Intersectionality has become the default grammar for writing about marginalised women in South Asia. It arrived from a particular genealogy - Black feminist jurisprudence in the United States into a region that had theorised compounded subordination for a century under other names: Phule on caste and women's education, Ambedkar on endogamy as the mechanism reproducing caste through control of women, Pandita Ramabai, Uma Chakravarti's Brahmanical patriarchy, Gopal Guru's claim that Dalit women talk differently; and Sharmila Rege's Dalit feminist standpoint. Whether the import clarifies or flattens that inheritance is contested. Nivedita Menon argues that intersectionality serves states and donor agencies better than feminist politics; Sunaina Arya and Anandita Pan reply that the fault is citational, not conceptual. It has run almost entirely in social science. This seminar asks what comparative literature has to say to it.

Three provocations frame the seminar. First, the arithmetic of injury: criticism here tends to produce a tally of wounds, in which the Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, trans, disabled or displaced woman is legible chiefly through what was done to her. Charu Gupta shows this figure has a history: in colonial Hindi reformist print, the polluting "vamp" gave way to the deferential sufferer, Surpanakha displaced by Shabari, while the Dalit virangana of 1857 offered a rival image that never took. Following Gupta; Anjali Arondekar on archival abundance over loss, and Shailaja Paik on Tamasha performers who turn vulgarity into leverage, we welcome papers that read 'craft', 'expertise', 'pleasure' and 'the ordinary'.

Second, marginality is not a virtue. Tanika Sarkar's work on the Hindu wife as a ground of cultural nationalism and on women's agency inside right-wing movements refuses to assume that subordination guarantees a critical position. We want dominant-caste women's self-writing - Rashsundari Debi's Amar Jiban – read alongside rather than apart from Dalit testimonio and the complicities an axis model hides.

Third, translation. Most of these texts do not exist in English. Bama's Karukku and Challapalli Swaroopa Rani's Telugu poems reach the Anglophone academy through an apparatus – glossary, preface, caste footnote, anthology – that turns literature into evidence. Swaroopa Rani's "Water" registers not only the village/wada line but also the gradations within it, leather-worker and weaver. The grid has grids inside it, and translation is where they flatten.

We invite papers on any South Asian language, region, period or diaspora.