ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

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Bhojanmata’s Struggle for Dignity

Caste consciousness imposes moral limits on preferential hiring in the mid-day meal schemes.

 

Caste and Race: Discrimination Based on Descent

In 2001, Dalit non-governmental organisations pushed for the inclusion of caste-based discrimination in the United Nations conference on racism and other forms of descent-based discriminations. How did the Government of India respond to the internationalisation of casteism? Why did Dalits want casteism to be treated on par with racism in the first place? Did they succeed? And above all, is caste the same as race?

Occupational Hazards in Healthcare Settings

This paper highlights the working conditions in two work chains in the public healthcare system: municipal solid-waste management and handling of hospital waste and dead bodies. While COVID-19 has exposed the hazards that workers in these sectors are exposed to, it also lays bare the historical and social hierarchies, the exploitative working conditions and intrinsic discrimination within the public healthcare system.

Law of One’s Own? On Dalit Women’s Arduous Struggles for Social Justice

This article discusses the differential treatment of two rape cases in terms of civil society’s outrage and the process followed in the aftermath by the police and the valid questions that need to be reiterated in the context of caste–gendered structures of violence in Indian society.

Dalit Women and Colonial Christianity

The paper focuses on the history of the first three Bible women, Mary Wesley, Martha Reuben, and Bathsheba, who came from marginalised communities in Rayalaseema, and emerged as new leaders of social change in the context of colonial modernity and Christianity in the region. The emergence of a modern profession of Bible woman for Dalit women in the 1870s was transformative, opening doors of education, learning, and transforming them into local leaders. Bible women played a pivotal role in the history of Dalits, gender, and missions by shaping the life and community of Dalits and spreading Christianity in Rayalaseema.

 

Gender Equity and COVID-19: Dalit Standpoints

This paper attempts to understand the larger meanings that interlink social spaces of Dalits women and COVID-19. It tries to foreground the following questions. How does it determine the realm of social distancing? Does it lead to a new world of caste and precarity? One of the central transitions in the lives of Dalits and their subsistence in an economy that is impacted by the transition of welfare state towards the neo-liberal state that does not address the question of social security. Capitalist phase of neo-liberalism thus is reshaping the gender relations within the Dalit families. Work forces of Dalit women are being caught in challenges raised by Brahmanic, socially regulated economy. Domestic and external labour of Dalit women are embedded within the larger facets of society. In addition to these social and political developments, atrocities on Dalit women are increasing day by day in addition to covert/overt marginalisation within the Dalit families. Thus, this paper tries to map questions of Dalit women in the time of COVID-19.

Dalit Women, Vulnerabilities, and Feminist Consciousness

Dalit women in India have faced and are facing violence in myriad forms; they are victims of inhuman treatment, brutal violence and humiliation. Despite this, they have not been mute victims resigned to their plight; they have relentlessly struggled against caste-based social oppression and exploitative material relations, against atrocities and complex and contextual forms of hierarchies. The framework of vulnerability provides a useful lens to understand this violence and powerlessness. It is also important to address the lacuna in conventional feminist movements which do not account for caste-based gender violence, as also to assert Dalit women’s quest for and claim to universal transformative emancipatory practices.

Reflections on the ‘Chalo Nagpur’ Campaign

The ‘Chalo Nagpur’ campaign mobilised thousands of women marchers and drew attention to not only the exploitation and violence suffered by women from the lower castes, classes and marginalised sections but also their efforts to build connections with women engaged in similar aims across the world.

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