Ekata Bakshi
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for Women's Studies, School of Social Sciences, Graduate Student
I am a PhD candidate in the Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. I have completed my Master’s Degree in Sociology from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU and have written a dissertation titled ‘Unsettling Settlement: Gender and Refugee-hood in post- Partition Bengal (1947-1958) for the completion of my M.Phil degree from the same Centre. As a scholar located within the developing context, I have been interested in the theme of gender since the very beginning of my academic career. Given the history of colonisation that abounds India, I developed a keen interest in the politics of memory especially pertaining to violence and trauma. Eventually, Partition, which has been often framed as the Indian holocaust became my primary area of interest because of its unprecedented scale and the formative impact of the violence unleashed during the course of Partition of the British India and the indelible imprints of the same over the current socio-political context of the subcontinent. The premise of Partition being on religious lines led to a mass exodus along two borders of the newly formed nation-states and has since altered fundamentally the history of the subcontinent. It has been the subject of multiple academic engagements ever since and in what was considered as the subaltern turn in partition historiography at the end of the twentieth century memory became an important tool in the reconstruction of Partition and Partition induced refugee-hood from the point of view of the masses. Subsequently, its history of has been claimed reclaimed and contested from multiple standpoints exposing multiple cleavages among what has collectively named as the ‘subaltern’. This criss-crossing of memory gender and multiple marginalities and the socio-political contexts that undercut alliances and contestations, creating and re-creating identities form the crux of my PhD work.
Supervisors: Dr. Mallarika Sinha Roy
Supervisors: Dr. Mallarika Sinha Roy
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across generations. The structures of caste, then, have rendered lowered-caste refugee families as marginalized ‘quasi-citizens.’ Unlike upper(ed)-caste refugees, they have struggled to overcome the consequences of Partition and become integrated as ‘successful’ citizens; in a context where the degree of citizenship has been increasingly defined as being inversely proportional to one’s economic dependence on the government and directly proportional to one’s performance of ‘caste-moral
respectability’. But, in a teleological fashion, their insufficient capacity to display adequate citizenship has only reinforced their de-valuation as labourers.
Drafts by Ekata Bakshi
Articles by Ekata Bakshi
However, for such an exercise, the question that became ethically and methodologically crucial was how an academic enterprise by an upper-caste woman, enabled by the consumption of devalued, feminized labor of mostly women from lower-caste/outcaste (Dalit/Bahujan) groups, can seek to ethically understand such lives. Subsequently, in tracing some of the possible answers, in this paper, I argue against a simplistic deployment of self-reflexivity as a method. I propose taking a relational approach that posits not only the upper-caste and lower/outcaste femininity as co-constituted but also the researcher–researched relationship as an extension of that co-constitution. Taking research work as labor that is enabled by other kinds of (in)visible, (un)paid, (de)valued, caste-based labor as an entry point, I seek to further unpack such co-constitution.
diverse movements born from different histories. These diverse feminist movements continue to inadequately provide a comprehensive and inclusive theorization of the relationship between caste and gender. Dalit feminist movements have successfully made ‘Dalit women’ a critical part of the dominant feminist discourse and have confronted it for including a caste framework as imperative to understanding the women’s question. But the question of caste within the dominant feminist discourse has largely remained confined to reading and understanding the Dalit woman through the intersectional framework. Intersectionality is useful in providing a framework for categorising the Dalit woman and for highlighting the lacunae in understanding the intersections of caste and gender in existing discourses. Yet, when framed through the overarching lens of difference, it occludes the contingent co-construction of the Savarna woman and Dalit woman as categories, as well as the complicated relationality between
these two categories. Treating intersectionality as difference, also ironically posits the Dalit women as a homogenous and essentialised category. This category is over-determined by vulnerability, exploitation, and, violence. Thus, the entire spectrum of experiences inhabited collectively by women placed under this category is erased. This article attempts to elucidate these arguments by focusing on West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. As two researchers from different locations, both disciplinary and socio-political, one a Savarna-feminist-ethnographer, the other a Dalit-feminist-legal-researcher, we then seek to understand what adopting a holistic anti-caste methodology rather than simply ‘doing intersectionality’, means while inhabiting both these locations.