Paper short abstract:

My paper is the outcome of an ethnographic research carried out in two slums of Ahmedabad, India, amongst Dalit women who roll the agarbatti and who undergo the complex politics of structural inequities beyond constitutional rights granted by law.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decades the Dalits started moving to the public sphere and to an extent they became synonymous with Dalit public figures such a Mayawati, the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party, who born in UP in the Dalit caste of Chamar embarked on a polemic political career which culminated on being the first Dalit women chief minister. Dalit women activists have taken this role forward, and Dalit cultural assertion in the literary field is noteworthy.

However, this ever-expanding Dalit affirmative action cannot be conflated with the "regular" Dalit woman who delve in the shadows of politics and whose sense of belonging to the broader nation - and even to a national Dalit movement - is deeply compromised by social discrimination and segregation.

My paper will be grounded on a fieldwork carried out among Dalit women who leave in a slum of Ahmedabad, and who constitute a marginalized community whose sense of belonging is rooted on socially exclusive rather than on inclusive citizenship.