Author – Anannya G Madonna

Some scholars in the Dalit circles have been on a crusade to discount, dismiss and disprove the presence of patriarchy among the Dalits taking a jibe at the Dalit womxn who are fighting patriarchy amongst the Dalits. As part of these efforts, we have seen articles with astounding statements like ‘Feminism is Brahmanism’ and so on. The author of this article goes to great lengths to prove her point and goes in circles over and over again arriving nowhere and proving nothing but her ignorance and lack of understanding on the subject she supposedly seems to have ‘mastered’.

Since my knowledge or criticisms about feminism doesn’t just come from a mere google search and actually stem from education in social sciences and humanities, I would like to throw some light on the subject for the benefit of those who have been so easily swayed away by ‘evidence’ pointed by a location-based google search and information from Wikipedia (which every academician would know is not a completely reliable source of information).

To begin with, let us start with a simple definition of what feminism is since everyone is so convinced with a google search I’m just going to paste a definition of the ‘feminism’ from google.

The Wikipedia definition itself reads “feminism is a range of social movements, political movements and ideologies that aim to define, establish, and achieve the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes”. So feminism is defined as something that aims to define, achieve and establish ‘equality of the sexes’.

If we turn our attention to the beginnings of feminism it dates back to the 18^th century when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her famous text ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ published in the year 1791 which is regarded as a classic of enlightenment philosophy and it is seen as the earliest sustained argument for gender equality in the English language. She is generally seen as the ‘Mother of the feminist’ movement by many. Now, why is her text so important? Many of you may wonder even, how a text written by a white woman back in the 18^th century have any relevance in my life? Well, to begin with, this was the first time, equality of sexes was demanded by a woman, not on the basis of morality or ethics, but on the basis of reason. To quote her “In what does a man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole; in Reason”. That we human beings distinguish ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom based on our reasoning abilities, something that is not as well developed in other animals is a known fact now. And it is based on this simple yet powerful tool that we possess that Mary has demanded for the equality of sexes, she demanded that women not be seen as someone merely known for their beauty but their ability to reason and disputes the idea that women are the weaker sex or that they are to be infantilized. She says “My own sex, I hope will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone,” Wollstonecraft argued for the education of women, which until then was primarily domestic and her argument for reform in education is that women are equally rational as men. Her view was that ‘educated women equal better society’ and that allowing women to better themselves will naturally better the men as well. Does this not resonate with the work and ideas of Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai who dedicated their life for the education of women? Does it not resonate with the ideas of Ambedkar who said “be sure that we shall soon see better days and our progress will be greatly accelerated if male education is pursued side by side with female education” or when he says, “I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved”?

The Brahmanical hegemony in India never advocated the education of the downtrodden let alone women. Education became accessible to women in India because of the white British Colonizers, through the ‘Woods Despatch’ which clearly mentions the need for education of women. Woods Despatch was known by the name of the President of the Board of Control, Charles Wood, but it is known that was written by John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill, the first member of parliament to call for women’s suffrage and he was highly influenced by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. And most people who read Ambedkar know that J.S. Mill had a profound influence on Ambedkar’s thinking.

The author talks about how her paternal grand aunt played a pivotal role in her education, while there is no denying her role, the point remains that had a ruling not been passed for the education of women, then many of us women like the author of this article herself would not have been able to even think of having an education in a country like India which is ruled by Brahmanism which works on the principle of oppression and denying of human rights. So, yes Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing has had an impact on all our lives.

While the feminist movement gained momentum by a group of white women with a narrow outreach, that too was an important step towards equality, we have to see that feminism of today is very different from what it was when it started out.

The first wave of feminism was to do with suffrage, the author strikes off feminism as something to do mainly with voting rights and how our forefathers already bestowed these rights to us in our constitution itself we never had to go out to protest for these things. The fact that we didn’t have to protest is proof that the efforts of those women who took to streets for suffrage in the west had an impact on us living in India, a country where discrimination was the established rule. Because somebody somewhere fought for this we didn’t have to fight for those things, and we could take the next step.

When the black women felt that their rights were not represented in the feminist movement they created their own space to fight both race and patriarchy, women like Alice Walker created the womanist movement and called themselves womanists/black feminists. Their idea was not to go against feminism but create a more diverse space for themselves within the feminist movement.

The author completely negates the presence and efforts of Black feminists or their contributions to the feminist movement and reduces them to mere agents of white feminists. In a similar fashion she negates the intellect, efforts and contributions of Dalit feminists in the Indian context. In short, the author denies the existence of Dalit feminism, invalidates their experiences and strips the Dalit feminists of their agency to fight back caste and gender oppression. She even reduces them to be mere pawns of the Savarna feminist. Contributions of black feminist writers like Sojourner Truth, Alice Walker, Bell Hooks, Chimamanda Adichie or Dalit Feminist like Baby Kamble, Urmila Pawar, Bama or the more recent Sujatha Gidla, Yashica Dutt cannot be ignored.

The author goes on to say that the comparison of Feminism and Brahmanism seems like that of apples and oranges, I would like to differ even on this point. At least apples and oranges are fruits, they have something in common. What do Feminism and Brahmanism have in common? They are two opposing constructs, Feminism is essentially emancipatory in nature whilst Brahmanism is the rigid, oppressive and discriminatory structure created for the purpose of treating some people as subhuman. How can one say that they both can even be put on the same plane for comparison? Her justification for comparing the two is that ‘Are they about humans?’ If one was to go by her logic then we can compare any two constructs and equate them, like ‘Anti-Casteist is Brahmanism’, ‘Buddhism is Brahmanism’ ‘Egalitarianism is Brahmanism’ because apparently the only question we are supposed to ask is ‘are they about humans? I can go on with more examples but you get the drift.

The author then talks about, most university-educated women ‘becoming feminists’. This notion that one becomes a feminist during college or university is something that is disputable. According to studies, the ability to protest something unfair is something that is developed at a very early stage in life. Being a student of Psychology myself I would like to turn your attention to something called the fairness study conducted by Alessandra Geraci and Luca Surian. In their experiment with Capuchin monkeys they gave the monkeys tokens which the monkeys could exchange for food when both the monkeys were given cucumber, neither of them showed any reactions, but when one was given a grape and one was given a cucumber, the monkey that received a cucumber threw out the cucumber in protest that it wasn’t given the same resource as the other, it was not okay with the inequity. This is what psychologists refer to as ‘disadvantageous inequity aversion’, it basically is an instinctual aversion to getting less than the others, and it is said to be found among dogs, chimpanzees and humans where it develops from a young age. So as human beings when we are given something less or treated in an unequal manner we do not like it, that we protest the inequality. Most women are treated unequally with respect to their male counterparts so we all inherently have sense fairness wherein we feel that we must be treated equally to the males, so psychology shows us that to become a feminist we need not necessarily wait until college or university, it is instinctual, we may start calling ourselves feminists when we enter college or university but protesting gender inequality and fighting for emancipation makes you a feminist whether or not you call yourself one. Feminism is the term they become familiar with after they enter universities while the thoughts of revolt exist all through their lives. It is equally important to keep in mind that most women who call themselves feminists in the university spaces are not received very well by their peers both male and female. ‘Feminist’ is a title that is conferred not in awe but contempt because the idea that womxn are equal to men is too radical for most people. If she calls university-educated women only as feminists, what about the struggles of Alisamma in Karamchedu who fought against the caste Hindu male dominance? Can’t she be called a Dalit feminist?

This reminds me of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s text ‘We should all be feminists’.

She talks about how in her young age, her friend accused her of being a feminist. She goes on to beautifully define why she sees herself as a feminist and talks about the need for equality. She says that in the earlier times, humankind survived on the basis of physical strength wherein we had to defend ourselves from all kinds of perils. Now we know that the hormone testosterone gives physical strength and because men have more testosterone they had more physical strength so they were considered to be superior. If men are stronger, why women do the most difficult task such as carrying bricks in construction sites and sowing the seeds through the sunny day in the agricultural fields? This is nothing but her mere essentialist cliché and proves that she did not even read Frederick Engels or Butler or Bell Hooks. In a democratic society, we no longer rely only on physical strength as the goal of democracy is to equality. We, in fact, rely more on our mental faculties, on our intelligence, on our ability to think, innovate, strategize and reason. It is these traits that help us navigate through the perils in life, and there are no specific hormones for these abilities so anyone man or woman can be intelligent and creative and so on. She says that basically our ability to think and reason is what makes us equal. Now, where have we read this? If you go back to the beginning of this article you will see that Mary Wollstonecraft also said the same thing. Adichie is a black woman from Nigeria who made this speech about seven years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft is a white woman from Britain who wrote her book in the 18^th century, these two women irrespective of the differences in culture, race and time period essentially said the same thing showing that the idea of feminism has a certain universality to it because patriarchy operates in different manifestations in most of the society across the globe. The movement may not be inclusive, but that is the error of the people who lead the movement, it is to be attributed to their blindness of race, class or caste not the idea or philosophy of feminism in itself. Brahmin women’s feminism has excluded the issue of Dalit women till 1990s. However, with Dalit feminist activists and writers have not only vehemently questioned their exclusion in feminist circles, also have formed the basis for the Dalit feminist episteme through voicing out their experiences of caste and patriarchy. When the author said feminism is Brahminism, her knowledge is obsolete and not aware of the fact that the Indian academia teaches the thoughts of Ambedkar and Phule on intersections of caste and gender and Uma Chakravarti’s theorization of Brahminical patriarchy and unpublished parts of Riddle of Rama and Krishna by Ambedkar form a major part of women’s studies in Indian universities. I would like to give a benefit of doubt to the author as she left India decades ago and might not have been in touch with any Indian academics. Moreover, the author seems to have no formal training in the social sciences and humanities.

The next point that the author tries to make is, Feminist movement and feminist literature is something that is basically a concept of the west and it doesn’t do much for someone in India and says feminism never made much sense and felt that it was irrelevant. We are shown some images of google results of feminist authors. Well, I would like to show my search results as well.

This is the result for feminist authors. My google search shows me images of women of a different colour, not just white.

The next is a google search of books on feminism.

(To make a note here, Google search results vary based on various factors such as your previous search history, geographic location, the device and type of browser you are using, changes in Google algorithm etc. among others. – editor)

As you can see the results again are varied and not representative of white women only. In this google search itself, you will see a lot of black feminists along with the white feminists who have made a lot of contributions towards the rights of women. The author in her article says that they don’t represent her issues and are not talking about what they ‘should’ be talking about.

The point I would like to make here is, despite the cultural differences we find solidarity in things that happen so far away from us. It is the reason why the Black Panthers movement inspired a group of Dalit men in India to start the Dalit Panthers movement. If a Dalit man can take inspiration from an African American man then why not a Dalit woman from any other woman in the world? The Black Panthers movement may not mean much to most Savarnas in India but it speaks to the hearts of Dalits, similarly why is it so unimaginable to think that a form of resistance from the West could resonate with a woman here? Just like how my heart resonates with Sojourner Truth’s cry of ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ so does my heart resonate with Bama’s ‘Karukku’. And when that’s the case how can feminism be irrelevant? If you are still going to tell me that feminism is a Eurocentric idea and is not relevant to the anti-caste struggle in India then you sound no different than our right-wing Home Minister Amit Shah who said ‘the western concept of Human rights doesn’t apply to India’. In the Constituent Assembly, certain leaders (Gandhians) criticized Ambedkar saying that the Constitution was not ‘Indian enough’ and that most are borrowed from the west, but these ideals were enshrined regardless of these criticisms because some have a universal application.

The author says that most feminists and authors of feminist theory are of the ruling class and before she begins she herself points out how she has lived in an urban setting and studied in institutions in the city and so on. There’s no doubt that the ruling class woman doesn’t completely represent the issues of the working-class woman. She makes that point very clear and she says it doesn’t hold much for a poor woman in India. Going by her logic, how far does she being the Indian American and living in the first world capitalist country represent the poor Dalit woman living in rural India? Has her ideologies or set of ideas any relevance to the poor Dalit woman or a Dalit woman student in Indian university?

When one takes a closer look at this whole thing trying to be passed off as a great academic piece, one can observe that it is filled with a hidden agenda, to discredit the Dalit womxn who are actively questioning the patriarchal systems in place especially amongst the Dalit and Bahujan intellectuals and activist circles. How so irresponsible of her to accommodate a Dalit man who publicly called Dalit feminist as sexually immoral? While a Savarna woman is the epitome of sexual purity, a Dalit woman is vulnerable to sexual violence and hence is also stigmatized as sexually impure according to the Brahminism. When a Dalit man publicly humiliates Dalit women by calling them loose women, she has not taken out her precious time call out the inherent Brahminism of that so-called Dalit activist which proves that she doesn’t identify herself as a Dalit woman.

When an oppressive regime is faced with resistance from a certain group, the regime pits the resistors against one of their own kind to dismiss and weaken the resistance. It is not uncommon to see this phenomenon of this author who only associates herself with heterosexual Dalit men and Savarna men and not a single Dalit woman. Oftentimes, we see how the dominant/upper castes employ Dalits to weaken the resistance of Dalits, thereby weakening the movement. And this online Dalit space founded by the author and her heterosexual Savarna male friends ironically has adopted this strategy and very successfully by pitting one privileged Indian American woman against the other Dalit womxn. In passing off Feminism as an agenda of the oppressor, the author did a great disservice to not just the Dalit womxn who are resisting patriarchy currently but also to so many who have fought in the past for the rights we today take for granted. In 1972, an Adivasi woman Mathura’s rape case lead to changes in rape laws in India. A lower-caste woman Bhanwari Devi’s struggle for legal justice against gang rape engendered laws against sexual harassment in the workplace. Another Dalit woman Raya Sarkar put out the list of sexual predators in Indian academia who are mostly Brahmin and Savarna male faculty. This initiated #MeToo movement in India and many students could call out sexual predators and attain justice. Such struggle was merely named as Brahmin conspiracies against Dalits by the authors. It not only proves her reluctance to validate the struggle of Dalit women but also shows her ignorance about the caste and gender intersectional oppression that Dalit women face.

If Feminism is Brahmanism why did Ambedkar resign in opposition to the not passing of Hindu code bill in the Parliament? Ambedkar even says how a lower caste woman faces double the oppression than that of the lower caste man, she faces oppression owing to both caste and gender. Now, will the writers of “Online Dalit space” come up with a new statement that ‘Ambedkarism is Brahmanism’ because Ambedkar fought for the rights of women or spoke of the oppression they face? Let us not forget the words of Periyar who said that “The way a man treats a woman is much worse than the way landlords treat servants and the high-caste treat low-caste”. Now, are you going to say that ‘Periyarism is Brahmanism’ for making this statement? Most of the leaders we look up to whether it is Phule, Ambedkar or Periyar have all insisted on the equality of women, their education and their rights, spoke against the injustice meted out to them on the basis of gender bringing in the importance of the intersection of caste and gender.

The author of that article and those that are promoting this on various social media platforms are doing a grave injustice to the many Dalit womxn who are fighting patriarchy and caste simultaneously. They are stifling the voices of those women who have been and continue to be oppressed by this regressive structure of patriarchy. So many women, Indian women, Indian Dalit women have talked and written about the oppression and violence they have faced owing to their gender irrespective of their caste or class. Many womxn would agree with me on this point that speaking up about these things and fighting them has not been an easy path to take, most people are just looking for that one blade of grass to hide under to say that these womxn are wrong and prove their innocence, and the author has provided them with a meadow to hide under and ridicule the efforts of womxn who are fighting oppression and patriarchy.

This preposterous writing will now silence the voice of every womxn who will try to speak up against any kind of gender bias or harassment, or sexual attacks or misogyny or sexism they are subjected to. Every time a womxn tried to raise their voice, they are going to be slapped with ‘Feminism is Brahmanism’ and cast aside. I would like to congratulate the author on achieving such a great feat of putting an obstacle in the path of emancipation, bravo! I must applaud her on her efforts to condone the very philosophy which has enabled her to have access to a decent education in a cosmopolitan city, a university degree and be able to land up in a first world capitalist county.

Bell Hooks said ‘Patriarchy has no gender’. The author has proven this point by her misogynistic views on feminism, I would like to add to Bell Hooks’ quote, ‘Patriarchy has no gender, no class or caste’ and it is high time that we acknowledge it on the way forward. The first step to solving any problem is to recognize the problem in the first place and until we do that, we will not be able to go forward but would be caught in vicious circles.

After all the ‘research’ the author has supposedly done on feminism clearly, she hasn’t understood what feminism is and the Intersections within the feminist movement in the present day. Another point worth mentioning is that the fourth wave feminism is predominantly run by womxn of colour and various ethnicities and sexualities where they are taking the reins into their hands. So, going by her logic, does it mean that they are also serving some agenda of the white woman and not fighting for themselves? The author’s inability to validate or learn from any other feminists other than Brahmin feminists substantiates her own inherent Brahminism.

‘Logic is not reason and analogy is not an argument’ and the article/talk ‘Feminism is Brahmanism’ is a fine example of this!

Anannya G Madonna is Research scholar in Psychology at Pondicherry University, Ex-president of Ambedkar Students Association. The views expressed are the author’s own!