SOWJANYA TAMALAPAKULA The Politics of Inter-caste Marriage among Dalits in India The Political as Personal ABSTRACT Marriage in Hindu communities is caste-endogamous. Any transgression leads to violence against the men and women who move toward inter-caste unions. A few inter-caste/interfaith couples manage to enter conjugality despite the familial and social pressures. This paper explores the caste and gender politics that operate within inter-caste marriages. KEYWORDS: endogamy, Hinduism, gender, Dalits, inter-caste marriage INTRODUCTION The most significant slogan of second wave feminism, “the personal is political,” became the bedrock of feminist politics. If the personal is political, personal choices are also political. Therefore, there is no personal arena which is apolitical. Marriage and conjugality have been perceived to be spaces of reli- gious significance. 1 In contemporary times, marriage and other forms of inti- mate relationships are considered impenetrable private spaces of individuals. But social structures like gender, race, class, caste, and community continue to determine power relations within marriage and other intimate relationships. The genesis of this article lies in informal discussions among various circles of Dalit feminists. 2 These discussions produced an interesting observation: SOWJANYA TAMALAPAKULA is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, India. My special thanks to N. Rajeshwar for valuable and con- structive suggestions to improve this paper. I thank my mother and Sahitya for their encouragement. I also thank all the participants who facilitated the study. Email: < sowjanya.tamalapakula@tiss.edu>. 1. A. Bandyopadhyay, “Of Sin, Crime and Punishment: Elopements in Bengal, 1929,” in Samita Sen et al. (eds.), Intimate Others: Marriage and Sexualities in India (Kolkata: Stree. 2011): 98–120. 2. Dalit is a political term used to describe the people from the “untouchable” castes in Hindu society. I thank all the Dalit feminists for illuminating the discussion of marriage. Asian Survey, Vol. 59, Number 2, pp. 315–336. ISSN 0004-4687, electronic ISSN 1533-838X. © 2019 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1525/AS.2019.59.2.315. 315