When Babytai Kamble<\/a><\/strong> penned The Prisons We Brok<\/em>e<\/a><\/strong>, the first published autobiography by a Dalit woman in Marathi, she did more than just narrate a life; she exposed the architecture of caste-determined care. \u201cWe clean the filth others create, then are called filthy ourselves<\/em>,\u201d wrote Kamble, naming an untouchable reality that Indian literature has long rendered invisible. While mainstream narratives celebrate the housewife\u2019s domestic sacrifice, they systematically erase the Dalit and Bahujan women whose blistered hands scrub floors before dawn, wash vessels others have dirtied, and absorb the household\u2019s emotional dumping, only to disappear from the stories when the time comes. Their labour is what sustains the upper-caste domesticity, yet remains the silent infrastructure of comfort: foundational, uncredited, unnamed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kamble\u2019s testimony resonates powerfully across Dalit feminist literature. Bama\u2019s seminal Tamil autobiography Karukku<\/em> (1992)<\/a><\/strong> documents how Paraiyar Christian women scrubbed floors on their knees while being denied dignity by upper-caste nuns who \u201cwould not even drink water touched by our hands<\/em>.\u201d Similarly, Shantabai Kamble\u2019s Majya Jalmachi Chittarkatha (The Kaleidoscope Story of My Life)<\/a><\/strong> traces how Mahar women\u2019s bodies became sites of caste-allocated sanitation work, writing, \u201cOur hands were meant only for sweeping, scrubbing, and serving<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Dalit feminist scholar Urmila Pawar writes<\/a><\/strong> in The Weave of My Life<\/em>, \u201cMy mother used to weave aaydans<\/em>,\u201d the Marathi generic term for all things made from bamboo. \u201cI find that her act of weaving and my act of writing are organically linked. The weave is similar. It is the weave of pain, suffering, and agony that links us<\/em>.\u201d This metaphor transcends poetry: her mother\u2019s bamboo weaving, like the Dalit domestic worker\u2019s scrubbing, was never \u201cjust labour\u201d. It was an unacknowledged infrastructure of survival, transformed into literary resistance.<\/p>\n Interestingly, however, Pawar has analysed the differences between Brahman and Dalit women, arguing that the Dalit woman, in contrast to the Brahman woman, was not bound by customs such as sati, child marriage, among others. Pawar further exploded some myths regarding the gender question in relation to the Dalit movement, such as the wide gap between Dalit and Brahman women on economic, social and educational levels.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pawar continues, \u201cA myth is harboured that unlike the brahman woman the dalit woman is free from bondage and sti\ufb02ing restrictions. The pain of the devadasi, the deserted woman and the murali is ignored in this stand. In fact the woman in the household is yet to get recognition as a full and equal human being<\/em> (ibid: 94).\u201d<\/p>\n On similar lines, Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, in their work entitled Daughters of Independence<\/em>, write about the non-sexual and the sexual divisions of labour. Although economically deprived, Dalit women lead more sexually liberated lives than upper-caste women. Lower caste women, by contrast, experience far fewer controls over their physical freedom.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe economic bene\ufb01ts and the social constraints of seclusion are unknown to them. Sati was never demanded of them, widowhood was no curse, divorce was allowed in many lower caste communities and widows and divorced people could re-marry without disgrace<\/em> (Liddle and Joshi 1986: 95-69 and 91).\u201d<\/p>\n In Aayda: Mahila Adivasi Jivan Katha (edited by Pawar and Meenakshi Moon), oral histories of Adivasi and Dalit women reframe domestic work not as a naturalised duty but as caste-determined exploitation. Oxfam\u2019s data confirms this structural truth: urban Indian women spend 312 minutes daily on unpaid care work, compared with men\u2019s 29 minutes; rural women spend 291 minutes, compared with men\u2019s 32 minutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n The rate of this invisibility is concerning. Oxfam\u2019s 2020 report<\/a><\/strong>, Time to Care<\/em>, along with an India-focused supplement, demonstrates how our sexist economies are acting as a catalyst for the inequality crisis. \u201cWomen and girls are among those who benefit least from today\u2019s economic system. They spend billions of hours cooking, cleaning and caring for children and the elderly.\u00a0Unpaid care work is the \u2018hidden engine\u2019 that\u00a0keeps the wheels of our economies, businesses and societies moving. It is driven by women who often have little time to get an education, earn a decent living or have a say in how our societies are run, and who are therefore trapped at the bottom of the economy,<\/em>\u201d stated former Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar. Furthermore, the report suggests that women make up two-thirds of the paid \u2018care workforce\u2019. Jobs such as nursery workers, domestic workers, and care assistants are often poorly paid, provide scant benefits, impose irregular hours,\u00a0and can take a physical and emotional toll.<\/p>\n Thus, pressure on carers, whether unpaid or paid, is set to grow over the coming decade as the global population ages.\u00a0Climate change could worsen the looming global care crisis \u2014by 2025, up to 2.4 billion people will live in areas without enough water, and women and girls will have to walk even longer distances to fetch it.\u00a080% of indigenous people live in Asia and the Pacific, a region vulnerable to climate change. \u201cGovernments must prioritise care as being as important as all other sectors in order to build more human economies that work for everyone, not just a fortunate few<\/em>,\u201d said Behar.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the Periodic Labour Force Survey (2017\u201318) report<\/a><\/strong>, it is seen that in rural areas, the share of helper in household enterprises was nearly 17 per cent among male self-employed workers whereas 67 per cent among female self-employed workers while in urban areas, the share of helper in household enterprises was nearly 11 per cent among male self-employed workers and 32 per cent among female self-employed workers.<\/p>\nLiterary Testimonies of Embodied Labour<\/h3>\n
What The Data Says?<\/h3>\n
![\"ahana](\"https:\/\/feminisminindia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/IMG_20260225_193227-100x100.jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\n