Narratives of Dalit Women and ‘the Outsider Within’: Toward a Literary Practice of Dalit Feminist Standpoint

This paper establishes an experimental methodology for developing a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Theory through the analysis of Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke and Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life. Exploration suggests an outline method to attain a standpoint and represents the more significant issues of marginalization of Dalit women, their subjectivity, their lack of voice as reflected in the Dalit Movement, Dalit Literature, Indian feminism, and in their everyday lives. This study claims that Dalit women writers have a potent standpoint as an \u27outsider within,\u27 and argues that their triply oppressed caste, class, and gender identity allows for diverse perspectives that appraise one another and helps readers gain an understanding of their condition as women and Dalit subjects. Thus, Dalit women create this new knowledge that subverts dominant androcentric knowledge construction. This study marks an awakening of consciousness, an approach to social change, Dalit women’s activism, and empowerment. Most of all, this exploration may help other marginalized groups of people or sociologists by putting greater trust in the creative potential of their narratives and cultural biographies