Abstract
Caste is the main social institution that organizes Indian society. There are 3,000 castes and 25,000 subcastes in India (Chaudhary, 2019). Dalits are marginalized socially, economically, politically, and culturally (Thorat, 2008) and represent a dehumanized partition of Indian society. Systemic discrimination affects all gender, and age groups equally, and it has a more impact on Dalit women as they are placed at a very low position in the social structure. Dalit women have to experience multiple faces of oppression, discrimination, subjugation, and exclusion within their community and outside of the community too (Guru, 1995). Hence, they are forced to face a triple burden of discrimination as women, the poor, and Dalits (Sabharwal & Sonalkar, 2015a). Constant discrimination within and outside of the community against Dalit women impacts their well-being, the effective functioning of an individual, and the effective functioning community. Hence their mental health and emotional stability are affected badly as it has a direct connection with overall well-being (Krushna Chandra Sahoo, 2015). The researcher chose the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Tindall, 2009) method for this study to explore how discrimination in the name of Caste and Gender impacts the psychosocial health of Dalit women (Khubchandani et al., 2018) and the pathways and resources people have engaged to reduce caste-based oppression in their lives to promote their psychosocial health (Shields-Zeeman et al., 2017). The findings from this study bring out the intersectional discrimination faced by Dalit women and their perceived pathways to promote their mental health.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Caste, Gender, Intersectional Discrimination, Psychosocial health and Well-being
