Care Injustice and Sustainable Development: Reading P. Sivakami's The Grip of Change through Joan Tronto's Political Ethics of Care

Abstract

In addition to being maintained through direct acts of violence, exclusion, and unequal resource access, caste and gender discrimination are maintained through unequal relations through which vulnerability is identified, responsibility is assigned, work is done, protection is provided, and decisions about well-being are made. In literature, P. Sivakami's The Grip of Change represents a pertinent literary example of these systems through the depiction of caste oppression, patriarchal control, labour, political activism, and the fight of Dalit women for agency. While existing research on the novel has explored it through such categories as caste, Dalit identity, patriarchy, body politics, resistance, and political change, the political organisation of care remains under-examined. Filling this gap, the present study focuses on the application of Joan Tronto's political ethics of care as applied to selected text situations in the novel. In order to complement the intersection of caste and gender, the concept of intersectionality is used as an additional theoretical approach in the study of their mutually reinforcing effects. Employing qualitative close reading, thematic analysis, and theoretical interpretation, the research proposes care injustice as an additional analytical category for the exploration of systematic inequalities in recognition, responsibility assignment, care labour, reception, and political participation. The analysis will show that Thangam's suffering becomes visible without guaranteeing equal control over the representation of it; protection can be an act that fights caste discrimination but maintains patriarchal control; economic dependency makes labour inseparable from vulnerability; and political actions of a community can be exclusive when excluding the affected person from decision-making processes. The study therefore suggests that care is politically ambivalent as it challenges domination but at the same time reproduces it. Connecting Tronto's theory of care ethics with Dalit feminism and intersectionality, the study presents a caste- and gender-sensitive analysis of care injustice and its applicability to sustainable social justice, in particular SDGs 5, 8, 10, and 16.