Prachi Patankar and Priyanka Samy 
Today, March 8, is Women’s Day.
In December 2024, over three-thousand people gathered in Bangkok for the AWID Forum, a significant gathering of transnational feminists. This gathering of women, LGBTQIA+ people from feminist movements and NGOs from across the world was a beautiful shared space, the sisterhood among activists who passionately discussed courageous movements advocating for a better world. From Palestine and Sudan, from Mexico to Myanmar, indigenous groups fighting for land sovereignty and climate justice, as well as anti-caste grassroots movements striving for equitable futures, the event was a testament to the resilience and determination of people across the world.
We, Prachi and Priyanka, both feminists and changemakers, had crossed paths before because of our involvement in movements and their resource mobilisation. But it was here, in this transnational feminist space that we built a deeper connection. One evening, after a reception at AWID called “Dreaming of Begumpura,” that Prachi had helped organise to celebrate anti-caste dreams, we found ourselves reminiscing about our mothers Gail Omvedt and Ruth Manorama. Our conversation revolved around our mothers’ friendship, shared dreams, and our experiences as daughters raised within movements.
We continued to reflect on the ways we can honour the legacy of our movement elders, including our mothers, Gail Omvedt and Ruth Manorama, as we strive to build a world that is liberated from caste, class, and gender oppression. Their remarkable camaraderie, driven by a shared vision for the liberation of the most marginalised, remains a gilding light. As daughters of feminists, we remember their story of radical sisterhood as a story of a bond that was as transformative as it was revolutionary and one that offers inspiration for feminist and social justice movements today.
Our connection is also rooted in the early exposure we had to diverse people’s movements. We both grew up surrounded by movement leaders from all walks of life, from urban labour struggles, to rural struggles for water and land rights, and women’s struggles for rights and dignity. Each of these struggles formed a vital part of our extended family that shaped each of our upbringing. We shared with each other the collective responsibility that we both feel, not only to our mothers but also to the community of the movements that nurtured and supported us.
Transformational Solidarity
When Gail Omvedt came to India as a scholar and activist, she immersed herself in the anti-caste and left social movements. Her searing critiques of caste and gender oppression inspired action, challenged systems, and opened doors for voices that had been silenced for centuries. Known as a true embodiment of an “organic intellectual,” Gail seamlessly integrated her scholarly contributions with her social movement work in rural Maharashtra where she lived. This grassroots social movement work made her scholarly contributions grounded in the realities of struggles of those most marginalised. Gail produced an extensive body of scholarship ranging from feminist and anti-caste politics, peasant struggles, post-colonial politics, environmental justice, capitalism, and globalisation.
Gail’s partnership with Dalit leaders was marked by humility and shared purpose – a hallmark of her solidarity. The essence shone through in the way she crafted her words of her scholarly work – she understood who she was writing for and embraced the responsibility that came with it.
It was this commitment that created the conditions for her powerful bond with Ruth Manorama, a fierce Dalit feminist activist. As a life-long anti-caste activist, Ruth has devoted her life to confronting a multitude of marginalisations facing oppressed-caste communities in India, linking to caste, gender, and class hierarchies.
Ruth has passionately advocated for the rights of domestic workers and the unorganised sector of labour, as well as for slum dwellers, Dalits, and the empowerment of all marginalised women. She has been at the forefront of various social justice movements – organising at the grassroots, while also bridging critical ground realities with advocacy at the national and global scales.
Also read: Gail Omvedt on the Indian Feminist Movement and the Challenges It Faces
Ruth often speaks of her first meeting with Gail as a turning point. They met in 1986. Ruth had just returned from the United States, where a delegation of ten Dalits as part of the Christian Dalit Liberation Movement (CDLM), had travelled to study the parallels between the Black and Dalit liberation struggles. For the first time, Ruth was exposed to Black American activism and scholarship.
Ruth remembers the time fondly:
“At the time, I had just started reading Gail’s writings. Her writings were unparalleled – she articulated the oppression of Dalits in ways that shook the complacency of caste privilege. Gail was more than her scholarship; she was a comrade who walked alongside us, amplifying our voices and opening spaces that had long been closed to us. When we met, she already knew of my work with the urban poor and the land struggles I had been leading across 100 bastis (urban settlements) in Bangalore. I was immediately captivated by Gail – our conversations were long and profound.”
These connections and conversations catalysed Ruth’s evolution, propelling her to centre Dalit women within the broader movements that she was part of. By placing the realities of caste oppression at the heart of feminist discourse, Ruth challenged the exclusionary structures within the movement.
Ruth recalls:
“I had not previously thought of mobilising Dalit women as a distinct constituency. Gail’s writings and words of encouragement led me to focus exclusively on Dalit women’s issues. Gail took me across Maharashtra, and introduced me to prominent Dalit leaders at the time. That generosity of spirit and solidarity were transformational, reshaping my personal and political journey.”
Ruth’s life’s work and relentless advocacy earned her the Right Livelihood Award, 2006, often called the Alternate Nobel Peace Prize, recognising her “for her commitment over decades to achieving equality for Dalit women, building effective and committed women’s organisations and working for their rights at national and international levels.”
Gail is no more. But Prachi learned about Ruth’s work through Gail, and the importance of Ruth’s organising Dalit women in urban poor communities, and building their power to challenge labour and land exploitation. Gail understood that genuine change in India could only emerge from robust grassroots movements led by everyday individuals coming together to envision and advocate for anti-caste, feminist, and progressive futures. Gail’s scholarship and grassroots movement efforts consistently emphasised the vital importance of unity across different castes and classes.
A Vision for Collective Liberation
Mainstream feminist movements, both in India and globally, have consistently overlooked the significant contributions of women from historically marginalised communities, exploiting their efforts while denying them leadership roles. This erasure persists despite these women being at the forefront of struggles for justice.
In such a context, Ruth and Gail’s solidarity stands out. They rejected the superficial solidarity displayed by most dominant-caste elite feminists, recognising that such allyship often results in patronising and tokenising behaviour towards feminist leaders from oppressed castes, rather than fostering shared responsibility and accountability in the pursuit of change.
Ruth and Gail understood that solidarity requires shared political struggle, long-term commitment, and rising above individualism. Their body of work broke the caste system’s confinement to local struggles, pushing global movements to recognize its intersections with race, labour, feminism, and development. Therefore, transnational solidarity was central to their efforts, forging deep, strategic alliances across borders in the fight for social justice.
Today as caste supremacy, racial capitalism, and entrenched patriarchy continue to suppress our communities, we believe that our movements must be rooted in a radical vision for collective liberation. A vision that does not demand inclusion in existing oppressive structures, but one that seeks to dismantle them entirely. Only through deep, transformative, and accountable solidarity can we build movements capable of withstanding the violence of systemic oppression.
A transnational vision of liberation also demands that we refuse the co-optation of feminist movements by states, corporations, and elite organisations that dilute our demands. It is a call to re-centre grassroots leadership, resource radical organising, and build the international solidarities that the neoliberal world order seeks to erase.
The Unfinished Work: A Call to the Future
Begumpura is not a metaphor, it is a political demand. If our movements today do not disrupt, they are not movements, they are mere extensions of the system itself. We must reject the depoliticisation of feminist struggles, and instead seek to build nurturing radical community-led organising rooted in lived realities to reclaim the power of radical imagination for liberation.
This radical imagination and pursuit of collective liberations must boldly persist as we confront today’s troubling rise of authoritarianism and supremacist ideologies that assert their influence across the globe. For those of us dedicated to not just envisioning a different path but also to uniting in the pursuit of a radically transformed future, it is essential that we genuinely embody love, healing, and support for one another, standing side by side with transformational solidarity. This is a necessity when envisioning and working to realise the shared dream of Ravidas’s Begumpura, a realm free from sorrow, exploitation, caste, or class.
We need to strengthen the transformational solidarity that our feminist mothers and ancestors have built. We must be bolder, louder, and more unrepentant than ever, at this moment. We must dare to think beyond what is considered possible, beyond what is seen as pragmatic, and instead craft a future that is just, abundant, and free from the violence of race, caste, class, and capitalism.
The solidarity that Gail and Ruth forged and nourished sustains us and carries us through the next generation. We are here to take on that responsibility, in our own ways, and do justice to it in these times. Do what the times today require of us and call on us to do.
Prachi Patankar is a feminist and anti-caste activist and writer involved in social movements which link the local and the global, police brutality and war, migration and militarisation, race and caste, women of colour feminism and global gender justice.
Priyanka Samy is a Dalit feminist activist. Her work centres on dismantling systemic and intersecting forms of oppression, advocating for equitable access to rights and essential services, and strengthening feminist movements from the grassroots to the global level.