Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of 'Difference' and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position

Sharmila Rege’s essay is one of the central texts in the debate over a Dalit feminist standpoint. It follows Gopal Guru’s claim that Dalit women “talk differently,” but it refuses to romanticize difference as a sealed identity truth. Rege asks how experience becomes knowledge, how knowledge enters political organization, and how political movements can avoid reproducing caste and gender hierarchy.

The essay’s importance lies in bringing standpoint theory back to history and collective practice. Dalit women’s experience matters not because experience is automatically pure, but because it reveals mainstream feminism’s silence on caste and exposes patriarchal structures within Dalit politics. Experience must be interpreted, historicized, and theorized collectively before it can become a critical standpoint capable of changing movement direction.

For readers, the essay clarifies why intersectionality cannot be reduced to adding identity labels. In South Asian contexts, caste is not simply equivalent to class or ethnicity. It works through marriage, labor, sexual violence, religious norms, and everyday space. Rege’s contribution is to place Dalit feminism at the center of knowledge production rather than treating it as an appendix to mainstream feminism.