Caste, Gender, and Subaltern Agency: A Sociological Analysis of Kainli Kamini’s Resistance in Nepal

Abstract

Yogmaya Neupane is increasingly recognized as an important woman reformer who challenged caste discrimination, gender inequality, religious orthodoxy, and social injustice in early twentieth-century Nepal. However, marginalized women associated with her movement, particularly Kainli Kamini, remain comparatively invisible in historical and sociological scholarship. Her fragmented historical presence provides an important lens for examining caste, gender, subalternity, agency, resistance, and historical memory. This study critically examines Kainli Kamini’s caste-gender intersectionality and everyday resistance within Yogmaya Neupane’s movement and explores how dominant historical narratives have marginalized or silenced Dalit women’s voices in Nepal. The study adopts a qualitative historical-sociological approach based on documentary analysis, textual interpretation, and subaltern feminist reading. Academic and institutional records, historical scholarship, oral traditions, and literary representations are critically examined through intersectionality, Dalit feminist standpoint theory, subalternity, symbolic power, and everyday resistance. Given the fragmented evidence, the study distinguishes historical evidence from oral and literary representations and avoids constructing an unsupported biography. The study finds that Kainli Kamini’s historical visibility, particularly through the reported water-sharing episode with Yogmaya, symbolically challenges caste-based purity, pollution, and untouchability. Her position as a Dalit woman reveals the interconnected effects of caste and patriarchy. Her limited autonomous historical voice also reflects unequal access to literacy, documentation, and knowledge production. Evidence concerning her reported participation in the 1941 jala-samadhi remains insufficiently verified. The study shifts attention from Yogmaya as a singular reformer toward marginalized women associated with her movement. It uses Kainli Kamini’s fragmented historical presence to examine caste-gender inequality, subaltern agency, everyday resistance, and historical memory, highlighting the need for further archival, oral-history, and Dalit feminist research.