At the margins of feminist politics? A comparative analysis of women in Dalit politics and Hindu Right organisations in northern India

Abstract

This article draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in northern India on historically marginalised women's political participation. In particular, it examines women party activists in Dalit politics and the possibilities for the existence of feminist politics in the spaces analysed dense with masculine powers, caste identity-driven politicians and women's obstacles in building a political career for themselves. It is argued that these women present a theoretical impasse: labelling their practices as non-feminist would negatively connote the subjectivity and agency of those women who are engaged in different political worlds, even when they replicate dominant structures or embody traditions not exclusively based on the gendered individual as an actor or beneficiary of politics. Drawing from a comparison between women in Dalit politics and Hindu Right organisations, women activists are analysed through the lenses of their self-realisation trajectories, theirs and their political movements' relationship (or the absence of such a relationship) with gender progressive agendas, and the individual and collective consequences of their mobilisation. In doing so, this article aims to offer a portrait of women's political agency unconstrained by categories that, by themselves, might only offer partial explanations for everyday political life in a slum, a village or a state capital.