Intersectionality in India: Analyzing Caste, Class, and Gender Dynamics

When we talk about intersectionality in India, we are not simply applying a Western academic framework to an Indian setting. The interplay of caste, class, and gender in India has its own history, its own pioneers, and its own intellectual traditions – some of which predate the term “intersectionality” itself by more than a century. Understanding how these systems of power overlap and reinforce each other is essential to understanding Indian society, its democracy, and the persistent inequalities that continue to shape millions of lives.

What intersectionality means in the Indian context
The pioneers: Savitribai and Jotiba Phule
How caste, class, and gender interlock
Gopal Guru and the assertion of Dalit women’s voice
Dalit feminism and the critique of mainstream Indian feminism
Intersectionality, democracy, and the unfinished project

What intersectionality means in the Indian context

The concept of intersectionality, formally introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, describes how overlapping social identities – such as race, gender, and class – combine to create unique forms of discrimination that cannot be understood by examining each identity in isolation. In India, intersectionality has deep roots, where forms of discrimination based on caste, religion, and class have historically overlapped in complex ways. A Dalit woman, for instance, does not experience gender discrimination and caste discrimination as two separate problems – she experiences them as a single, fused reality.

Intersectionality is primarily an organizing principle that calls for reflexivity in studying social characteristics, ensuring that one form of marginality is not simply substituted for another and that lived experiences are not treated as generic or undifferentiated. In India, this framework has been taken up most powerfully not by mainstream feminism, but by Dalit feminist scholars and activists who argued that caste had been systematically ignored within feminist politics.

The pioneers: Savitribai and Jotiba Phule

Long before intersectionality had a name, its spirit was being practised on the ground in 19th-century Maharashtra. An elementary reading of feminist literature and politics in India reveals that Savitribai Phule was the first female reformer to implement intersectionality in its most practical sense. Together with her husband Jotiba Phule, she recognised that caste oppression and gender oppression could not be fought separately – they were woven together.

Jotiba Phule opened a pioneering school for lower-caste girls in Pune in 1848, at a time when it was extremely rare for any girls in India to receive a formal education. He had first educated his wife Savitribai at home, and she became the school’s teacher – a radical act in a society that excluded both women and lower castes from learning. As India’s first female teacher, Savitribai Phule fought against deep-rooted caste and gender discrimination, advocating for universal education that would benefit women, lower-caste individuals, and the oppressed.

Political scientist Bidyut Chakrabarty argued that Savitribai Phule was the sole female reformer of 19th-century India to explore the interplay of patriarchy with caste, and considered education the most powerful tool to awaken self-respect among the oppressed and challenge Brahmanical dominance. The Phules also founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873, a social reform organisation that advocated for inter-caste marriages, opposed child marriage, and sought to dismantle the ideological foundations of caste hierarchy. Jotiba Phule’s analysis of Indian society was rooted in a radical critique of Brahmanical dominance, and he explicitly linked caste oppression with gender oppression – a connection that would become central to Dalit feminist theory a century later.

How caste, class, and gender interlock

In Indian society, caste has never been just a social classification – it determines economic roles, access to resources, and the rules around sexuality and reproduction. Violence against Dalit women has been labelled as either a caste atrocity or a sexual atrocity, when in fact, the issue of gender cannot be addressed in isolation from caste, since caste determines the division of labour, sexual division of labour, and division of sexual labour.

Class adds another layer to this. Economic inequality creates additional difficulty for women in informal labour sectors, and women in poorer families often have less access to education and employment, making it harder to improve their lives. For Dalit women, poverty is not incidental – it is structurally produced by the caste system, which historically confined lower-caste communities to the most underpaid and degrading forms of labour. The result is that Dalit women occupy the lowest position across all three hierarchies simultaneously: caste, class, and gender.

Violence against Dalit women is not merely individualistic but is often collective, serving as a tool for maintaining caste dominance and social control. Sexual violence, in particular, functions as an instrument through which upper-caste groups assert dominance over Dalit communities – targeting women as a means of disciplining the entire community. Dalit women suffer severe oppression through the intersectionality of caste, class, and gender – as members of the lower caste, as labourers subject to class-based exploitation, and as women experiencing patriarchal domination.

Gopal Guru and the assertion of Dalit women’s voice

A critical turning point in the Indian intersectionality debate came with scholar Gopal Guru’s landmark 1995 essay, “Dalit Women Talk Differently,” published in the Economic and Political Weekly. Guru’s central argument was that Dalit women, because of their positionality as both Dalit and women, have voices that are unique and more relevant in understanding social reality. They are at the receiving end of two forms of domination simultaneously – caste oppression and patriarchal subjugation – and this dual experience gives their articulations a depth that mainstream feminism had consistently failed to capture.

Guru also identified a troubling pattern within the Dalit movement itself. In the post-Ambedkar period, Dalit leaders had often subordinated and at times suppressed the independent political expression of Dalit women. The Dalit community, despite its struggle against Brahmanical patriarchy, was not free from patriarchal influences internally. Guru called this “Dalit patriarchy” – a concept that described how Dalit women faced oppression both from outside their community through caste violence, and from within through male domination.

Guru highlighted the need for Dalit women to articulate their experiences on their own terms, underscoring their subjugation both within and outside the Dalit community. This call for autonomous assertion found its institutional expression in the formation of the National Federation of Dalit Women in New Delhi in 1995, which became a platform for Dalit women to organise independently and push for human rights advocacy and anti-discrimination policies at both national and international levels.

Dalit feminism and the critique of mainstream Indian feminism

One of the most important contributions of Dalit feminist thought was its critique of the dominant women’s movement in India. Dalit feminist movements successfully made “Dalit women” a critical part of dominant feminist discourse, confronting it to include a caste framework as imperative to understanding the women’s question. They argued that mainstream Indian feminism had, for too long, universalised the experiences of upper-caste, middle-class women as the experiences of all women.

Mainstream feminism followed a single-axis approach, treating gender discrimination in isolation and overlooking non-Brahmanical feminist standpoints. Scholar Sharmila Rege, building on Guru’s work, proposed a “Dalit feminist standpoint” – a framework that recognises the unique position of Dalit women at the intersection of caste and gender oppression, and insists that any feminism that does not account for caste is inherently incomplete. Rege argued that the inclusion of Dalit diversity is a prerequisite for establishing genuine feminism.

Dalit women writers such as Bama Faustina Soosairaj, Urmila Pawar, and Sivakami brought these themes into literature, using autobiography and oral narrative to articulate their struggles, resistance, and aspirations. These narratives addressed patriarchy within caste systems and caste-based hierarchies within patriarchal structures simultaneously – demonstrating through lived experience what theory was still working to articulate.

Intersectionality, democracy, and the unfinished project

The relationship between intersectionality and democracy in India is a deeply contested one. India’s Constitution, shaped significantly by the work of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, formally abolished untouchability and guaranteed equality before the law. Yet the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, remains inadequately enforced, with legal frameworks often failing to address the intersection of gender and caste, leaving many women vulnerable.

The Dalit feminist movement and scholarship have asserted caste, class, and gender intersections as critical to mainstream feminist discourse, laying the path for autonomous Dalit women’s organisations that led the struggle for human rights advocacy and the implementation of anti-discrimination policies. But the work remains unfinished. The mainstream Dalit movement has a tendency to equalise all Dalit experiences with those of Dalit men, and Dalit feminism must work to transform and critique the Dalit movement itself, not only the broader structures of Brahmanical patriarchy.

The Phules’ vision of a society free from caste and gender oppression, Guru’s articulation of Dalit women’s unique political voice, and the ongoing work of Dalit feminist scholars and activists all point to the same conclusion: intersectionality in India is not an abstract academic exercise. It is a living political struggle over who gets to speak, whose suffering counts, and what kind of democracy India is committed to building. The intellectual contributions of Dalit feminists merit substantive recognition, as their lived experiences of intersectional oppression identify and analyse manifestations of structural injustice that dominant frameworks have consistently missed.

What do you think? Does recognising intersectionality require us to rethink how we define feminism and social justice movements more broadly? And given that both the mainstream feminist movement and the Dalit movement have historically sidelined Dalit women, what does genuine inclusion look like in practice?

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Table of Contents

What intersectionality means in the Indian context 🔗

The pioneers: Savitribai and Jotiba Phule 🔗

How caste, class, and gender interlock 🔗

Gopal Guru and the assertion of Dalit women’s voice 🔗

Dalit feminism and the critique of mainstream Indian feminism 🔗

Intersectionality, democracy, and the unfinished project 🔗