Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women's Testimonios

In Writing Caste/Writing Gender, Sharmila Rege reads Dalit women’s life narratives not as raw experience awaiting interpretation by an outside scholar, but as testimonios that revise the history and theory of modern India. Bringing several Marathi autobiographical traditions into relation, she shows how memories of labor, hunger, humiliation, education, sexuality, conversion, family conflict, and collective struggle carry arguments about caste and gender. The testimonio form exceeds the liberal story of an isolated individual: a speaker’s “I” becomes connected to communities whose histories have been excluded from literary and academic canons.

Rege’s intervention is directed at two forms of erasure. Savarna-dominated feminism can treat caste as one identity among many rather than a structure organizing labor, respectability, violence, and knowledge; male-centered Dalit politics can present caste emancipation without confronting patriarchal power within households and movements. Dalit women’s narratives expose both limits. They also challenge research methods in which privileged scholars “give voice” to marginalized subjects while retaining control over theory. Rege instead proposes an accountable practice of learning to speak with, and being transformed by, Dalit feminist standpoints without claiming transparent access to them.

The book’s archive is historically and linguistically situated, especially in Marathi writing, and translation, editing, literacy, publication, and academic selection all shape which testimonios circulate. Calling narratives collective must not erase differences among their authors or turn suffering into proof of authenticity. These are reasons for careful reading, not for retreating to supposedly neutral scholarship. For FemRes, Writing Caste/Writing Gender is foundational feminist epistemology: it asks who is recognized as a theorist, how experience becomes knowledge, and what institutional changes are required when marginalized writers are read not as illustrative cases but as producers of concepts and history.