Akanksha Shahi
The recent controversy on Instagram, initiated by influencer Divija Bhasin, revolves around the hashtag “#ProudRandi,” which has polarised viewers into two different categories. In her video, Divija Bhasin shares her experiences, explaining that due to her bold nature and her willingness to raise her voice against various issues, some people have commented on her posts by calling her a “Randi.” In response to these comments, Bhasin confirmed, “Yes, I am a proud Randi,” and encouraged her followers, particularly women, to use the hashtag #ProudRandi on their accounts. This call to action led several teenage girls to adopt the hashtag, sparking a significant debate.
The whole action of Bhasin is an effort to “reclaim” a caste-coded sexual slur, illustrating the persistent tensions and internal contradictions that define savarna feminism in India. Far from constituting an act of empowerment, this gesture exemplifies a recurring pattern wherein savarna feminists appropriate marginalised women’s histories, vocabularies, and experiences while positioning themselves as the universal referent of feminist struggle. Through this move, Bhasin not only detaches the slur from its historical grounding but also reframes it through her urban upper-caste gaze, which neglects the larger structural oppression of the working-class Bahujan women. This flattening is what enables savarna feminism to claim universality while erasing the structured caste-specific mechanisms of violence that make the term un-reclaimable for many women.
This particular slur, “Randi”, is not a generic insult but a historically sedimented weapon of caste and sexual regulation. Its usage is intimately tied to the lives of women in sex work. These women, as a pan-India survey indicates, predominantly belong to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes. In Northern India, the word functions simultaneously as a tool of sexual shaming and caste discipline: it marks the woman as “characterless” while invoking the casteist imaginary of women from communities historically pushed into prostitution through Brahminical patriarchy and caste-based occupational stratification. The slur thus draws its force not merely from patriarchal contempt for sexually autonomous women, but from caste histories that have designated certain women as inherently available, polluted, or morally suspect.
Against this background, a central question emerges: How does Divija Bhasin’s experience of cyberbullying gain the authority to overshadow the experiences of lakhs of lower-caste women whose identities have been shaped and degraded by this very slur? Acknowledging that Bhasin’s harassment is unjust does not necessitate equating it with the centuries-long caste-based subjugation embedded in the slur. Such an equivalence is both analytically flawed and politically violent, because it collapses structural harm into personal grievance and erases the historical specificity of caste oppression. Indeed, Bhasin’s narrative inadvertently reveals the operations of Brahminical patriarchy she fails to interrogate. To be called this slur is not merely to be insulted; it is to be threatened with being cast as a woman from communities associated with hereditary sex work. This reveals how caste and gender co-produce each other: sexual regulation is always already caste regulation.
A deeper and more uncomfortable question emerges here: Do the women engaged in sex work choose this identity? Do they aspire to become prostitutes? Do they dream of being labelled through a term that has historically operated as a slur? The answer is self-evident. Yet, savarna feminist discourse routinely sidesteps the structural coercions, particularly caste location, that push lower-caste and denotified community women into intergenerational sex work. Another critical concern is whether women located within specific caste and socioeconomic hierarchies even possess the option to take pride in such labels. The very ability to reclaim or romanticise a term historically used to degrade women reveals the depth of privilege—caste, class, urban location, or professional status that insulates certain women from its everyday violence. For women from stigmatised castes or working-class backgrounds, this term has been a lifelong tool of humiliation; its reclamation by privileged women offers them no relief, no transformation of material realities, and no acknowledgement of the systemic conditions that sustain the stigma.
Ultimately, this symbolic movement of renaming or re-signifying does little for women whose labour and identities are already shaped by structural vulnerabilities. By homogenising women’s experiences under the rhetoric of universal sisterhood, savarna feminists not only refuse to confront the entrenched inequalities produced by caste, but also benefit from them since their caste privilege shields them from ever inhabiting the precarity and violence that such labels entail for lower-caste women. In this context, the proclamation of “Proud Randi” becomes legible as an act made possible only through caste privilege. The ability to “reclaim” a slur of this nature depends on not being structurally defined by it. For marginalised women, the slur is not metaphorical; it is a determinant of social identity, community stigma, and everyday vulnerability. To transform it into a symbol of empowerment from a savarna position is to aestheticise violence that continues to shape the lives of lower-caste women.
Thus, the attempt to reclaim this slur is not merely misguided; it constitutes a form of symbolic violence. By promoting a slur that functions as a marker of caste oppression, savarna feminism recentres upper-caste subjectivity. It erases the histories of those whose lives are structured by this dehumanising vocabulary. This episode reveals, yet again, that without centring caste, feminist politics risks reproducing the very inequalities it seeks to challenge.
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Akanksha Shahi is a Doctoral candidate at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU.
