Revisiting Existential Crisis with Special Reference to Dalit Women’s Rights and Human Rights

Sudha Kumari sudhasudha7040@gmail.com

CSJM University Kanpur, India

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

The word “Dalit” has a Sanskrit derivation that means “ground,” “crushed”, “suppressed”, and “to bits”. This phrase was initially used in the nineteenth century by Jyotirao Phule in reference to oppression and severe prejudice. In recent years, academic institutions in India have added a new subject of study called “Dalit Women studies”. It aims to focus on Dalit women's rights and human rights, two of the most popular literary and human rights genres in recent years. But the rights of Dalit women are the real issue. Dalit women's rights have been overlooked in the discussion of human rights, which has to be revisited. Dalit rights are currently the most popular literary genre.

This essay explores with great attention to how Dalit women's bodies have been used and tortured via hard physical labour, construction out of poverty, and psychological abuse. In a way, Dalit women should also have access to human rights. Why do some situations qualify as human rights concerns but not others? How do historically marginalised groups convert internal frustrations into human rights claims that are recognised internationally?

This study extends these and other related points through a comparative analysis of recent initiatives by India's Dalits to elevate long-standing caste-based discrimination into a global human rights concern. Members of Dalit castes are physically separated from the dominant castes in housing patterns, seating arrangements in educational institutions, especially schools, and are forced to participate in degrading occupations like manual scavenging and carrying night soil by women due to caste-based discrimination based on ancestry lineage. Due to caste-based prejudice against descent, men from the dominant caste violently appropriate and sexually control Dalit women. It is necessary to fill up the gaps between Dalit rights and international human rights and incorporate them into the idea of human rights. There are still certain groups of women forging their own paths and refusing to accept the biased gender segregation that is imposed on them on the name of some gender and community, despite various types of oppression and human rights violations. This article discusses these recent developments as well as the long absence of caste from discussions about human rights.

As a metaphor for this erasure of the subject, the idea of the unmaking of bodies and the worlds in which the bodies are embedded is put forth. It asserts that embodiment and ontology are social embodiment and ontologies, building on the theories advanced by Turner and Judith Butler, among others, and asserting that for the embodiment to flourish, a supporting, liveable environment is essential. Life cannot exist without the many conditions that make it possible, and these conditions are always social, resulting in interdependence rather than a unique ontology for each individual. When Bryan Turner claims that the self is generated through embodiment, ensoulment, and emplacement, he provides further detail on the circumstances in which the potential for the evolving, autonomous, and coherent self is situated. In order to have a longer-lasting impact on Dalit rights, P.K. Nayar investigates the implications for human rights theories, international human rights law and practise, and beyond the body.

Some theorists contend that the body is a cultural image made possible by a multitude of media, most notably language, rather than a natural phenomenon. What is it about a Dalit woman's physique that is unique? The body has recently undergone revision and reinterpretation in academic and popular contexts. Are the women’s “bodies” actually their own, or are they something else entirely? It needs considerable reassessment, as well as great focus and attention, in my opinion. Women have been reduced to nothing more than "bodies" by patriarchy, which includes groups like Dalit men and upper caste men, through acts of domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and even mutual sex. Show how the biological points have effects on everyone's mentality through what she terms a mythological norm. Do you have trouble defining what the body is? Why is it so important to think about it and rewrite about it? Most philosophers have held the view that physical form is a cultural invention rather than a feature of nature. How a society regards something is expressed in a culture's body:

The body has also been materially restructured by science through practices such as genetic engineering and artificial insemination, and devices such as life-prolonging machines and artificial wombs. The body can be disassembled by plunging parts of one body into another. Various parts of the anatomy can be rebuilt through cosmetic surgery. Ultimately, the human organism may be replaced by automata which can perform quite efficiently many of the tasks once associated with the natural body. (Dani Cavallaro & Illustrated by Carline Vago 5).

The “Dalit women’s body” has not undergone much change, but contemporary theory has reinterpreted the body. I'll analyse feminist positions, as well as the contradictions and challenges associated with Dalit feminism, in addition to studying diverse theoretical perspectives on Dalit women's bodies. The discussions will be focused on issues such as the essentialization of women, the potential for Dalit feminism to essentialize, specific feminist concerns, the androcentric viewpoint, how traditionally male authors have received preferential treatment in literature, and how women have been denied the opportunity to be treated equally with men. The problems and issues include the patriarchy of capitalism, the newly assigned religious significance of goddesses, irrationalism, mysticism, witchcraft, social constructions of Dalit women's "bodies," the concept, construction, and use of language regarding Dalit women, as well as others that are certain to come up throughout the course of study.

“Trauma” is a term for "experiences of socially placed political violence," and the "body" of the Dalit trauma is more than just the individual's physical body (Cvetkovich 3). Dalit life literature relates individual sorrow to society hardship. The pain affects the social body of the community in which the survivor or traumatised body is located and is not merely imprinted on the individual. Cultural trauma is the term used when members of a group feel they have gone through something that has left a “indelible stamp onto their consciousness” (Alexander 2). It enables them to forge a sense of collective identity, assign responsibility for the trauma's causes, and make room for political action (Alexander 2). The argument focuses on human rights treaty organisations that refused to recognise caste-based discrimination as a violation of human rights and prominent human rights NGOs that failed to address problems like marginalisation. Baby Kamble notices something very important:

In those days, it was the custom to keep women at home, behind the threshold. The honour enjoyed by a family was in proportion to the restrictions imposed on the women of the house. When no one could see even a nail of the woman thus confined within the four walls of the house, then this ‘honour' became the talk of the town- a byword among the relatives and friends in the surrounding villages. Then people would tell each other, how one Pandharinath Mistry kept his wife completely hidden in the house and how even the rays of the sun did not know her. (Baby Kamble 5).

The fundamental thrust of the argument is how these difficulties might be incorporated into literary theory and fiction. Can literary works be analysed using these issues as a foundation before creating a theory for Dalit women's rights, or is it the other way around? What frame of reference shall we employ? Which texts fall under the "rights" of Dalit Feminists? Why frequently arrives literary theory too late or ignores social difficulties and real-world knowledge? Bama describes the extent of the Christian Church's hegemonic control as well as the discrimination Dalits who converted faced in Sangati. Bama backs this up with the following character dialogue:

Sothipillai shouted angrily, look at what goes on in our church as well. It is our women who sweep the church and keep it clean. Women from other castes stand to one side until we have finished and then march in grandly and sit down before anyone else. I have stood it as long as I could, and at last, I went and complained to the nuns. And do you know what they said? It seems we will gain merit by sweeping the church and that God will bless us especially. (Bama 23), (Ruchi Tomar 6)

The physical strength of Dalit women's bodies—who toil hard as farmworkers in upper-class fields—will also be examined in this article in an effort to understand how they react to the taboo of the "docile body" that the patriarchy has long connected with them. Since the label "Dalit" has already been a humiliating experience for them, any attempt to make the Dalit women's bodies conformable may bring them extra psychological trauma. It is a story that resides on the periphery of literature, portraying individuals whose representation is not permitted. Most often, testimonies are accounts of horrors and suffering that put the reader in touch with the victims. The testimony is the voice of someone who testifies on behalf of someone else who cannot speak for themselves. In other words, the speaking subaltern subject of the story gives voice to her own lived experiences as well as those of others who are marginalised in social and linguistic terms.

It is also a matter of keen research and concern how Dalit women's rights as businesswomen affect and how families are formed. How Dalit women provide for their family financially and the difficulties they encounter as they lay the groundwork for their families' financial stability. The emphasis will also be on how women are to blame for the abusive family and institutional framework (mother-in-law syndrome, daughter-law syndrome). The study aims with great concern to discover how Dalit women have been prevented from receiving the same treatment as men. To recreate the past of their ongoing internal and external enslavement, they need their literature. It aims to re-examine the topic of Dalit women who are influenced by the culture of poverty that comes with being a Dalit woman by looking at the tale of Dalit women’s consciousness, experience, and issues experienced in family, community, institutions, and religion.