DALIT WOMEN’S EDUCATION IN INDIA: Double Discrimination. By Shailaja Paik. Routledge Research on Gender in Asia Series, 7. London, New York: Routledge, 2014.
Reviewed by Surinder S. Jodhka in Pacific Affairs. Volume 89, No. 2, pp. 466–467.
Correspondence from Book Author
The senior scholar Surinder Jodhka has provided a wonderful review of my book, Dalit Women’s Education in India: Double Discrimination. This is certainly heartening. In his concluding sentence, however, Jodhka notes: “What seems to be almost missing in her book is a critical analysis of the new patriarchy within middle-class Dalit households in urban India.” Jodhka’s examination does not hold ground because my book documents ways the intersectionality of caste and gender oppressions actually doubly oppressed Dalit women. I demonstrate that Dalit men were both dominated and dominating within their communities and families. I pay close attention to what caste and double patriarchy—public and private—meant to women in both colonial and post-colonial periods. I unravel how women subtly and overtly challenge double patriarchy. Moreover, I also demonstrate the procedures men adopted to both oppress as well as support women’s initiatives. In chapters 3 and 4, I examine how Dalit women fought against double patriarchy—Brahmani (Brahmanical) and Dalit—a complex feature of everyday life that was reproduced in the realm of education in the early twentieth century. Chapter 5 documents Dalit women’s education, lives in the urban slum, gender discrimination, and women’s struggle against double patriarchy. Chapter 6 continues the story especially among middle-class Dalits. I examine how Dalit middle-class men (and women) sought to precipitate new patriarchy by embellishing elite gruhini (lady-like, genteel) feminine virtues, and emphasizing a “respectable” middle-class life-style. In chapter 7, I focus on Dalit women’s struggles in employment and changing attitudes towards education and employability. Some men openly supported women’s employment. At the same time, some men mentioned that they wanted the women of their families to progress and cooperated with them in achieving this. Yet, this cooperation rarely materialized in everyday practice. In chapter 8, “Education, marriage, children, and family life,” I analyze the ways “Dalits’ struggles with upper castes in the public sphere 536 were reproduced in their intimate familial relations” (295). I uncover how women and men renegotiated duties and obligations. I have devoted an entire chapter (295–326) to record both Dalit leader’s ideas about marriage and children, as well as the historical lived experiences of Dalit women who connected with, critiqued, and continually resisted private patriarchy. While Nani demonstrated her outward modesty and negotiated with double patriarchy (314), Swati openly challenged Dalit men’s attempts to restrict her public participation and emphasize a modest, mellow, and modern gruhini model (312), and Sheela showered her love on the chapha tree, her new companion (308). I thus provide textured details of women’s experiences, choices within constraints, purposeful negotiations and renegotiations, emotions, and desires as they lived under double patriarchy. Moreover, I paid close attention to the unique voices of women and different tensions that lower and middle-class women from the second-and-third-generation faced in their overt and covert struggles against patriarchal oppression inside their families, in terms of domestic violence, the vice of polygamy, underscoring of Brahmani norms, double-standards of men, misogynist objectification of Dalit women, and so on. Women’s struggles underscore their capacities for challenge and sacrifice.
Shailaja Paik
University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio