Intersection of Caste, Gender and labour: Lived experiences of Women Sanitation Workers in Delhi

Abstract

Engendering caste concepts within academia through research and feminist methodologies of critical reflexivity, inquiry and dialogue is of pivotal significance. This enables an understanding that is in-depth, thus focusing on the critical consequences of what is called a ‘double layered’ marginalisation at the intersection of gender and caste. Academic literature is replete with the sentimental & stigma; exclusionary & policy issues of the same i.e. gender and caste examined intellectually by experts/practitioners and academicians- albeit separately. Studies that interpret social realities at the intersection of essentially the both (whilst discerning both the centripetal and centrifugal forces) are seminal in that they act as a potent tool that attempt an annihilation of caste-based practices that continue to breach human dignity and human rights justified by historical notions of brahmanical patriarchy. Using qualitative methods and tools of inquiry, this study is an attempt at carving out thick descriptions and narratives of the Valmiki womenfolk employed in a select public university where women are employed as sanitation workers. The paper seeks to understand the lived realities of Dalit women in the sanitation work that they perform and how the intersection of caste and gender has shaped the kind of struggles these women face. It attempts to understand both the structural and institutional factors that act as coercive elements in their lived realities within a post-colonial framework of development. It makes the power producing knowledge systems explicit consequently shifting the pivot of the problem from the body of the Valmiki woman to that of systems which produce and reproduce such hierarchical identities. The study aims to deconstruct the factors that affect the nature and type of engagement and participation of the womenfolk in the sanitation work and the forms of coping mechanisms adopted by them to deal with this oppression induced by caste and gender.