Dalit women
Ujithra Ponniah
DALIT WOMEN: HONOUR AND PATRIARCHY IN SOUTH INDIA by Clarinda Still Orient BlackSwan, Noida, 2015, 258 pp., 650
September 2015, volume 39, No 9

In the last two decades a number of autobiographies have been published both in English and regional languages documenting the experience of dalit-ness and the constitution of the dalit self. Some of these autobiographies are by dalit women and it forefronts the gendered experience of caste, critiquing dalit men, the dalit movement and the mainstream feminist movement..
Ethnographic accounts of dalit women, capturing contemporary processes of change however have been missing, and Still’s scholarship situated in Madiga palli in Nampalli district of Andhra Pradesh addresses this vacuum. She uses the heuristic device of paruvu-pratishta-gowravam (prestige-honourrespect) to understand the changes in aspirations and effects of mobility on dalit women.

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