The Silent Ashes

This book reveals the suppressed and unwritten history of caste-based violence against lower-caste women in India. Drawing from historical accounts, sociological studies, newspaper archives, and oral traditions, it reconstructs the lived realities of women whose voices were never allowed into official history. Through narrative storytelling grounded in documented practices, the book exposes the systemic brutality embedded in social customs—Sati, Devadasi dedication, enforced nudity under the Upper Cloth prohibitions, child marriage, widow punishment, and the routine exploitation of lower-caste women in domestic and agricultural labour. These stories highlight not only the suffering of women, but also the enforced silence of lower-caste men who, despite their love for their families, were stripped of all authority under the threat of collective punishment. The book also records the quiet acts of defiance—small, courageous moments of resistance that have gone uncredited but helped future generations survive. By merging research with narrative depth, this work restores dignity to the forgotten women whose pain shaped India's social fabric but whose names never appeared in its textbooks. Their stories are retold not as fiction, but as reflections of a tragic truth long denied space in written history.