📄 Abstract
Vrinda Nabar's Caste as Woman offers an unusually accessible yet conceptually ambitious account of the cultural production of female subordination in India. Its governing insight is that gender can operate like caste: it is assigned at birth, converted into a hierarchy, naturalised through religious and social authority, reproduced through endogamous marriage and family discipline, and made to appear as destiny rather than history. This paper examines that insight through a close thematic reading of Nabar's discussions of the girl child, marriage, widowhood, dowry, wifehood and motherhood. It argues that Nabar's metaphor of the “female-jati” is most useful when treated not as an equation between caste and gender but as an account of their structural interdependence. The book reveals how patriarchy survives through a dispersed cultural apparatus comprising scriptural interpretation, ritual, family honour, popular media, domestic labour and women's own internalisation of prescribed roles. At the same time, its broad category of “Indian woman” requires an intersectional qualification because caste, class, religion and location do not merely add separate burdens; they produce distinct forms of womanhood. Read alongside B. R. Ambedkar, Uma Chakravarti, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Sharmila Rege, Nabar's work illuminates both the power and the limits of gender-as-caste as a feminist method. The paper concludes that the book's enduring contribution lies in relocating oppression from isolated acts of male cruelty to the ordinary institutions that manufacture consent, respectability and female selfhood.
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📚 How to Cite:
Avnessh Kumar Nim, Dr. Apeksha Tiwari , GENDER AS CASTE: TRADITION, PATRIARCHY AND FEMALE IDENTITY IN VRINDA NABAR'S CASTE AS WOMAN , Volume 11 , Issue 7, July 2026, EPRA International Journal of Research & Development (IJRD) , Pages: 350 - 357 ,