This paper argues that the existentialist feminist framework developed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, while indispensable to the analysis of women's subordination, requires structural modification when applied to the literary representation of Dalit women's lives in contemporary Indian fiction. De Beauvoir's account of woman as “The Other” constituted in immanence by a social order that reserves the status of transcendent subject for men describes a single axis of domination. The Dalit woman, this paper contends, is constituted as other along two axes simultaneously: she is other to the dominant male subject through the operations of patriarchal gender ideology, and she is other to the dominant-caste subject through the operations of caste pollution ideology. These two forms of othering do not simply add together; they interlock, each lending The Other a force and a permanence it would not otherwise possess. Reading Bama's Karukku and Sangati alongside Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife through Sartre's vocabulary of facticity and transcendence, this paper demonstrates that the literary texts themselves perform a theoretical operation: they show facticity functioning along two simultaneous and mutually reinforcing axes, and they show transcendence the refusal of the given, the assertion of a self the social order has not authorised emerging from a position that existentialist feminism, in its classical form, did not anticipate and cannot fully describe without revision. The paper concludes that Dalit women's fiction is not merely an object to which existentialist feminist theory can be applied, but a body of work that makes a contribution to that theory, exposing and correcting its limitations from within.