The Making of ‘Brahmin Womanhood’: An Intersectional and Reflexive Study

Abstract

Discourses around the ‘modern Indian woman’ emerged as a part of the anti-colonial nationalist movement in India. Scholars have widely recognised that the issues in its purview are implicitly centred on the experiences of dominant caste (savarna) women, all while claiming to save women belonging to marginalised castes, classes, and religious backgrounds. Responding to such critique, feminist studies exploring caste-gender intersections have focused on the category of Dalit women. This leaves a gap in our understanding of how gender relations operate among socially dominant castes. In this paper, I argue that the performance of womanhood is an intrinsic feature of caste practice among Brahmins, a scripturally masculine category and, more recently, a governmentalised caste category associated with birth. To make this case, I employ intersectionality to analyse the production of womanhood among Tamil Brahmins amidst generational changes and sociopolitical shifts in the postcolonial setting. I also draw on my identity as a caste-gender insider (Tamil Brahmin woman) to reflect on the co-occurrence of caste privilege and gender conformity in the making of hegemonic womanhood in the caste context. Like the ‘modern Indian woman’, I posit that the ‘Brahmin woman’ must be viewed as a discursive construct. Doing so uncovers the gaps between notions of ideal Brahmin womanhood and the lived experiences of Brahmin women, which both caste ideologues and critics often conflate.