In recent years, a distinct genre of academic writing on caste and gender has acquired considerable prominence. It announces itself as a radical intervention, claiming to recover marginal voices allegedly erased by earlier nationalist or reformist narratives. The figure of the subaltern woman becomes the privileged site through which the contradictions of social movements are exposed. Shailaja Paik’s essay on Ambedkar and the figure of the “prostitute” is exemplary of this trend. Her argument suggests that the Ambedkarite movement’s emphasis on discipline and reform produced a politics of respectability that marginalized Dalit women associated with Tamasha performance and sexual labour.

Such arguments are often presented as bold feminist correctives to hagiographic readings of anti-caste movements. Yet beneath this appearance of radicalism lies a theoretical framework that is strikingly familiar. The political economy of caste recedes into the background while the internal moral contradictions of the oppressed become the primary object of critique. What is framed as feminist recovery thus operates within a broader liberal academic tendency: the substitution of structural analysis with narratives centered on identity, morality, and cultural representation.

The problem is not that Paik draws attention to neglected histories. The lives of Dalit women who navigated the complex economies of performance, labour, and survival deserve serious historical attention. The difficulty lies in the interpretive lens through which these histories are read. When Ambedkar’s critique of Tamasha culture is interpreted primarily as patriarchal respectability politics, the structural foundations of caste society are quietly displaced. Anti-caste political strategy becomes indistinguishable from moral regulation.

This displacement becomes clearer when we return to the fundamental insight offered by Karl Marx: social hierarchies cannot be understood solely through cultural meanings or moral discourses; they must be analyzed through the material organization of labour and property. Caste historically functioned as a mechanism that assigned entire communities to hereditary occupations while simultaneously stigmatizing those occupations as degrading or impure. Ritual hierarchy thus served a very practical function: it naturalized economic exploitation.

Dalit women’s participation in Tamasha and forms of sexual labour cannot be understood outside this structure. These practices existed within a caste economy in which access to land, education, and dignified employment was systematically denied. Eroticized performance and sexual availability were embedded within systems of patronage that tied Dalit labour to dominant caste elites. The bodies of Dalit women became sites where caste hierarchy, economic extraction, and cultural humiliation intersected.

Under such conditions, the question confronting the Ambedkarite movement was not merely one of stigma but of structural entrapment. Ambedkar understood with extraordinary clarity that caste reproduced itself by locking communities into hereditary labour regimes. His famous formulation that caste represents a “division of labourers rather than a division of labour” captured precisely this dynamic. The struggle against caste therefore required not only political agitation but a transformation of the social and economic practices through which caste hierarchy was reproduced in everyday life.

The Ambedkarite critique of occupations associated with humiliation must therefore be interpreted as part of a broader project of liberation from caste-bound labour. When Tamasha was transformed into forms such as Jalsa—where erotic spectacle gave way to political education—the aim was not to purify culture but to reconfigure it. Spaces of entertainment and patronage were converted into spaces of collective consciousness.

In other words, what is now described as “respectability politics” was in fact a strategic attempt to dismantle the symbolic and economic infrastructure of caste society.

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital helps illuminate this process. In deeply stratified societies, power operates not only through economic control but also through the distribution of legitimacy and recognition. Dalits were historically denied not merely resources but dignity itself. Their social representation was systematically constructed through stereotypes of impurity, immorality, and incapacity.

The Ambedkarite movement confronted this symbolic violence directly. By cultivating discipline, education, and political organization, it sought to accumulate symbolic capital within a hostile social field. The production of a modern Dalit public was therefore not a cosmetic exercise in moral respectability but a radical reconfiguration of the social grammar through which caste hierarchy justified itself.

Yet contemporary academic discourse often approaches such historical transformations through an entirely different sensibility. Instead of analyzing how systems of domination structure social life, the analytical gaze turns inward toward the internal tensions of marginalized communities. Political movements that sought to dismantle structures of exploitation are reinterpreted as disciplinary regimes that regulate sexuality or culture.

This shift reflects a deeper transformation in the way knowledge itself is produced and circulated within the contemporary university. Structural critique increasingly gives way to a marketplace of moral narratives in which identity and recognition become the dominant currencies. Within such an environment, scholarship often appears radical precisely to the extent that it exposes contradictions within the oppressed, while leaving the underlying architecture of power largely undisturbed.

Paik’s narrative participates in this broader intellectual tendency. By centering the figure of the prostitute as the limit of Ambedkarite politics, the argument subtly redirects attention away from the caste economy that produced such conditions in the first place. The focus shifts from the structures that compelled Dalit women into degrading labour to the alleged discomfort of Dalit male reformers confronting those realities.

The political consequence of this shift is the quiet production of Dalit masculinity as the site of critique. Ambedkarite men appear as agents who discipline women’s sexuality in order to achieve social respectability. While gender tensions within movements certainly exist, the analytical framing adopted here risks reproducing a familiar colonial trope: the construction of subaltern men as inherently patriarchal subjects whose politics must be morally corrected.

From a Dalit-Bahujan perspective, this framing demands serious scrutiny. Dalit men historically occupied positions of extreme vulnerability within caste society. They were subjected to humiliation, violence, and economic dispossession by dominant castes. Their attempts to reorganize community life were shaped by this context of systemic exclusion.

When gender relations within oppressed communities are analyzed without situating them within the larger structure of caste domination, critique easily becomes a form of moral surveillance directed at the oppressed themselves. The structural violence of caste society fades into the background while the supposed contradictions of anti-caste movements occupy center stage.

The irony is difficult to ignore. Scholarship that claims to speak in the name of marginality ends up reproducing the very epistemological patterns through which ruling groups have historically interpreted the lives of the oppressed. The subaltern once again becomes an object of explanation rather than a subject of political transformation.

From a Marxian standpoint, this shift represents the masking of class relations through the language of identity. The caste system historically functioned as a mechanism for organizing labour and extracting surplus from subordinated communities. To analyze its effects primarily through the lens of sexuality and stigma is to detach those experiences from the economic structures that produced them.

Ambedkar’s own writings repeatedly warned against precisely such abstractions. His political project was rooted in the recognition that dignity without material transformation is fragile and reversible. Education, industrial employment, and economic independence were not merely social reforms; they were the foundations of a new political subject capable of confronting caste hierarchy.

Seen from this perspective, the Ambedkarite emphasis on discipline and collective reform appears not as patriarchal moralism but as a revolutionary attempt to break the hereditary reproduction of caste labour.

None of this is to deny the necessity of feminist critique within anti-caste movements. On the contrary, a genuinely radical feminist politics must confront the ways in which gender oppression intersects with caste and class. But such critique cannot be grounded in liberal moral frameworks that isolate sexuality from the structures of labour and power within which it is embedded.

To do so risks transforming the history of anti-caste struggle into a morality play in which the oppressed themselves become the principal objects of scrutiny.

If the study of caste is to remain politically meaningful, it must resist this intellectual drift. The central task remains what Ambedkar himself insisted upon: to expose the material foundations of caste domination and to dismantle the social structures that sustain it. Without restoring the primacy of political economy, the critique of caste risks dissolving into an endless commentary on identity and representation.

The history of Dalit emancipation deserves better than that.