CHAPTER 35

• Jurisdiction: United States

CHAPTER 35

From Me to We: Locating Dalit Women in #MeToo

Shreya Atrey¹

"As Dalit women, we write this statement at a difficult and a perplexing time. We have been wondering about the 'me' in #MeTooIndia and have not been able to locate ourselves in this current framework. Our points of assertion in dealing with violence of various forms have always been based on our collective consciousness. A caste-stratified society has denuded our personhood and often considered our lives as mere data or a story. We remain unnamed and our struggles unnoticed. Through this statement, we want to reiterate that we cannot even begin to imagine a gender just world in a society that is ridden by caste divisions."

—Anti-caste feminist statement on #MeTooIndia from #DALITWOMENFIGHT (October 10, 2018)

Where are Dalit women² in #MeTooIndia? In order to answer that we need to go back in time to the postcolonial history of the Dalit women's resistance.

This chapter takes a cue from Anupama Rao's exceptional ethnography and in particular, the Sirasgaon incident as a tell-all account of casteist patriarchy.³ This chapter makes four points about the nature of intersectional sexual harassment Dalit women suffer: the role of caste in the experience of sexual harassment, the extremity of violence involved in it, the duality of it being both public yet invisible, and the timelessness of it. With this historical account, one starts to exhume the reasons for longstanding invisibility of Dalit women's sexual harassment and understand why Dalit women remain marginalized in the current framework despite the solidarities engendered by #MeToo.

Sirasgaon

As Rao describes, the incident occurred at the end of 1963, sixteen years after India's independence from colonial rule and thirteen years into constitutional order, in the village of Sirasgaon, Aurangabad district of the State of Maharashtra. Sonabai, a Dalit woman, had carried lunch to her brother Kishan, who worked in the fields of a wealthy upper-caste landlord, Yedu Kale. Seeing her alone, Yedu had propositioned Sonabai, showing her money and touching her sari. Sonabai and her mother-in-law complained to Yedu's wife, Shevantibai, who had asked them to be discreet about it. But when Kishan left Yedu's service six months later, he visited Shevantibai to ask how she would have felt had he been immodest with her and touched her sari. The interaction was relayed to Yedu Kale.

On December 22, 1963, Yedu Kale and a group of men approached Kishan's hut armed with sticks. Not finding Kishan, the men started beating his father, Vithal Amrit. They then found Kishan's mother, Laxmibai, and later Sonabai, who were both beaten, stripped naked, dragged, paraded around the streets, and taken to the village entrance, ves, to be exhibited. Another group of men found Kishan's sisters-in-law, Kadubai and Sakrabai, who too were beaten, disrobed, and paraded to the ves while passing Yedu's house so Shevantibai could see them being punished for her ignominy. The four women returned home that evening wrapped in a single sari someone had thrown at them.

While asked to settle the matter within the village, Kishan's family preferred legal recourse and against all odds, managed to lodge a complaint for crimes including rioting, intent to hurt, house trespass, and "outraging the modesty of a woman."⁴ The act of stripping and parading naked was recorded only later, initially ignored by the police and downplayed by the Dalit women themselves due to humiliation. Despite a botched investigation, such was the evidence that the Magistrate found the men guilty and the District Judge upheld the conviction. The accused were sentenced to forty-three months' imprisonment and a fine of 300 rupees. Vithal Amrita received 1,000 rupees in damages.⁵

Casteist Patriarchy

The full story of Sirasgaon—the historical relations between Dalits and caste Hindus in Maharashtra, the way in which the incident unraveled legally and was covered by the media, and how it changed the lives of those involved and the entire village in fact—is a story of how class, caste, and patriarchy prevail in rural India. It is the story of casteist patriarchy that plays out in the theatre of everyday lives of Dalit women, whose rights and opportunities are dictated by the intersection of poverty, patriarchy, and the caste system, all of them at the same time. These factors' full intersectional force can be reckoned in four ways in which casteist patriarchy transpires.

First, Sirasgaon's story shows that sexual harassment of Dalit women is inseparable from casteism. Dalit women are targeted not only because of their sex or gender but because they are Dalit. Thus, the form of sexual...