Articulations of injustice and the recognition--redistribution debate: locating caste, class and gender in paid domestic work in India.

• Author: Chigateri, Shraddha
• Position: Essay

Abstract

Based on primary research conducted with the Karnataka Domestic Workers Movement in Bangalore, India, this paper locates the injustice that a group of dalit women domestic workers identify as structuring their lives, and assesses the strategies that the group employs in resisting and dealing with such injustice. In analysing the injustice as well as the claims for justice, the paper draws on Nancy Fraser's framework of recognition and redistributive justice, viz., the use of culture and economics as analytical categories in locating primary harms, and an assessment of claims-making in terms of transformation and affirmation. At the heart of the paper is the disjunction [distinct from Fraser's argument on the displacement of redistributive claims making and the reification of recognition and identity politics] between recognition and redistributive politics as one between caste and class, and what this means for the articulation of a dalit feminist politics in Bangalore.

Keywords:

Paid domestic work in India; Dalit feminist politics, Recognition and redistributive frameworks of justice, Nancy Fraser, Perspectival dualism, Caste, class and gender in India

1. Introduction

   This paper engages with Nancy Fraser's framework of perspectival dualism (Fraser, N, 1997a) in analysing the difficulties and the tensions in the articulation of a gendered caste politics in Bangalore. (1) The larger context in which Fraser makes her claims about a perspectival dualism are what she terms the problems of displacement and reification which she argues have accompanied the shift in the grammar of political claims making, viz., that struggles for the 'recognition of difference' are increasingly displacing redistributive politics, and that they tend to reify group identities (Fraser, N, 2000, p 108). I use her framework for a perspectival dualism with the understanding that there is a disjunction between cultural and economic aspects of justice claims, in the context of caste and class struggles in India, which pose particular difficulties for the articulation of a dalit feminist politics (Chigateri, S, 2004). Whilst dalit politics in general and dalit feminist politics in particular conceptualise caste as a 'bivalent collectivity' to use Fraser's terms, I argue that there are several instances, and the context of paid domestic work is one, where there is a disjunction between the cultural and economic aspects of justice claims. In this paper, I use Nancy Fraser's framework of justice in order to uncover the difficulties that such a disjunction poses for the articulation of a dalit feminist politics. I do so through an analysis of the politics of the Karnataka Domestic Workers Movement (KDWM), a group engaged in organising groups of paid domestic workers in the city of Bangalore, India.

   Drawing on primary research conducted in Bangalore between May 2001 and March 2002 with 25 dalit domestic workers from the KDWM, the paper analyses both the conditions and the nature of paid domestic work in Bangalore, as well as the articulations of injustice and the discourses employed by the domestic workers movement to deal with such injustice. The KDWM (which has, since the research was conducted, been reincarnated as the Domestic Workers Union) was the Bangalore unit of the larger Domestic Workers Movement (DWM), which was formed in Mumbai in the mid 1980s. In Bangalore, this group was started by Sr. Celia whose agenda was to mobilise domestic workers in Bangalore, and distinct from the agenda of the DWM, to unionise them. At the time that the research was conducted, the strength of the KDWM in Bangalore was about a 100 members drawn mostly from two slums in the east of Bangalore. Whilst the group was not formed by the domestic workers themselves, the discourses of the domestic workers themselves as well as by the DWM and Sr. Celia, provide insights into the terrain of caste, class and gender politics in Bangalore, as well as the difficulties with the claims making of the group in terms of a transformative and affirmative politics of recognition and redistribution.

   In the first part of this paper, I engage with the debate between Sharmila Rege (Rege, S, 1998, 2000) and Chhaya Datar (Datar, C, 1999) on dalit feminism to locate the debate on recognition-redistribution as an issue of pertinence to dalit feminist politics. The heart of the debate is on whether or not dalit standpoint feminism can encompass both 'cultural' and 'material' aspects of injustice. This debate also provides the context for an engagement with Nancy Fraser's framework of justice. In the next part of the paper, I lay out Fraser's framework through her early work on her framework of recognition and redistributive justice (Fraser, N, 1997a). Her framework relies on the use of culture and economics as analytical categories in assessing the injustice that communities identify as structuring their lives. The use of culture and economics as analytical categories then allows for a conception of recognition and redistributive claims for justice as analytically distinct realms of justice claims, and for Fraser, the struggle is to hold onto the equal importance of both realms. Her analysis of affirmation and transformation, which flow out of the kinds of recognition and redistributive claims that progressive politics engage in, provides a means of assessing the strategies that groups employ in dealing with the injustice that they experience. Her framework of affirmative recognition, affirmative redistribution, transformative recognition and transformative redistribution then provide analytical tools for assessing what Fraser claims can sometimes result in the recognition-redistribution dilemma in the politics of groups that experience both cultural and economic injustice.

   In the third part of the paper, I lay out the context of paid domestic work in Bangalore by analysing both who performs such work, as well as the nature and conditions of work. In the fourth and fifth sections, I draw on Fraser's framework of justice to analyse the discourses of justice and injustice amongst dalit women domestic workers in Bangalore. I argue that a politics of affirmative recognition amongst domestic workers' groups, because of the ways in which it elides particular aspects cultural injustice, does not necessarily attend to the injustice of 'a division of labourers' that Ambedkar has famously categorised as the condition of dalit communities (Ambedkar, B, 1936).

2. Dalit Feminism and the Dichotomisation of 'Culture' and 'Economics'

   In her ground-breaking essay entitled, 'Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of "Difference" and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint' (Rege, S, 1998, pp 39-46), Sharmila Rege laid the ground for future engagements on caste and gender by arguing for a revisioning of feminist politics through a dalit feminist standpoint. Locating her standpoint feminism within a nuanced critique of 'difference' speak, which she argues, renders dalit women's voices as another 'different voice' amongst many, Rege calls for a shift of focus from 'difference' to the social relations which convert difference into oppression. Distinguishing between a narrow 'identitarian' politics based difference and a difference that is historicised, or rooted in the 'long [...] history of lived struggles', she argues that a dalit feminist standpoint emerges from the practices and struggles of dalit women, and that whilst non-dalit feminists cannot speak as or for dalit women, they can re-invent themselves as dalit feminists, thereby transforming themselves as 'individual feminists' into 'oppositional and collective subjects' (Rege, S, 1998, pp 41- 45). I have discussed elsewhere (Chigateri, S, 2004) the theoretical moves that Rege makes in her conceptualisation of dalit standpoint theory. In this paper, I want to specifically engage with her debate on dalit feminism with Chhaya Datar that ensued upon the publication of this article.

   In a response to Rege's proposition for a dalit feminist standpoint Chhaya Datar (Datar, C, 1999, pp 2964-2968) argued that a dalit feminist standpoint cannot be understood as a standpoint, as only 'those who regenerate both natural and societal resources can claim a standpoint' (Datar, C, 1999, p 2964). For Datar, it is the eco-feminist trend which centres reproduction in all its three dimensions, that can be called an alternative standpoint (Datar, C, 1999, pp 2964, 2968). According to her, the dalit women's movement, with its focus on a cultural revolt against brahminical symbols, cannot aspire to a revisioning of society without also talking of the 'materiality of the majority of dalit, marginalised women who lose their livelihoods because of environmental degradation' (Datar, C, 1999, p 2964). Datar, therefore, attempts to complicate the focus on culture, which she attributes to a dalit feminist standpoint, by implicating the materiality of the 'industrial, technological paradigm' (Datar, C, 1999, p 2964).

   In a counter to Datar, Rege (Rege, S, 2000, pp 492-495) clarifies some of her positions on dalit feminist standpoint. She suggests that there is no contradiction between the dalit feminist standpoint and a feminist environmentalist position which holds that 'the linkages between gender, caste and class, structure the organisation of production, reproduction and distribution--as also the effects of environment change on people' (Rege, S, 2000, p 492). In drawing out her argument, Rege criticises the dichotomy between the material and cultural which equates the material to environmental degradation and brahminism to the cultural:

   Brahmanical patriarchies and caste-specific patriarchies are material in their determination of the access to resources, the division of labour, the sexual division of labour and division of sexual labour [...] Further [...] endogamy also structures and maintains the redistribution of resources. Datar's contentions about...