Colonialism, Caste, and Gender: The Emergence of Critical Caste Feminism in Modern South India

Abstract:Subaltern studies, and postcolonial scholarship more broadly, has perceptively analyzed women’s conditions in colonial India. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated the limitations of these approaches for understanding women’s struggles against the interconnected problems of patriarchy and upper-caste power. This article builds on and extends this critical task. It demonstrates that Tamil Buddhist women and men in early twentieth-century Tamil Nadu repudiated privileged-caste patriarchy precisely because they understood caste and gender to be mutually constitutive. Through an analysis of the archive of The Tamilian (1907–1914), a weekly newspaper of the Tamil Buddhist movement, this study suggests that Tamil Buddhists argued that caste-based patriarchal power ascended during the colonial era by marginalizing Indian women in general, and by othering lower-caste and untouchable women and men, in particular. This necessitated the mobilization of Tamil Buddhists around critical caste feminism in colonial India.