Feminist activism in the 1990’s is often remembered as an extension of neoliberal planetary patriarchy which betrayed radical feminist agendas. Revisiting a history of dalit feminist organizing in the 1990’s, I demonstrate how dalit feminist organizations subvert these claims. I argue that dalit feminists were able to undergo consequential transformations in in how they conceptualize identity and political praxis, making them critical actors in radical feminist theorizations. Reading the actions of the National Federation of Dalit Women at the Fourth World Conference of Women, I suggest that the emergence of dalit feminist standpoint involved a shift from a relatively homogenizing discourse claiming dalithood as indigeneity to a renewed focused on dalithood as a condition of being oppressed. This shift is enabled by acts of historical recuperation that aim to construct a sense of cultural identity, a process I understand through the lens of Gayatri Spivak’s term ‘strategic essentialism’. These acts of recuperation spark contentious negotiations about the temporality of culture and possibility for belonging, producing possibilities for further change even while being limited in its epistemic potential. Ultimately, by engaging with these historical articulations we not only provide inspiration for resistance against melancholic conservativism, but also address substantive questions regarding how marginalized groups deal with questions of sameness and difference in the historical efforts that characterize their revolutionary praxis.