Mobility as Violence: Dalit Women’s Negotiations, Resistance, and the Limits of Sanskritization

Abstract

Prevailing anthropological and sociological definitions of social mobility – such as Sanskritisation, Westernisation, modernisation, educational and occupational attainments – conceal more than they reveal. These frameworks have naturalised mobility as a value-neutral process, ignoring the centrality of violence in shaping the experiences of marginalised groups, particularly Dalit women. Based on my feminist ethnography of social mobility among different Dalit women in Uttar Pradesh, this paper examines how violence underpins negotiations, contestations, and strategic agency in everyday life. I argue that concepts like Sanskritisation are not innocuous descriptors of change but deeply structural constructs that exclude marginalised voices and reproduce oppression and inequalities rather than mobility. Using Dalit feminist frameworks, I interrogate the coercion behind Sanskritisation, showing that the experience of mobility is often accompanied by caste-based and gendered violence, economic precarity, moral policing, and surveillance. At the same time, my fieldwork also demonstrates Dalit women do not passively accept either Sanskritisation or Ambedkarite resistance as static categories; instead, they use strategic agency to navigate and subvert these frameworks in everyday life. I show that different Dalit women manoeuvre between Sanskritisation, modernisation, Westernisation and Ambedkarite assertion to navigate the structures of caste and patriarchy to their advantage. By doing so, I argue for moving beyond dominant paradigms of mobility, often based on upper-caste, androcentric definitions, and instead foreground the violent exclusions, negotiations, and strategic agency that shape mobility from below.