal, laugh with a friend, travel for pleasure, make love, read a book, or pursue a passion. Dalit girls could feel safe while going to school, sing while working on a farm, or giggle at a silly joke. Dalit children could play in the streets, watch television, or dream of a future. We could all just live, without having to fear death and punishment for doing the most mundane things. We could all just survive and thrive.
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(Christina Dhanaraj is a writer with 12+ years of work experience in India, Singapore, China, the US and the Netherlands. She is a consultant for women and minority-led initiatives focusing on social justice, self-determination, and collaborative models of scholarship. She is currently an advisor for Smashboard and The Blue Club’s Media Fellowship for Dalit women. She was the co-founder of the Dalit History Month project and a volunteer for Dalit Women Fight. Views are personal.)
