Paradoxes of victimhood : Dalit women’s bodies as polluted and suffering in colonial North India

Abstract

This chapter explores how and why Dalit women came to be overwhelmingly represented as 'victims' in a section of upper caste reformist writings in Hindi in early 20th-century colonial North India. It argues some seminal works of Peter Robb. The chapter emphases on iconographies of suffering, sentimentality and subservience. It provides the observation forward by arguing that the shift from the polluting to the victimised body of Dalit woman in late colonial North India. It focuses from Surpanakha to Shabari; in many ways was a historical need of the times, as reformers faced the challenge of transforming stigmatised bodies into suffering Hindus. The chapter presents that there were various limits to such sentimentality, as Dalit women usually appeared here as mute sufferers and romanticised submissive beings. It investigates how such idioms were often invoked to evade questions of structural inequalities.