These Bridges We Keep On Building: Dalit Feminism and The Combahee River Collective
Collage of Dalit feminists and members of the Combahee River Collective.
By Priyanka Kotamraju
In the latest installment of our Special Blog Issue, “50 Years of Combahee”, writer Priyanka Kotamraju analyzes how Dalit feminists conceptualized a programmatic statement of their beliefs and a concrete manifesto of their actions and used the Combahee River Collective’s Black feminist statement as a roadmap to articulate their politics.
On March 8, 2002, a group of Dalit (1) and non-Dalit women students called the Alisamma Collective published a manifesto that constituted a radical departure from mainstream feminist politics. The emergence of autonomous Dalit women’s organizations and collectives through the 90s forced the mainstream feminist movement to confront its caste-blindness and its failure to adequately address the specific concerns and experiences of Dalit women. Grounded deeply in Dalit feminist theory and practice, the manifesto centered the concepts of ‘difference’ and ‘experience’. Reproduced below is an extended extract of the Dalit feminist manifesto (Anveshi 2014a) that reads:
“We Dalit women want you (non-Dalit women) to acknowledge the political importance of ‘difference’, i.e. heterogeneity that exists among the Indian female community. That you are made, whereas we are mutilated. You are put on a pedestal, whereas we are thrown into fields to work day and night. You were made satis (2), we were made harlots. Recognition of difference is fundamental to any democratic politics. Our subordinate positions are constituted and represented differently according to our differential locations within casteist patriarchal relations of power. ”
“Within this structure, we do not exist simply as women, but as differentiated categories such as scavenger women, peasant women, ‘professional’ women. Each description reflects the particularity of [our] social condition. And real lives are forged out of a complex assertion of these dimensions. The objective of any stream of democratic feminism is to change the social relations embedded within all dominant power structures like gender, caste and class to name a few…Dalit feminism belongs to this stream of thought. We unhesitatingly claim that Dalit feminism has already started its voyage in this direction. We have named ourselves in memory of Alisamma, the witness of the Karamchedu Dalit massacre and her subsequent glorious struggle.”
Before this, Dalit feminists conceptualized a programmatic statement of their beliefs and a concrete manifesto of their actions and used the Combahee River Collective’s (CRC) Black feminist statement as a roadmap to articulate their politics. The CRC understood that the major systems of oppression that created the condition of their lives are interlocking in nature. They took upon themselves to develop an analysis and practice that reflected their understanding. Black feminism, according to the CRC, was the “logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face” (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, 1977). When we read the Dalit feminist manifesto of Alisamma Collective against this background, the links between the two margins become clearer. Alisamma Collective also called upon Dalit feminists to organize themselves outside the Indian feminist movement which is often dominated or modulated by the subjectivities of upper-caste Hindu women.
The feminist movement had already begun to fracture in the early nineties, with the emergence of autonomous Dalit women’s organisations such as the National Federation of Dalit Women (1995) and the visible participation of Dalit women in global women’s forums (3) to foreground caste as a crucial axis of ideational and institutional oppression. Over the last century, Black feminists and women in the Ambedkarite movement have been forging pathways for contemporary Dalit feminists to follow and develop further.
In this essay, I reflect on some of the paths that Telugu-speaking Dalit feminists, in particular, have taken. These paths were shaped by the transnational ripples of Black feminist thought, which partly led to the formation of Dalit women’s groups such as the Alisamma Collective. During this time, Dalit feminist consciousness took root and grew in different parts of India, and it was most visible in the efforts to reclaim and rewrite history and assert self-respect. In their organizational efforts aimed at generating solidarity, Dalit women carried with them Telugu translations of the Combahee statement to colleges, protests and political meetings. They met in reading groups, where Dalit women read bell hooks and Maya Angelou with as much fervor as they did the life stories of local marginalized women both in the forests of Bailadila (4) and in the Telangana armed struggle (5).
Both collectives – Combahee River and Alisamma – were named after pivotal historical events that were meaningful to the lives of Black and Dalit women. In 1863, Harriet Tub led a military campaign at the Combahee River to free more than 750 slaves, whereas Alisamma served as the key witness of the 1985 Karamchedu massacre, in which dominant caste mobs assaulted the Dalit Madiga (6) population of the village, killing six Dalit men and raping three Dalit women.
“In their organizational efforts aimed at generating solidarity, Dalit women carried with them Telugu translations of the Combahee statement to colleges, protests and political meetings. They met in reading groups, where Dalit women read bell hooks and Maya Angelou with as much fervor as they did the life stories of local marginalized women both in the forests of Bailadila and in the Telangana armed struggle.”
Black feminists of Combahee felt the necessity of forming separate black feminist groups after their disillusionment with the racism and the elitism both in white feminist and in black liberation movements (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, 1977). Similarly, these Dalit feminists experienced stigma and humiliation both in feminist spaces and in Dalit movements; their experiences necessitated the formation of separate collectives. Even in the generally progressive spaces of college and university campuses, feminists from the dominant castes viewed Dalit women as ‘inauspicious’, ‘smelly’, and ‘ugly’. Swathy Margaret writes that the Alisamma Collective was formed after feminist and progressive movements deliberately kept Dalit women out of student unions, campus politics, and intellectual discourse.
Dalit men did not view Dalit women as ‘smart’ enough to articulate their own progressive politics while feminists could not allow Dalit women to speak for all women. (Anveshi, 2014b) “Antaranitanam ante enti? What is untouchability?” writes Gogu Shyamala. “Is it the everyday practice of stigma, disgust and humiliation? Or is it also the institutionalised ways in which Dalits are kept at untouchable distances from education, opportunity and power?” (Gogu, 2024). Shailaja Paik calls these acts of generating epistemic and political solidarity as exercises of ‘building bridges’, which invoke a ‘margin-to-margin’ framework between Dalit and African American women. In this way, we can “conceive of liminality as a space of solidarity,” understand power and oppression among and across different margins, and engage in a new politics of difference (Paik, 2014).
Black Dawn Rising
On July 17, 1985, dominant caste (Kamma) (7) mobs assaulted 300 Madiga Dalit families in Karamchedu over a dispute concerning the Dalit community’s access to a public water tank. Six Dalit men were killed and three Dalit women were raped. Two years later, Alisamma, the key witness in this case, was murdered. On August 6, 1991, in Tsundur, dominant caste mobs (Reddy and Kapu) (8) massacred 17 Dalit men, whose bodies were recovered from irrigation canals and drains surrounding the village (Balagopal, 1985; Balagopal, 1991). These massacres of Dalits marked an important turning point for anti-caste mobilization, particularly for Dalit feminist mobilisation.
On the one hand, dominant caste Hindus brazenly carried out killings in the name of caste, warning Dalit populations of more such atrocities in the future. The social mobility experienced by Mala (9) and Madiga Dalits in Andhra Pradesh had posed an existential and societal threat to the dominant caste Hindus, and their retaliation to this mobility took bloody forms – massacres, rapes and aggressive mobilization. “They (dominant caste Hindus) could and did kill for caste,” writes Gogu Shyamala. “Our everyday interactions were informed by caste feelings, but that they could kill us with impunity, that awareness was new and frightening” (Gogu, 2024).
On the other hand, these events shook the progressive movements of the time. Telugu literature was the first to respond by taking a distinctly feminist turn, and then specifically, a Dalit feminist turn. In addition to reading translated works of anti-caste and anti-racist thinkers, progressive feminist groups published feminist histories such as Women Writing in India, We Were Making History (Life Stories of Women in the Telangana People’s Struggle and We Were Also Making History (Women in the Ambedkarite Movement (Lalita K et al., 1989; Moon and Pawar, 2004). In 1999, Gogu Shyamala, a Madiga Dalit writer, undertook a five-year-long feminist project to write Nallapoddu: Dalit Strila Sahityam, 1921-2002 (Black Dawn: Dalit Women’s Writings 1921-2002) (Gogu, 2003).
Nallapoddu created a storm in Telugu and anti-caste literature: its context of publication, language subject matter was fiercely political. Black Dawn traversed unprecedented sociohistorical territory, excavating, retrieving and restoring nearly forgotten and unacknowledged Dalit women’s writings. The book documents the lives of fifty-three Dalit women, whose literary contributions range from oral histories to haikus, and who have been active participants in social and political movements of all hues – the pre-independence freedom struggle, women’s movements, leftist movements, self-respect politics, rationalist movements, trade unions, student movements and anti-caste movements.
The Alisamma Collective’s Dalit feminist manifesto was also published in this volume. Women wrote about hunger, durable poverty, self-respect, friendship, hope and solidarity. The spectre of caste loomed large on the horizons of their everyday lives, but they were not just victims, rather they were critical agents and social subjects. Though separated by a few decades, the visions of the Combahee River Collective and Dalit feminists like Gogu Shyamala and the Alisamma Collective share striking similarities. Both works argued for a nuanced understanding of oppression that goes beyond single-axis frameworks. They prioritized the experiences of marginalized women as critical to understanding and addressing systemic inequality, by connecting ingrained gender and identity oppression to broader economic injustices. They also demanded that mainstream movements broaden their scope to include the lived realities and leadership of marginalized women.
“What would these margin-to-margin solidarities look like or encompass? Could they take the form of collaborative processes of knowledge production that can enrich global feminist discourse? These bridges could take the shape of transnational solidarity alliances that center intersectional, historically contingent approaches to understand hierarchical oppression and mobilize against it.”
We Fight The World
In Birudu, Swaroopa Rani, a Dalit poet, questions why Mahatma Gandhi has bestowed the title of harijan only on the untouchables. “Aren’t we all harijans, don’t we all belong to Vishnu or Shiva in the Hindu dharma,” she asks (Gogu, 2003). In a similarly militant vein, Dalit poet Jyoti is not afraid to question the poetry of the Telugu literary giant Gurajada Apparao, who famously wrote, “Desamante matti kaadoy, desamante manushulu (“Land does not a nation make, people make the nation”). Jyoti retorted, “We know the land does not make the nation, we know that people make the nation. But what about the differences among these people, the untouchables and the others? Can untouchable people make the nation?” Dalit women’s writing in Nallapoddu was so incendiary that its contribution was quarantined in the category of regional literature produced in a regional language; through this categorical replacement, Nallapoddu was institutionally stripped of its anti-caste militancy. Despite the encouragement of feminist and progressive allies, projects to translate Nallapoddu into English remain unfinished.
In the sustained search for sisterhood, Dalit feminists have argued that solidarities woven with the mainstream Indian feminist movements have been fragile, that dialogues and debates between their leaders, while useful, have often led to dead ends – as is indeed the case with the Alisamma Collective, whose members are now part of smaller ‘political care’ groups (Nadamala et al., 2024). Paik has argued that building margin-to-margin solidarities with Black feminists will perhaps lead to more robustly reciprocal, dialectical relationships for Dalit feminist mobilisation than those alliances that must travel from the margin to the centre, only to be subsumed by the centre’s norms (hooks, 1984; Paik, 2014). What would these margin-to-margin solidarities look like or encompass? Could they take the form of collaborative processes of knowledge production that can enrich global feminist discourse? These bridges could take the shape of transnational solidarity alliances that center intersectional, historically contingent approaches to understand hierarchical oppression and mobilize against it. In this sense, Dalit feminist mobilization appears to echo Michele Wallace’s pragmatic conclusion in ‘A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood’ (Hull et al., 2015):
“We exist as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle – because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world.”
About the author: Priyanka Kotamraju is an independent journalist from India, with nearly a decade of experience in the media industry focused on issues of social justice, gender, and inequality, and a PhD Candidate in Sociology and a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. She is also the author of ‘The Murderer, The Monarch and The Fakir: A New Investigation of Mahatma Gandhi's Assassination’, which was published by Harpercollins India in October 2020. Prior to taking up her Atlantic Fellowship in 2017, Priyanka shifted gears from working at highly respected, mainstream print media groups such as The Hindu and the Indian Express to managing a hyper-local, women-driven and cash-strapped newspaper in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh, India. She was also a co-editor of Local Diaries, a podcast that presents the stories of women in the Bundelkhand region in Uttar Pradesh and beyond.
Footnotes
Former untouchable castes, officially known as the Scheduled Castes.
Obsolete Hindu practice of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.
1995 World Conference on Women, Beijing, China, 2001 World Conference on Racism, Durban, South Africa.
Bailadila Aduvullo Chellalu, B D Sharma, translated by S Jaya.
We Were Making History (Life Stories of Women in the Telangana People’s Struggle), Stree Shakti Sanghtana.
Madiga is a Dalit sub-caste, predominantly found in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in southern India.
Dominant sub-caste.
Dominant sub-caste.
Dalit sub-caste, predominantly found in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in southern India.
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