FII Interviews: In conversation with Christina Dhanuja about her book “Dalit Women And The Fullness Of Life”
Christina Dhanuja is a writer, researcher and strategist whose work sits at the intersections of caste, gender, creed and justice. A third-generation Christian Dalit woman, she has worked for over 16 years in India, China, Singapore and the Netherlands, as an external relations consultant at Shell’s headquarters in The Hague, as a government and business advisor to the country chairman of Shell China, and subsequently as a consultant to corporations, non-profit organizations, religious institutions and universities in the areas of leadership development, caste justice and accountability frameworks.
She is co-founder of the #DalitHistoryMonth Project and founding member of the Global Campaign for Dalit Womena minority-led initiative working with survivors of sexual violence, caste atrocities, climate change and economic oppression.
Her writing has appeared in The Wire, Outlook India, HuffPost, The Swaddle, GenderIT and Verve, among others.
Her debut book, Dalit Women and the Fullness of Life, published by Penguin Random House India, begins with a problem that is also a provocation: that writing about Dalit women has long been shaped by two dominant frameworks: structural analysis and narratives of suffering or resilience. Both are important, but neither is enough. What they consistently leave out are the textures of everyday life, i.e. the way Dalit women experience desires, navigate relationships, negotiate beliefs or do business meaning of their own identity.
Written over several years and in cities such as New York, Chennai and Visakhapatnam, the book includes ten thematic chapters: Identity, Movements, Work, Community, Sisterhood, Body, Desire, Trauma, Faith and Joy. It combines memoir with social research and uses personal experiences as a method for examining larger structures. In Dhanuja’s reading, caste is not just a system of external violence, but something internalized, something that shapes one’s self-worth, emotional life and the smallest daily decisions: who to trust, how one belongs, what one wants.
We spoke to Christina Dhanuja about the genesis of the book, the arguments it makes and the silence it refuses to maintain.
FII: The lives of Dalit women tend to be divided into two categories in public discourse: victimhood or exceptional resilience. What harm does each of these things cause?
Christina: Both deal damage in different ways. The sacrifice turns Dalit women into objects of suffering. than those who do not have the agency or ability to make decisions for themselves and their families. Resilience burdens us with the expectation of endless strength – no matter what happens or how the world treats us, we would make it through. Ergo, no systemic change is required!
More broadly, they not only serve to misrepresent ourselves in public (and in private life), but also limit our ideas about who we could be. The many possibilities that lie before us become difficult to access because of this hyperfocus on stereotypes. Where is the space to be human? Where is the space to be anything and everything and not just something?
FII: Much writing on caste focuses on its external violence, atrocities, discrimination and systemic exclusion. Your book seems to be equally about how caste lives within a person, their self-esteem, their desires, and the decisions one makes about who to trust. What motivated you to write about this inner dimension?
Christina: Because this perspective is long overdue. Growing up, I struggled to understand the world around me. I didn’t know how to process the complicated experiences I was having because of my social situation. I didn’t have the language to understand why I felt this way when people around me kept saying that caste had nothing to do with it – that the world had somehow become so post- and anti-caste that there was no way caste could affect how people saw each other. And the literature, where it existed, focused more on the external. But what does caste-based experiences do to a child? How does she grow into the confident young woman that progressive society expects, while at the same time doing everything she can to tear it down?
With that in mind, I wrote this book as much for myself as for others. I wanted to read a book that would help me understand the world. I wanted to read about how to break down stereotypes about Dalit women. I wanted to read about the sisterhood of Dalit women and the joy of Dalit women – and whether I would ever find it. I wanted language. I wanted a narrative.
With that in mind, I wrote this book as much for myself as for others. I wanted to read a book that would help me understand the world. I wanted to read about how to break down stereotypes about Dalit women. I wanted to read about the sisterhood of Dalit women and the joy of Dalit women – and whether I would ever find it. I wanted language. I wanted a narrative.
FII: How did your relationship to faith, particularly Dalit Christian identity, shape what you were able to see and say in this book that might have been overlooked in a secular setting?
Christina: I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way. It does not seem right to us to compare Dalit Christianity to a secular framework, as if the former were somehow less rational than the latter. Dalit Christianity stands in contrast to traditional Christianity, Indianized Christianity, white evangelicalism, and faith traditions that hold a differential value for human beings. My faith is an essential part of who I am and my personality. And Dalit Christianity as a theological worldview has helped me recognize the divine in myself and my women, which feels like a powerful intervention for me, considering that caste sees us as spiritually impure.
FII: Joy is the hardest thing to write about politically without it turning into sentimentality or achievement. How did you approach the joy of writing for Dalit women without it becoming reassuring for non-Dalit readers?
Christina: I had a lot of fun writing the joy chapter, and I was conscious of the fact that it didn’t sound sentimental. I loved that the writer in me refused to settle for platitudes because, frankly, I was tired of reading pieces that infantilized the process of finding and maintaining joy. So it was really important to discover that joy, too, is essentially a caste-based good – something that, not surprisingly, is rationed based on one’s caste (and gender, as you’ll see). And only through deconstruction can we reimagine what joy might look like for Dalit women.
FII: The book combines personal experience with structural analysis. As you were writing, how did you decide what stayed in the memoir and what went into discussion, and was there material that you knew belonged in the book but couldn’t bring yourself to include?
Christina: My political writing always has its roots in the personal, and in many cases the two are indistinguishable. So at this point it’s more of a habit than a consciously structured process. And I’ve written about pretty much everything I wanted to write about.
FII: “Abundance” could easily become a soft word, ambitious, vague and certain. In the book you use it as something more sophisticated. How do you define it and what does it require?
Christina: The fullness of life, as I see it and as the book articulates it, is essentially the opportunity for Dalit women to experience, on a systemic, collective and individual level, the full spectrum of possibilities that life has to offer. This requires much more than symbolic inclusion and symbolic representation. It requires a complete reinterpretation – and in some contexts, revision – of the social, political, emotional, spiritual and material realities under which Dalit women are expected to live and endure. It also requires an overhaul of public and academic discourses, which in turn determine a range of things from politics to organizational dynamics to health practices and the way we lead movements.
FII: Who were you talking to while writing: Dalit women who read themselves in these pages, or the institutions and movements that have repeatedly crushed them?
Christina: Both. Some sites are aimed primarily at Dalit women, while the rest are more for listening and taking notes. Other pages deal with institutions, movements and the public, while Dalit women listen and hopefully cheer.
Dalit Women and the Fullness of Life by Christina Dhanuja, published by Penguin Random House, is for sale.
Japleen is smashing the patriarchy for a living! She is the founder and CEO of Feminism in India, an award-winning digital, bilingual, intersectional feminist media platform. She is also an Acumen Fellow, TEDx speaker and UN World Summit Young Innovator. Japleen loves gardening, traveling, swimming and cycling.
