Caste and GenderBooks

Thenmozhi Soundararajan combines memoir, Dalit feminism, engaged Buddhism, and embodied practice to examine how caste injury enters bodies, communities, and transnational institutions.

Isabel Wilkerson compares U.S. racial hierarchy, Indian caste, and Nazi Germany to describe caste as a hidden grammar of domination.

Suraj Yengde combines personal narrative and social analysis to show caste not as India’s past, but as power still operating in education, love, labor, and diaspora.

Yashica Dutt extends the language of “coming out” to caste, tracing concealment, shame, mobility, and the politics of public identity.

Baby Kamble’s memoir treats “prison” as a structure built by caste, poverty, religious discipline, and household patriarchy together.

Through her mother and uncles, Sujatha Gidla shows how caste, class, and patriarchy shaped the meaning of freedom across colonial rule, independence, and revolutionary politics.

Arundhati Roy revisits the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi to expose the caste question muted inside Indian nationalist narratives.

Bama’s Karukku begins from Tamil Dalit Christian women’s experience to write caste, religious institutions, education, and self-recovery in conflict.

Sharmila Rege curates Ambedkar’s writings on Brahmanical patriarchy, foregrounding anti-caste thought as a deeply feminist critique.

Based on 500 Dalit women’s narratives across four Indian states, this study shows how gendered violence enforces caste, class, land, and political power - and follows survivors into exclusionary justice institutions.

Srividya Natarajan and Aparajita Ninan use stark images, satire, and historical narration to remake Jotiba Phule’s Slavery while weaving Savitribai’s struggle back into anti-caste thought.

A. Revathi’s autobiography records gender, family expulsion, labor, survival, and dignity in hijra communities, bringing South Asian trans experience into feminist mapping.

Urmila Pawar weaves family, education, marriage, and movement work into a life history that shows how caste enters the body and intimate life.

Bama replaces the solitary heroine with a collective life of Dalit women, making labor, violence, laughter, language, and intergenerational memory the substance of grassroots feminism.

Gail Omvedt traces five centuries of anti-caste social visions, from Bhakti traditions to Phule, Periyar, and Ambedkar.

Through biography, letters, poetry, and student writing, this collection reconstructs Savitribai Phule’s anti-caste pedagogy and asks why her thought was excluded from national and feminist histories.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd and Durgabai Vyam reclaim labor, technique, and knowledge devalued by caste in a form accessible to younger readers.

Sharmila Rege reads Dalit women’s testimonios to reopen the boundaries between literature, oral history, and social science through caste/gender experience.

Anupama Rao’s anthology brings history, political argument, and Dalit women’s testimony together to show how caste and gender jointly organize bodies, labor, law, and intellectual authority.

Uma Chakravarti reads caste not as a simple social hierarchy, but as a historical order sustained through control of women’s sexuality, marriage, and inheritance.