Self-care and The Dalit Woman

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

As days go by, and as I meet more of my amazing sisters, I am becoming increasingly convinced that self-care and self-love is of great importance to us Dalit women. The kind that is fierce, almost radical.

But even as I write this, I wonder what it really means to place the self over the other. And who or what defines the ‘other’? What does self-reliance really mean? What does community and sisterhood and friendship really mean then? How does sex and love and loss figure in all this? What does advocacy and activism and counselling look like, where life and work is all about the other?

Also at a time when a status, a selfie, a plane ticket, a like, and a share has the potency to evoke hate and vitriolic backlashes, on social media and otherwise, in the name of ‘calling-out’, would self love be interpreted as selfishness? And do we need to bother? Especially when it comes from those we call our own?

And then there is violence — so many kinds of it, from so many corners. From a stranger, a co-passenger, an ally, the partner, a friend, this Savarna policeman, that upper caste landlord, a boss, a colleague, a lover, the family, the community, the someone and the anyone. It doesn’t end and it never promises to.

What do we do at this point? What does the Dalit woman do? Who do we run to? Where do we leave our kids, who do we leave them with? Where is the money? Who is the ‘man’ in our life? The world says he is our man, our love, and we too think we love him; yet, all we do is cry or shout. He beats us when he is drunk, he beats us when he is frustrated, he beats us when he is bored. Sometimes he beats us even without beating us. Sometimes it’s his words that kill; sometimes it’s his love. Yet, many times, we choose to protect him, his image and his honour, we find excuses for his behaviour, lest the savarnas use our story to demonise him; and this by placing our happiness, our peace, and our sense of dignity on hold. “Wait, not now. Shut up, you little thing, what is happening to you is neither so bad nor are you so important. You’re a Dalit woman, whose skin is too dark to touch and whose voice, too loud to evoke any desire. Wait, be silent.”

Also, if we do remain silent, who do we really have? Would we run to our friend, the one who promised to be there all life and then buckled? Or perhaps another, the one who speaks of feminism and liberation and revolution, but doesn’t have a ear or a hand to lend? Would we run to each other? Maybe we would find a new job. Or a new man. Or both. Or the one that’s easier.

But the savarnas. Like hawks they wait in the street corner. They will taunt and tease. They will violate. They will size us up and pull us down. They will not hesitate to crush us when they get a chance. For this to end, for this fight to cease, should we stay? Should we feign peace and fake love?

Maybe this is when we would stop trusting everyone but ourselves. Perhaps self-love, to us, at its core, would just mean protection from the others; a form of survival.

But if we do choose this path, assuming that we have fought to exercise this choice, would we have the toolkit? Would we know how to remind ourselves that our skin is beautiful like innocence, and our eyes, like the yellowness of a flame leaf? Would we know that inside of us lies so much strength, all that we would ever need? Would we believe that we matter? Our voice and our Dalit-ness and our worldview?

Would we realise that self care and self love is not the domain of just savarna feminists, who have created careers and lives riding on the backs of our women as their maids and nannies? Would we know how to reject the you’re-not-so-good-enough voice? Would we have the courage to sometimes protect our souls from ourselves? Would we trust our self-love over our partner’s abuse that comes camouflaged as love? Would we fully, daily, believe that we are beautiful and desirable and everything else?

Would we believe, fiercely, that our lives and our souls are beyond precious? Would we be radical enough to leave and close and stop, anything, everything that is harming us? Would we trust our authenticity, and with that, our spirit of resilience? Would we please not sacrifice just about everything? Would we “leave the table when love (and respect) are no longer being served”? Would we speak and write and paint our minds, without fearing backlash?

Would we choose life? Would we choose healing? Would we, by that, choose to teach each other ways to self-love and love/stand up for each other?