“Daat Faadu Mahilaye”: Dalit Women’s Laughter and Disruption of Casteist Structures, India

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2022 to 2024 in two urban villages in Delhi, I investigate how Dalit women’s laughter functions as a powerful site of anti-caste resistance and feminist praxis. Moving away from dominant frameworks that foreground grief and victimhood, I centre laughter as an everyday embodied tactic employed by Dalit women to navigate and subvert the structural violences of caste, gender, class, and religion. I analyse how laughter operates as a generative force—simultaneously affective and political— and thus unsettles the fixity of caste, gender, class, space and religion. Engaging with interdisciplinary debates in feminist anthropology, Dalit studies, and humour theory, I examine how Dalit women’s shared, rebellious, and often vulgar laughter forms a counter-public, subaltern speech act that challenges brahminical patriarchy. Laughter, conventionally perceived as an expression of joy, I argue, is a defense mechanism employed by Dalit women to navigate everyday caste violence in the cities, creating the societal perception of them as Daat Faadu Mahilaye (Women Who Show Teeth). This analysis is crucial, as caste significantly influences women’s access to laughter in India. I ask, who has the privilege to laugh? Whose right to laughter is jeopardized? Who are the women who laugh more frequently, and why? This paper offers insights into discussions of gender, and urban marginalization.