Book Forum: Hugo Gorringe on Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation
I am honoured to have been asked to say a few words about this wonderful book and I must begin by congratulating Radhika on a fantastic achievement. She is characteristically modest and humble throughout the monograph, but she has nothing to be humble about: this is not just a fine piece of scholarship that offers original insights, but also a vital pedagogical tool. Radhika places knowledge cultivation – rather than production – at the heart of this volume, and that is not just an empty statement. From the introduction till the hope-filled poems at the end, there is a commitment to thinking with other scholars to unpack, discuss and illustrate key concepts and debates in ways that enhance understanding and engagement. Time and again I found myself wondering how I would apply insights from the text to my own research and appreciating the care and effort taken to elucidate key points and practices. Intersectionality has become a buzzword and is applied in caricature or without discussion. This book outlines the concept and key debates occurring with and around it with an enviable clarity which should make this a go-to text for budding researchers.
Focussing in on those aspects of the book that speak most directly to my own research, Chapter 4 concerns Dalit women’s agency and activism in rural north India. The starting point for the chapter is the critique of white, Western hegemony in knowledge production. It notes how many of the early attempts to recover women’s agency and experiences from the trope of the ‘Third World Woman’ operated with blind-spots and elisions of their own. Central to this chapter is the way in which Dalit women have been marginal for too much of this analysis and are, as activist-academic Ruth Manorama put it, ‘rarely to be found as subjects of study, speaking in their own voices, coping with their own lives and difficulties’ (cited in Govinda 2024: 127). As research on Dalit women emerged, it often cast them as thrice oppressed – subject to caste, class and patriarchal structures and lumped them together as poor and marginalised women. Such accounts were not confined to academia and may – as both Radhika’s research and mine (Gorringe 2005) shows – be held within movements as well. This chapter seeks to problematise and unsettles such sweeping accounts, and Radhika (2024: 24) follows Puar in foregrounding the question of ‘difference within’ categories as well as between them. But should she be doing such work? One strand of opinion, as Guru puts it, holds that: ‘Social location which determines the perception of reality is a major factor that makes the representation of Dalit women’s issues by non-Dalit women less valid and less authentic’ (cited in Govinda 2024: 128). Drawing on Rege’s (2000) work, Radhika points towards alternate approaches which allow for the possibility that non-Dalit feminists can ‘reinvent themselves as Dalit feminists’.
Working from this vantage point, Radhika brings attention to the voices, experiences and viewpoints of diverse Dalit and Muslim activists in ways that challenge homogenising narratives and illuminate the diversity of Dalit women’s experiences. Educated, English speaking and professional Dalit activists relate very differently to class, caste and patriarchy to impoverished and illiterate Dalit women. At the same time, their shared occupation does not necessarily allow for commonality with upper-caste Hindu co-workers – who continue to exhibit casteist attitudes. Likewise, though both Dalits and Muslims are politically marginalised in this context, communal attitudes and stereotypes may afford Dalits more opportunities. Throughout, the research seeks not just to acknowledge difference, but to highlight how these differences are constructed, embraced, contested and negotiated. What emerges is a nuanced picture of Dalit agency that is sensitive to the local context.
Does this serve to underplay what Shah et al. (2018) called ‘class casteism’? Critics of both identity politics and of intersectionality view it as susceptible to appropriation by neo-liberal agendas. There is a persistent sense that such analysis undermines the unity of the oppressed and diverts attention from the underlying structures. To take one example, Das (2023: 25) argues that: ‘The political power of the masses (workers and small-scale producers) to fight for justice lies in their class-based unity, but the objective effect of Identity Politics is disunity’. Rather than necessarily and automatically privileging class analysis (as the Communist parties in India have long done), Radhika rightly draws on scholars who emphasise the importance of grounding intersectionality within specific contexts and ‘letting those contexts determine which axes of difference are the most salient for intersectionally analysing oppression and/or privilege in that context.’
This point is made all the more pertinent in Chapter 5, when Radhika introduces the lens of coloniality into the mix as she seeks to unpick the category of the ‘Southern women’s NGO’. In the 1990s, funded by institutions in the global north and charged with ‘empowering’ poor and marginalised women, a proliferation of NGOs emerged – however, they in turn often reinforced or replicated the marginalisation of Dalit and Muslim women. Borrowing from rashné limki, Radhika (2024: 162) notes how ‘coloniality naturalises the activity of racial, gender and sexual Others as that which does not merit recompense’. Thus, we see how educated upper-caste women dominate in positions of leadership and Dalit women remain as case-workers even in enlightened institutions that are seeking to tackle caste discrimination. Dalit women were seen as impoverished – neglecting caste discrimination – whereas Muslim women were over-determined by their religion to the neglect of material issues. The requirements of funding and norms of international engagement meant that those without cultural capital struggled to rise up the ranks. The book, however, does not simply echo the well-rehearsed critiques of NGO-led development as depoliticising development. Instead, Radhika points to the emergence of Dalit and Muslim led organisations as potentially revitalising the women’s movement in India by calling for renewed feminist solidarity based on ‘a practice of radical vulnerability and reflexivity about power and privilege’.
Throughout the book, to paraphrase Bhambra, Radhika ‘makes explicit the issue of listening and learning from others in any development away from current dominant structures of knowledge production’ (cited in Govinda 2024: 34). There is much to listen to and learn from in this volume which is a timely contribution to feminist analysis and debate.
References:
Das, R.J., 2023. Why is identity politics not conducive to achieving sustained social justice?. Dialectical Anthropology, 47(1), pp.19-31.
Gorringe, H. 2005. Untouchable Citizens. New Delhi: Sage. Shah, A.,
J. Lerche, R. Axelby, D. Benbabaali, B. Donegan, J. Raj, V. Thakur. 2018. Ground down by growth: Tribe, caste, class and inequality in twenty-first-century India. Pluto Press, London.
Prof. Hugo Gorringe is Head of Sociology at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His research has focused on social and political movements in both South India and Scotland.
