The Impact of Anti-Caste Movements on Women’s Liberation in Colonial India

In colonial India, two of the most transformative forces for social change were not nationalism alone – they were the anti-caste movements that challenged the very foundations of a society built on hierarchy, purity, and exclusion. Among these, the Self-Respect Movement led by Periyar E.V. Ramasamy and the Ambedkarite Movement led by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar stand out as particularly significant for what they did for women. These movements didn’t treat women’s rights as a side concern. They understood that caste oppression and gender oppression were deeply intertwined – and that you could not dismantle one without confronting the other.

The double burden: caste and gender in colonial India 🔗

To understand why these movements mattered for women, it helps to grasp the social reality they were pushing against. In colonial India, caste and gender operated as interlocking systems of control. Women from oppressed castes faced what scholars today call intersectional discrimination – they were subordinated within patriarchal family structures while simultaneously oppressed by the broader caste hierarchy that governed public life, labor, and access to resources.

As Ambedkar argued in his writings, the caste system was inherently patriarchal, and that patriarchy was deeply rooted in Brahmanical Hinduism. Religious doctrines not only sanctioned caste-based hierarchies but also dictated women’s subjugation. Dalit women, positioned at the intersection of caste, class, and gender, bore the heaviest burden. They faced child marriage, widowhood taboos, denial of education, and sexual exploitation by dominant-caste men – all of which were justified through religious custom.

The Devadasi system illustrated this most starkly. Young girls, largely from lower-caste communities, were “dedicated” to serve temple deities, a practice that in reality subjected them to exploitation by priests and temple trustees. These women had no legal recourse and no social standing. Both Periyar and Ambedkar targeted this system directly as a symbol of how caste and gender discrimination reinforced each other.

The Self-Respect Movement: Periyar’s radical challenge to patriarchy 🔗

Founded in 1925 by E.V. Ramasamy in Tamil Nadu, the Self-Respect Movement went far beyond what most social reform efforts of the time were willing to attempt. Periyar did not simply want to reform practices like child marriage or widow remarriage – he wanted to dismantle the religious and caste scaffolding that made those practices possible in the first place.

Redefining marriage and bodily autonomy 🔗

One of the movement’s most concrete and lasting contributions was the concept of self-respect marriages – secular unions conducted without Brahmin priests or religious rituals, in which the couple simply exchanged garlands and declared their consent in front of witnesses. These marriages were premised on equality between partners, and included the freedom to divorce – a radical proposition at the time. They also actively encouraged inter-caste unions, directly attacking one of the mechanisms by which caste reproduction was enforced through women’s bodies and sexuality. The bill validating self-respect marriages was eventually passed unanimously in the Tamil Nadu Assembly in 1967.

The movement also affirmed women’s rights over reproductive choices, including access to contraception – a position that put it far ahead of mainstream national discourse, which under Gandhi’s influence largely condemned birth control. Women were given the right to choose partners, divorce them, and remarry. Widowhood was not penalized. The domestic division of labor and child-rearing were identified as areas requiring change, not just public policy.

Women as active participants, not just beneficiaries 🔗

Crucially, women were not just objects of reform in the Self-Respect Movement – they were active participants and organizers. It was two Dalit women who shaped the movement in foundational ways: Annai Meenambal, president of the Scheduled Castes Federation of India, was the person who gave E.V. Ramasamy the title “Periyar” (meaning “great one”). Veerammal constantly pushed Periyar to sharpen his understanding of Dalit people’s specific struggles.

Women in the movement worked on issues like opposing the Devadasi system, supporting survivors of domestic violence, and advocating for alcohol prohibition, but they were not confined to these concerns. During the anti-Hindi agitations of 1938, 73 women were arrested for protesting in Madras – 37 of them went to jail while still nursing infants. Activists like Moovalur Ramamirtham, herself a survivor of the Devadasi system, used their lived experience to challenge how oppressive social customs were normalized and defended by those in power.

Women from the most marginalized sections, including former Devadasis and wage laborers, became active participants in social reform, alongside doctors and teachers. The movement created a space where women from diverse class and caste backgrounds could organize around shared demands for dignity and equality.

The Ambedkarite Movement: linking caste annihilation to women’s liberation 🔗

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar approached the question of women’s rights from a different but equally radical direction. He argued that caste and gender were intertwined systems – that to maintain the caste system, endogamy was a necessary condition that had an enormous impact on women’s lives. Dismantling caste, for Ambedkar, was inseparable from dismantling the patriarchal control that made caste reproduction possible.

Organizing Dalit women 🔗

Ambedkar’s work was not only theoretical. He organized Dalit women into collectives known as Mahila Mandals, which functioned as spaces of political education where women learned to speak publicly, question social norms, and organize for change. At these gatherings, Ambedkar urged women not merely to become literate but to critically understand the systems that subjugated them, and to seek economic independence as the foundation of genuine dignity.

At the All-India Depressed Classes Women’s Conference in Nagpur in 1942, Ambedkar declared that he measured the progress of a community by the degree of progress its women had achieved – a statement that placed women’s liberation at the very center of his political vision, not as an afterthought.

The Manusmriti burning and symbolic resistance 🔗

Ambedkar’s public burning of the Manusmriti in 1927 was not simply a protest against caste oppression – it was a direct challenge to the ideological foundation of Brahmanical patriarchy. The Manusmriti explicitly denied women the right to education and used religious sanction to justify their subjugation. By burning it, Ambedkar signaled that no social reform was possible while this text continued to define the terms of women’s existence in Hindu society.

His work The Annihilation of Caste exposed how religious doctrines sanctioned both caste-based hierarchies and women’s subjugation simultaneously. This analysis was ahead of its time – it anticipated what feminist scholars would later call intersectionality, the idea that systems of oppression do not operate independently but reinforce one another.

Legislative action: the Hindu Code Bill 🔗

As India’s first Law Minister, Ambedkar channeled his vision into law. His most significant legislative intervention was the Hindu Code Bill, which sought to grant women the rights to property, divorce, and inheritance – areas in which Hindu personal law had long discriminated against women. The bill also tackled polygamy and inter-caste marriage, directly targeting the caste endogamy that controlled women’s lives. When the bill was blocked by conservative opposition, Ambedkar resigned from the cabinet. It was later passed in parts between 1955 and 1956 as the Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Succession Act, and related legislation.

Earlier, in 1942, Ambedkar introduced a Maternity Benefit Bill while serving as a labor minister, seeking to provide maternity leave to women workers. In 1928, a women’s conference was established in Bombay with his wife Ramabai as president. Around 3,000 women participated in the historic Mahad Satyagraha, demonstrating that Dalit women were active agents in the movement, not passive recipients of reform.

What made anti-caste movements distinct in their approach to women’s rights 🔗

What separated the Self-Respect and Ambedkarite movements from mainstream nationalist reform efforts was their refusal to treat women’s liberation as secondary to other political goals. Many nationalist leaders of the period addressed women’s issues within the framework of the nation and the family – institutions that Periyar, in particular, identified as themselves limiting women’s freedom. Periyar viewed both nation and family as structures that constrained women’s liberties, a position that was too radical even for many of his contemporaries.

Both movements also recognized that upper-caste women and Dalit women did not share the same experience of oppression. The mainstream women’s movement of the colonial period was largely led by upper-caste women whose concerns – access to education, widow remarriage, dowry reform – were real but did not encompass the caste-based sexual exploitation, labor exploitation, and social exclusion that Dalit women faced. The emergence of Dalit women’s collectives raised voices not just on caste but on the intersectionality of gender, providing a new dimension of analysis that the dominant feminist discourse had overlooked.

A legacy that extends beyond the colonial period 🔗

The anti-caste movements of colonial India did not simply produce policy reforms – they produced a new political consciousness among women from oppressed communities. As the chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar ensured that Articles 14, 15, and 16, which prohibit discrimination based on sex and caste, became the foundation of the new republic. The constitutional framework for gender equality that India inherited was, in significant part, shaped by the intellectual and political labor of anti-caste activists.

International organizations including the United Nations and Amnesty International have since recognized caste-based discrimination as a human rights violation, aligning with the framing that Ambedkar and Periyar developed decades earlier. The Dalit feminist tradition that emerged from the Ambedkarite movement has continued to grow, insisting that any feminism that ignores caste is incomplete – a position that remains directly relevant to contemporary debates about social justice.

The women who participated in self-respect marriages, who were arrested during anti-Hindi agitations, who spoke at Mahila Mandals, and who challenged the Devadasi system were not waiting for liberation to be handed to them. They were agents in movements that gave them both the political language and the organizational structures to demand equality on their own terms.

What do you think? The anti-caste movements insisted that caste and gender discrimination cannot be addressed separately – does contemporary feminism do enough to center the voices and experiences of women from the most marginalized communities? And given that the Hindu Code Bill faced fierce opposition even within progressive circles, how do you think movements today navigate the tension between radical reform and political feasibility?

References

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