My Back Hurts from Carrying Intersectionality for Savarna Feminists

The trap of making Dalit women responsible for everyone's anti caste education.



December 2018. Fort Kochi was buzzing with cultural events with something happening at every nook and corner. One evening my friends and I were happily walking towards the beach and we spotted a gathering at Vasco da Gama Square. There was an open stage and three familiar faces of savarna Feminists were visible on it. I stopped for a moment to listen to what they were talking about. Just then, a man approached me out of nowhere.

“Aren't you Aleena? Can you hop on the stage quickly and talk?”

I was bewildered, so I firmly said no. But my hesitation was apparently read as nervousness, because he insisted that it was okay. So I had to be firmer in my response. I said something like I'm here to enjoy the sunset with my friends. If you want intersectionality in your panel, you need to put more effort. I don't remember whether he had anything to say in response. I only remember the absurdity of the situation. I had come to spend an evening with my friends, to walk around Fort Kochi and watch the sunset. I had not agreed to participate in a panel, nor had anyone approached me beforehand with an invitation. Still the moment someone recognised me as a Dalit woman, I was apparently available to be summoned onto a stage to make a feminist discussion more intersectional.

I have thought about this incident many times since. It's not like a stranger asking me to speak at an event was the worst thing that could have happened to me. But the encounter revealed some things about the way we sometimes practise intersectionality. It was like my presence could solve a problem that the organisers had not bothered to address themselves. I was there, therefore intersectionality was available. All they had to do was put me on stage.

If you're not living under a rock, you probably know what intersectionality means by now, perhaps more theoretically than I do. Coined by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the term describes how different structures of power and discrimination, such as race and gender, intersect to shape experiences that cannot be understood by looking at either category in isolation. In the Indian context, caste, gender, class, religion and sexuality, among other structures, shape how people experience power and oppression.

But I sometimes feel like we have reduced intersectionality to the new trending internet buzzword. It is included in our feminist vocabulary, our panel discussions, our reading lists and our social media bios. We know how to talk about intersectionality without necessarily examining what practising it demands of us. And one of the things that troubles me is how much of that work continues to fall on Dalit women. We are expected to point out the exclusions, explain the nuances, recommend the reading, recount our experiences, correct the language and initiate uncomfortable conversations and we are expected to make feminist spaces intersectional while navigating the very inequalities we are being asked to explain. Meanwhile, acknowledging privilege, expressing solidarity or showing a willingness to learn is all what's expected as sufficient work on the part of savarna feminists. And I am interested in this imbalance: if intersectionality is supposed to transform the way we practise feminism, shouldn't it also transform how we distribute the labour of practising it?


But I assure you, this essay is definitely going beyond the usual "savarna women should educate themselves" argument, even though that's a desperate need of the hour. In my experience, intersectionality has been converted from a method of analysing and challenging power, into a service that marginalised people are expected to supply in the spaces they occupy. And if you have questions on why I constantly talk about savarna women rather than savarna men, it's because first of all, I do talk about savarna men and savarnas in general a lot. Secondly, savarna men aren't expecting an intersectional approach from me while dealing with their bullshit. Neither do they ask me to play sisterhood with them.


Coming back to the Fort Kochi incident, I realise I'm making a lot of assumptions about the intentions of the man who invited me (may be he's less smart than i expect and doesn't know what he was doing) . But regardless of that, the interaction fits a broader pattern of tokenism. My argument isn't separate from tokenism as a concept. We often discuss it by examining the institutions that practise it like who gets included, who remains excluded and whether representation alone translates into power. I am trying to look at it from the position of the person who becomes the token. What does it mean to be singled out, to have your presence acquire a political purpose you did not choose and to have to negotiate the expectations that come with it?

In feminist and other progressive spaces,  I've noticed the demand for representation becomes an expectation that marginalised people will make themselves available to satisfy it.  At this point, the need to make the discussion intersectional has become an immediate request directed at an individual. The broader work of researching, planning, building relationships, developing questions and deciding how caste should shape the discourse may already have been done, partly done or not done at all. But regardless there's labour involved. Imagine turning lived experience into something legible to people with no framework for it. That usually means explaining that caste exists, that it travels with the diaspora and why "class" or "race" doesn't cover it. When the request comes as "can you speak on caste?", this work is often handed over without it being named. Also, speaking in a space where others perceive you as "the voice for a community" when that community holds enormous internal diversity, you have the burden of knowing a partial or imperfect take will be read as the community's position. Others get to be individuals and the marginalised person has to be a delegate. Also managing defensiveness and guilt in the room by offering timely reassurance and making the audience comfortable enough to keep listening is a labour in itself. I anticipate this before even a random Instagram carousel and draft it with reaction already in mind. It's absurd that the audience's likely feelings become a constraint on what I can say, so the work is shaped before it exists and I'm preemptively fighting off a gaze before being subjected to it.


And saying yes or no to the mic, both answers cost something. Declining will be read as difficult or as sabotaging the cause or not being serious enough and accepting risks being tokenised or facing backlash from savarna "allies" or from within one's own community. These requests are mostly last minute and unpaid. They crowd out the person's own work, which is rarely only about caste anyway. Once someone has done it, they become the designated caste person, fielding follow ups, correcting later mistakes and answering for or being responsible for the group's/space's subsequent failures.

And who decided that all savarna women have to do to practise intersectionality is acknowledge their privilege, learn and be willing to be corrected? It is a reasonable starting posture. As a complete account of what's required, though, it works very well for the people performing it. It's cheap. It asks for a statement of awareness and an attitude. And “be willing to be corrected” assumes someone will do the correcting, which brings us back to the labour we've been tracing. The savarna woman's learning is paid for by a Dalit or Adivasi woman's explaining. Savarna women can afford to approach caste as something they need to learn about, while Dalit women are expected to make that learning possible. Savarna women typically have inherited advantages like educational access, English fluency, social networks, family wealth, time and institutional footholds and those are exactly the resources that make research, reading and self-education cheap. She can buy the books, enrol in the course take the unpaid hour but still the learning is routed through someone with fewer of those resources, whose time is scarcer and whose hours are more expensive in every sense. The knowledge being requested comes from living under a hierarchy that benefits the learner. And the learning converts into social capital as a more informed profile, a more progressive reputation, better access to the very spaces where Dalit women remain underrepresented.

I've noticed another tendancy from savarna women, "I don't have the right to speak". That clause takes a sound principle, don't speak for others or over them and stretches it into "don't speak about it at all." The problem is displacing someone's voice, not engaging with a structure and collapsing the two makes it political passivity than ethics. While it's reasonable to not speak over someone's else's lived experience, caste isn't someone else's life. It's a relation and structure and savarna women are still inside it as we speak. They've lived the savarna side of the surnames that open doors, the kitchens with rules about who enters, the family conversations about marriage, the casual remarks about "reservation people." That's firsthand knowledge that only they can share and the person who benefits from a hierarchy is often best placed to describe how it runs in private spaces. If the casteism sits in your family, your workplace or your friend group, "it's not my place" leaves it untouched. Challenging it there requires speaking to your own people, which is the harder and riskier conversation and the rule excuses it. What's interesting is that the rule is applied one way. Brahminical and savarna voices have always spoken about everyone, in the canon, the academy, the media and the feminist movement. Lived experience was never demanded of them. It's invoked now, when the topic is their own privilege. If we have massive gaps in the understanding of how brahminical and savarna privilege works, what's the extent of it, it's because even the most progressive savarnas aren't completely honest about. What does it mean you acknowledge your privilege? What exactly is your privilege and how does it help your current life?

If savarna women must not speak, someone else has to and that someone is the Dalit  woman who is already overburdened, then it's returning the labour to the marginalised. The workable line should be between speaking for and speaking with, about or against. For example citing Dalit feminist work rather than paraphrasing it as your own insight, confronting your community and handing over the platform when and where it counts. That's still action, whereas "I don't have the right to speak" is the one stance that doesn't make any difference.


There was another incident in Fort Kochi in 2019. A researcher contacted me by text asking if she could interview me in person about Dalit Christians that evening. I told her I can't make it because I am meeting a friend. She said she was already in Fort Kochi, so meeting that day would be easier. I repeated that I had prior commitments. That evening, I was chilling at the beach with the very friend I had told her I was meeting. The researcher spotted me and came over to say hello. I said hello back and we chatted for a few seconds. Then I realised she was trying to slip in the interview questions into the conversation. I asked her, “Are you trying to do an interview here?” I was uncomfortable. My friend had noticed what was happening too and told her, “You didn't treat Aleena as a human. You don't even consider Aleena as a human.” The researcher's face turned red and she was embarrassed and for a brief moment, I felt bad for her.

What my friend said, you didn't treat Aleena as a human, may sound a bit off, but it's about a person disappearing behind the knowledge that can be extracted from them. I had already declined the interview and  explained that I had other plans. Still when she encountered me at the beach, my permission became something she could work around. I was no longer an ordinary person spending an evening with a friend, I was someone who possessed information she wanted and the opportunity to obtain it had presented itself again. I don't know whether she consciously thought my time mattered less than her research or whether she had simply convinced herself that a few questions wouldn't hurt. But the effect was that my decision not to participate was not treated as the end of the conversation. There is a dehumanising part in being valued primarily for what you can provide. People want to hear about your community, your history and your experiences, but they can forget that accessing any of these things requires engaging with you as a person who has the right to say no.

And this is where I think about the labour expected of Dalit women in progressive spaces. Sometimes we are asked to speak, educate, represent or explain. Sometimes the request is presented as an opportunity to contribute to an important political or intellectual project. But beneath all these requests is a more basic question of are we being recognised as people who can choose when and how to contribute or as resources that should be made available whenever our knowledge is needed?

I don't want to suggest that every person who asks a Dalit woman to speak, participate or share her experiences is deliberately dehumanising her. That's not the point I'm trying to make. The labour of educating others about caste would be something Dalit women may choose to voluntarily undertake, if they wish to since they have agency to decide when, where or to whom, but it should not be expected to provide endlessly. Or without compensation.


Practising intersectionality better means moving from awareness to redistribution because awareness is only the starting posture and the practice is what it costs you. A savarna woman can begin by doing her own groundwork, reading Dalit feminist writers, citing them by name and working out where caste operates in her field before asking anyone else to explain it. She can redistribute the platform, the fee and the credit by asking who isn't in the room when she is invited to speak, stepping aside or co-sharing and paying people for their time, while making caste a standing part of who sets the agenda and who chairs, instead of an item added only when a Dalit woman is present. Much of the work also lies in her own circles, in challenging casteism within her family, marriage conversations, workplace and treatment of domestic workers, which is where the risk is highest and the use greatest. When corrected, she can change the thing without presenting a reassurance bill, which means not seeking absolution, centring her guilt or making the corrector comfort her. She should also resist treating "caste" as one position, since Dalit, Adivasi, Bahujan women face different forms of exclusion and none of them can stand in for the rest. And she has to accept loss, whether a slot, a citation or social ease among her own people, because practice that never costs anything is probably still performance.

And there are things that happen in ordinary life, not in discourse space that are tough to count. Caste operates through networks as most jobs, internships, introductions and recommendations travel through personal contact and savarna networks have historically been closed to Dalit people. So what are you going to do with that? Making an introduction, forwarding someone's CV with a line of endorsement or putting a name forward for a panel or project spends your social capital on someone else's behalf. It's different from mentoring which can stay advice only. If you're able to hire Dalit freelancers, writers, designers, lawyers or researchers, pay fair rates and credit them. Treat them as the professionals they are rather than as people being helped. Ask who your workplace's "culture fit" and "referral" norms favour and push for structured, transparent hiring that doesn't run on surnames and familiarity. A Dalit friend who is qualified and equal to you in every way may still be un or under employed, because discrimination in hiring, networks and housing is real even among the educated. Equality of ability doesn't produce equality of access, so asking about their situation without turning it into pity is part of practice. The aim isn't to do charity or rescue them. Remove the barrier you're positioned to remove, then let the person's merit carry the rest.


A simple test you could use in the end. After everything, did the work get lighter for the Dalit woman or heavier?