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.

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.

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.

Translated from Marathi by Maya Pandit, Urmila Pawar's memoir turns basket-making, family memory, and movement work into Dalit feminist social history.

Bama’s Tamil life narrative Karukku examines caste inside Catholic institutions, the politics of literary language, and the tension between selfhood and community.

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

Drawing on 500 Dalit women’s narratives across four Indian states, this study traces gendered violence through caste, class, land, and barriers to justice.

Srividya Natarajan and Aparajita Ninan rework Jotiba Phule’s 1873 anti-caste text as a graphic argument about caste, literacy, Savitribai, and the politics of representation.

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

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 reads Begumpura as an anti-caste social horizon, asking how equality becomes material freedom from hierarchy, exploitation, and restricted public space.

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’s illustrated book for young readers revalues knowledge devalued by caste; Durgabai Vyam’s art is integral to its argument.

Sharmila Rege reads Dalit women's life narratives as historical and theoretical knowledge, asking who gets to write caste and gender into India's feminist history.

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.

In this 1882 Marathi polemic, Tarabai Shinde turns public blame over widowhood into a challenge to men's unequal claims to moral authority and freedom.

Published in Philadelphia in 1887, Pandita Ramabai's English-language book examines childhood, marriage, and widowhood for high-caste Hindu women, and makes self-reliance, education, and locally grounded women teachers central to reform.