(MIS) Representing the Dalit Woman: Reification of Caste and Gender Stereotypes in the Hindi Didactic Literature of Colonial India

Abstract

This paper explores the complex social and literary narratives that functioned in the name of the Dalit woman in late colonial north India. It does so by scrutinizing a literary genre of the period, namely didactic literature and domestic manuals in Hindi, which principally addressed themselves to middle class, high caste Hindu women. However, this paper examines ways in which Dalit women got represented in this literature, as that became a potent ground for identity formation and social positioning for upper caste Hindus. The Dalit woman here was not just a footnote, but a constitutive footnote, perceived in a binary opposition to the upper caste woman. In different ways this literature and the material culture around it was involved with a gendered casteist discourse committed to constructing, and in fact institutionalizing, stable categories of pativratas (ideal wives) and kutnis (vamps). Through the lens of representation, this paper attempts to highlight the grave mismatch between rhetoric and reality. Further, an exploration of this genre reveals that the representation of women was sharply divided along caste and class lines, reinforcing not just a caste hierarchy but a female hierarchy among upper caste and Dalit women.