Indian Subaltern Feminism and American Black Womanism

Women's oppression is the most widespread and the deepest form of oppression in society. The world of women, as Simone de Beauvoir observes, "is everywhere enclosed, limited, dominated by the male universe; high as she may raise herself, far as she may venture, there will always be a ceiling over her head, walls that will block her way". Women all over the world, like the colonized subjects, have been relegated to the position of the "other" "marginalized" and in a metaphorical sense "colonized" by various forms of patriarchal domination as they share with colonized races and cultures an intimate experience of the politics of oppression and repression. Based on this assumption of inferior position, women are called the "subalterns". The issues agitating women belonging to different cultures are different.There are two special voices shouting in the wilderness for liberation-- the Dalit woman in India and the Black woman in America, who are under the triple subjugation of caste or race, gender and class. It is therefore imperative to isolate the problems specific to these triple-subjugated women and work for their empowerment. The Dalit woman writer Bama's stories and the African-American woman writer Alice Walker's stories demonstrate how the material reality of different groups of women can lead to very different perceptions of the nature of political struggle. All the different schools of Feminist thought have a particular way of characterizing freedom or liberation. In the case of Womanist thought, the emphasis is on the full self-development of woman but there is also recognition that women are all involved with families, communities, political entities and other groups that affect their progress in important ways. Dalit Feminism, on the other hand, underscores the relevance of the histories of colonialism on the national front and stories of male hegemony on the familial front. Hence, this paper focuses on Dalit Feminism and American Black Womanism.