Shivani Waldekar

165 years ago, one young Dalit girl strongly criticised brahminical hegemony and the hierarchal oppressive social structure. She questioned and critically examined caste, class, gender and religion and that empirical data continues to remain very relevant today, as they were in 1855. She strongly believed that education is the only path which liberates the people who are enslaved by the structure. It is an important tool which gives confidence to ask the questions against injustice and exploitation in our society and gives a voice to the unheard and unobserved since two thousand years. They constitute a part of society but never came out and spoke. Education is the only asset through which they will change their status and break systematic oppression and social stratification. Education is the tool through which they gather knowledge and cultivate their minds and enlighten their souls and go towards an egalitarian path and liberate themselves.

On 1 March 1855, the periodical named "Dnyanodaya" published one essay named "About the Grief of Mahars and Mangs"(Mang Maharanchya Dukhavisayi) written by the very first Dalit writer Mukta Salve. It is the first evidence in history which pointed out the historical exploitation and the problem of Indian caste and patriarchy where Dalits had always faced intolerance because of the oppressive Brahmin structure. Dalit history was always invisibilized by upper caste and class to portray that Dalit have no history of their own and especially when it comes to Dalit women then it's always in the dark and unpublished because women's liberation is closely linked with castes. That's why Muktabai's essay is to be treated as the first voice of Dalit feminism and history of modern Indian Dalit feminist literature which initiated Dalit women's liberation.

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Noel Mariam George

The recent crowning of a biracial black woman as Miss World made news as it made full circle with four other wins by biracial black and black women in the biggest beauty pageant. Not many understand beauty pageants as political; however what can be more political than a contest in which nations compete with each other by localising their nationhood onto the bodies of their women to claim the title of ‘most beautiful/desirable’[1]? Beauty pageants have become a new site of the ‘political’ understood in terms of aesthetics and black women are now claiming their space in these contests as sites of representation and even empowerment. Arguments made in favour of these pageant wins, claim that feminine representation of black women as desirable are subversive and hence political, as black women have historically been denied the freedom to express their femininity and have been deemed ‘undesirable’ in contrast to white women[2] (this is not to shy away from the monopoly of control, both monetarily and items of discourse of the beauty, pop and other culture industries).

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Hemangi Kadlak

(Transcript of her speech at the National Convention on the Rights of Dalit Women Human Rights Defenders: 'Dalit Women Speak' on 17-18 January 2020, at HDRC, St. Xavier's Campus, Ahmedabad)

First of all, I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to this conference on 'Dalit Women Speak.' Before coming to the topic which is given to me for today's talk, I want to give focus on the main conference heading that is 'Dalit Women Speak'. After reading this line, it immediately came to my mind, do we really see that Dalit women don't speak?

The reality is that they speak a lot, and they have been speaking for generations in their houses, even outside within their community and in general society. But the fact is that people have unheard them, neglected their voices by thinking these women are illiterate, lower caste, uncivilized, poor, don't have any culture. These comments from dominant castes reflect their mentality on caste and gender.

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Nabanita Roy

After an easy search, I entered the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) website, the Indian government agency responsible for collecting and analyzing crime data, and landed up finding a downloadable pdf, reading 'Crime in India-2017 Statistics'. And the date at once seemed very contemporary and relevant for understanding the pattern of crime, particularly against women.

To the backdrop of my search was the need to find some statistical record of crimes against women in India. With Priyanka Reddy's rape and murder in Hyderabad and the nationwide protests against the heinous crime, I had to understand why some 'rape victims' only spur discourses on Indian rape culture or the toxic masculinity of Indian men, whereas the rape and murder of 19-year-old Jaba Roy from Dinajpur on September this year, head dismembered, discarded in public space or the rape and murder of 10-year Khushboo Parveen from Falakata in the following month, were never accommodated as subjects of the mainstream discourses to define the rape culture.

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Raja Dhale

(In an interview first published in the Marathi journal Khel, Raja Dhale (1940-2019) recounted the history behind his surname ‘Dhale’: soldiers that were historically the standard bearers and advance guards at forts. True to this personal history, Raja Dhale stood at the vanguard of the Dalit consciousness and articulation in Maharashtra in its post-independence evolution. On August 15, 1972, the Marathi magazine Sadhana carried Dhale’s explosive essay ‘Kala Svatantryadin’, which entrenched him, and the Dalit Panthers, in Maharashtra’s imagination. Challenging the hypocrisy of Indian society for not ending violence against Dalits, Dhale wrote, ‘They aren’t our brothers. They aren’t our compatriots. Are we outsiders?’. Under the current political climate where the Indian state is snatching away the meagre rights remaining with the oppressed sections like we saw with Kashmir and the revocation of article 370, it would perhaps be poignant to revisit Raja Dhale’s voice from forty seven years ago.)

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The punctual but peaceful and relaxed city of Mumbai has been witnessing certain events and goings on. Truth be told, the times are changing, in Mumbai. For instance, student movements are descending upon the streets and taking the form of protests, marches and blockades. The anger of the students is taking real shape. A decision has been made to observe the silver jubilee of the independence day as a black day.

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Dnyanda Lad and Ajay Rahulwad

Introduction

Discrimination and exclusion on the basis of caste and gender have a natural effect on mental health of students. Many suicides have been committed in colleges in the last few years. Payal Tadvi, Rohith Vemula and many more individual Dalit students have been victims of these exclusionary institutional set-ups. This paper tries to stress upon the issue of exclusion to build a discourse that can be recognised and issues can be solved. The article is based on a research project that is submitted to the Department of Sociology, Fergusson College, Pune. The research is titled as "Social Exclusion of Dalit Girl Students Migrated from Rural Areas to Higher Education Institutions."

Research, Approach and Methodology

The study takes a theoretical approach of Dalit Feminism as a political theory which formulates the problems of Dalit women as being different from those of any other woman. A Dalit woman goes through multiple layers of oppression, especially when she comes out in public spaces like higher education institutions in the urban areas.

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