The “Double Burden” of Patriarchy and Caste: Intersecting Oppressions in Arundhati Roy and Mulk Raj Anand’s Works

The intersection of caste and patriarchy in India is a well-entrenched structure that exercises domination over dignity, mobility, desire, relationships, punishment, and belonging. The paper discusses caste and patriarchy not as parallel oppressions but as an interconnected ideological mechanism that dictates both public existence and personal emotion, thereby developing gendered and caste-based hierarchies that configure lived realities. This study engages with the way in which such systems traverse spaces-through the literary analysis of Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and probes how such systems operate across spaces: where Anand foregrounds public caste violence through occupation, humiliation, and social exclusion, Roy reveals the intimacy of violence enforced through love, family, morality, sexuality, and memory. The paper further contends that caste is not just a ranking of communities but one which dictates spatial access, emotional freedom, labor, speech, and selfhood. Similarly, patriarchy does not only subordinate women; it is the guardian of caste continuity through the restriction of female autonomy, desire, and choice. Their intersection produces layered outcomes: Dalit men are denied dignity and selfhood, women's agency and mobility are policed, Dalit women suffer compounded caste-gender brutality, and upper-caste women are put under patriarchal control to preserve caste purity. In Untouchable, caste oppression is more visible, through segregation and ritual pollution, spatial policing, and occupational degradation. Bakha epitomizes an organized dehumanization wherein identity is pre-written at birth and desire is forbidden by society. Roy places the site of violence within intimacy and institutional betrayal, where love and desire across caste lines are considered crimes punishable with social erasure and death. It is not for any wrongdoing that Ammu and Velutha are penalized but for their agency over their emotions and bodies to resist caste order. The paper concludes that caste humiliates the body, while patriarchy disciplines desire; caste dictates touchability, whereas patriarchy forbids emotional transgression. Together, they constitute a coherent political structure which maintains hierarchy through normalization, silence, punishment, and psychic conditioning. For this reason, one cannot imagine liberation without taking on both together, recognizing their inseparability as instruments of power and control.