Dalit Women as Political Agents

Articulating dalit women's experiences by exposing the operations of history by which their struggles were co-opted, subsumed, misrepresented or sometimes erased by mainstream debates and tracing the survival strategies by which these women have held out against political suppression and social isolation become ucial in contemporary dalit feminist struggles in Kerala. This paper addresses a complex and vexed question that has been evolving and changing, especially in recent decades, namely, how to approach and understand the specificities of dlit women activists' experiences in the context of Kerala's politics and social ovements. This enquiry attempts to understand the apprehensions and conflicts within public life for dalit women in Kerala and to show how the "public" itself differs according to one's location.