Religion helps young Dalit women navigate fragile class mobility by claiming selective cosmopolitan identities.
Author
Sugandha Nagpal, Associate Professor, Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal Global University, Haryana, Sonipat, India
Summary
This paper explores the role of religion in the class mobility projects of young Dalit women. It traces the journey of Nina, an upwardly mobile Dalit woman from Chaheru village in the Doaba region of Punjab, to the site of Ravidass Jayanti celebrations in Varanasi. In Chaheru, Nina utilises her fluency in urban cultures and religious knowledge to assert a cosmopolitanism oriented toward modern spaces abroad. During the Ravidass Jayanti celebrations, she draws on her regional and caste identity to claim proximity to the transnational Ravidassia movement and its mobility ethos. Nina’s shifting discourses of cosmopolitanism across the two sites highlight that class mobility among Dalit communities is tenuous and is accompanied by fragile claims to cosmopolitanism and middle-class status. Young Dalit women resolve their compromised access to economic resources and cultural capital by claiming a selective cosmopolitanism that is exclusionary, hierarchical and tied up with parochial identities.
Published in: South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies
To read the full article, please click here.
