When one upholds an identity, they are also committing to embrace many opinions and perceptions that come with it. What people often forget or choose not to highlight is how multiple identities can co-exist within everyone. When writer Christina Dhanuja talks about her experiences as a woman, Dalit Christian, an immigrant, and more, she makes it clear that she had to fight stereotypes across these identities. Sticking to a certain identity can demand purity tests from certain people, circles, or even nameless accounts on social media. Even though who makes all the rules is unclear, the result of not adhering to all the boxes of a particular identity is sometimes an angry X thread or a rant on Instagram stories, followed by an unfollow or block. And the polarisation of politics on social media forces you to take a stand. This seeps into real lives, never allowing people to understand the complexities. The one-word solution to this problem is intersectionality, and that is exactly what Christina tries to pen down in the pages of ‘Dalit Women and the Fullness of Life’ (published by Penguin Random House India).
Through her book, she brings in perspectives from all sides, writes hard-hitting truths of even progressive circles who are “proficient in the language of caste politics,” but conceals a “deep disgust for Dalits.” Coming out is, as Christina shares, is a risk, the cushioning of which requires one or more of the following: a higher socio-economic status; anti-caste politicisation; adjacency to savarna or white lineage; and an upbringing in, or migration to, a geographical context that is not caste-contoured. Through her book, she makes it clear that “the savarna’s inability to comprehend differences among Dalits is not a burden the latter must bear.” Excerpts follow:
Q: You wrote through miscarriages, childbirth, heartbreak, and postpartum — through the full spectrum of a woman’s interior life. At what point did you decide that your personal experience was the political argument and not just a backdrop to it?
My personal experience is not the political argument. It would be more accurate to say that I situated my personal experiences within a political context shaped by multiple axes, including caste, class, patriarchy, religion, and other less visible ones. My writing has always emerged from the personal, especially when writing politically. And yes, writing through experiences such as miscarriages, childbirth, and postpartum did inform my political perspectives.
Q: You describe apologising to people who disrespected you, afraid they’d leave; and then someone calling you spineless, someone else saying you were too servile to be a feminist. How do you hold together the contradiction of being a woman who writes fiercely about liberation while privately negotiating survival?
That is not necessarily a contradiction. In fact, I think it is precisely because one is negotiating survival that one feels the need to write about liberation. In my case, I wanted — and still want — to be free of this pressure to put up with disrespect and bad behaviour in exchange for a semblance of community. The fact that one is not always able to “stand up” for oneself in oppressive situations is less an indication of personal failure than of what the structure demands.
Q: That classroom scene where your teacher asked you to stand up and justify your caste category in front of 50 children was too cruel. What does it cost a child to be made an example of like that, and how long did it take you to name that as violence?
It is cruel, but it is also commonplace. I did not quite understand what was happening until much later. I still remember though the way her head tilted and her eyes widened when she asked me if I really, really came under open competition. As a child, one doesn’t necessarily register these things as violence. And as you grow older, you shrug it off, not wanting to make a big deal about it, because what matters is the ‘here and now,’ as some therapists would say. But it lingers on — this something that makes you feel like a fraud, an imposter, moving in spaces you really, really shouldn’t be in.
Q: You write that “coming out” as Dalit requires a specific set of cushions, like socioeconomic status, anti-caste education, geographic distance. For women who have none of those buffers, what does this book offer them?
It offers them the assurance that they are enough. That what they are doing — or not doing — is enough. That they don’t necessarily have to ‘come out’ in order to feel authentic. As I mention in the book, the act of coming out in and of itself doesn’t guarantee societal acceptance. And there is also nothing inherently Dalit about any of us that mandates a broadcast. Dalit is neither a natural nor a perennial identity. It is a political choice we have made based on our values; not our caste positionality, which is based on a lie.
Q: You reveal how Christianity became a kind of caste laundering, talking salvation while concealing Saidapet’s slums. How do you write about a faith that simultaneously sheltered and deceived your community, without flattening either truth?
Deception is a harsh word to use here. I’d rather see it as a caste problem rather than Christianity’s. As I have mentioned elsewhere, caste is also a framework that can work well with other paradigms. The Faith chapter delves into this much more deeply, while positioning Dalit liberation theology as an anti-caste, anti-colonial alternative.
Dalit Christian experiences are complex and complicated. There is no escaping that. It is a faith that is both liberating and colonising. But, as I mention in the book, there is also something undeniably interventional about Christ’s salvation. Here is a population whose lives have always been considered subhuman. They’ve been told that their separation from the divine is both permanent and predetermined. And then this faith comes along, telling them the opposite. That nothing — no power in the sky above or on the earth below — can separate them from the love of God. For Dalit Christian women, this means that they can converse with the ‘God in heaven’ without the need for men or Brahmins.
Q: You caution that by saying “Dalit this” and “Dalit that,” we risk reifying the very system that created the category. But erasure is equally dangerous. How do you navigate that tightrope in your writing and in life?
Yes, I think it is not an easy thing to navigate. It is an everyday reality to be battling this tension, especially when you are publicly Dalit and label everything as Dalit, while also having to be cognizant of the risks that come with it.
Q: You push back against reducing Ambedkar to a “Dalit icon” arguing it diminishes the fullness of his intellectual and political life. Do you feel Dalit women writers face a similar reductionism, where their work is only read as Dalit testimony rather than as literature?
Yes, absolutely. All the more reason for Dalit women writers to be writing about anything and everything from sci-fi to true crime to historical fiction, and for publishing houses to consciously refrain from pigeonholing their work.
Q: You make a sharp observation about NGO-isation — about how it has turned Dalit women’s activism into project-based work, while locking Dalit women themselves into the role of “perpetual victims.” Who benefits from keeping Dalit women stagnant on paper, and what does genuine solidarity look like?
There is an entire industrial complex that functions on the backs of Dalit women. From academic researchers to NGOs to social media influencers to upper-caste interns, many benefit from Dalit women’s lived experiences — particularly those who do not have access to the tools and resources the rest of us do. One needs to only look at the purpose statements of upper-caste students applying to foreign universities and fellowships, and what they cite as ‘grassroots experience.’
Q: The book is “for little Dalit girls, young Dalit women, and old Dalit mothers,” you say. When one of those little girls read this book twenty years from now, what do you most hope she finds in it?
That those who came before her fought for her fullness in fighting for their own.
Q: This book was written across continents — East Harlem, the Rose Main Reading Room, Chennai, Visakhapatnam. How did geography shape your thinking? Did the distance from India permit you to say things you couldn’t have said from within it?
Yes, and no. I also wrote portions of this book in India, and most of what I write about, I experienced in India. So the material itself is rooted there. But being away has helped my confidence overall. The fact that I could build a home with a loving partner, and now a son, is also a kind of luxury that I needed to write this book.