Why Yashica Dutt’s book is an eye-opening contribution to Dalit literature
Yashica Dutt moved to New York in 2015 to study journalism at Columbia University. There she had an epiphany.
Dutt witnessed her black, Hispanic and gay classmates openly sharing their stories of discrimination and abuse in class discussions. She was astounded because, while growing up, attending university and pursuing a career in India she had always had to assiduously hide her caste. What impressed her even more was how the rest of the class reacted to these remarks. They did not challenge what was said, but instead showed sympathy for their classmates from minority communities, and even anger on their behalf. After listening to such discussions for nearly two months, Dutt came to the painful decision to start talking about her own experiences with caste. When she did, her classmates’ response helped her see that she should not be ashamed and should, in fact, feel outraged.
Seeking to learn more about the Dalit cause, Dutt reached out to activists on social media. At this point, her path and that of Rohith Vemula—a 26-year-old Dalit research scholar who stood up against vicious, casteist harassment at the University of Hyderabad—almost crossed. He sent Dutt a friend request on Facebook. For reasons of her own, she declined. Ten days later, she opened her laptop to find news of his suicide posted all over her social-media feed.
Suicides by Dalit postgraduate students persecuted by their professors and university authorities happen all the time in India, though they are rarely reported. But Vemula’s story became major news, sparking protests across the country joined by caste-Hindu and Dalit students alike. This was something new. Even more strikingly, Vemula was not seen as a pathetic victim. He was portrayed for what he really was—brilliant, passionate and courageous. Dutt pored over Vemula’s eloquent suicide note printed in the press. She realised that had she not had certain advantages, his fate could very well have been hers.
Inspired by Vemula, Dutt decided to stop hiding her caste from Indian friends and colleagues. This was a brave step even for someone now living and working in New York, with—as she writes in her book—“no immediate plans to return to caste-conscious Delhi.” She posted a note revealing her caste status on Facebook and received an outpouring of responses from those she knew, and many others in India and around the world, as her statement went viral and attracted media attention.
Dutt’s book Coming Out as Dalit, published this year, is an elaboration of that statement. She recounts her life story, interspersed with a series of essays on subjects related to caste. Her story of coming to New York captivated me because I had a similar epiphany here. I arrived in the early 1990s, 24 years before Dutt, and like her, in my mid-twenties. Shortly afterward, America invaded Iraq. Weeks later came the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles, the first case in which racist cops were caught on video brutalising an innocent black man, only to be acquitted. Mass demonstrations were called against war and racism. I attended some of them carrying a politically unsophisticated sign I made myself: “The System Sucks!”
At these rallies I met white people who were ardent anti-racists. This surprised me because in India I had never seen caste-Hindus protest casteism. I inferred these people I met would not look down on me if I told them I was born untouchable. I was right, and their support eventually gave me the courage to confront the question of what makes someone untouchable. While looking for answers I ended up writing my family history, Ants Among Elephants, published just a couple of years before Coming Out as Dalit. Reading Dutt’s book, I was struck by the many ways her story echoes and complements mine.
Dutt was born in Rajasthan to a family belonging to the Bhangi caste. Bhangis are traditionally forced to eke out their living by manual scavenging—cleaning latrines and sewers by hand. Her grandfathers on both sides escaped that life through reservations. They went to college, passed civil-service exams, and served in quite high-ranking positions. Her father held a solid government job until he was suspended in 2001.
I come from Andhra Pradesh and my family belongs to the Mala caste. Malas traditionally do agricultural labor and other menial work. My grandparents found deliverance thanks to Christian missionaries, who educated them and offered them jobs in their schools. My parents went to government schools and universities, which in those days were more prestigious than private institutions and nearly free. They became college lecturers.
Dalits were historically excluded from learning to read and write, much less pursuing higher education. Within traditional Indian society, they had no hope of aspiring to anything better than ritually polluted or unskilled work. A chance for advancement could only come from outside the caste order—in my family’s case through foreign missionaries, and in Dutt’s through constitutionally mandated reservations.
But families like ours, who manage to grasp such opportunities and join the middle class—in other words, college graduates eligible for white-collar jobs through reservations—are a tiny minority, making up a little more than two percent of the Dalit population. As such, we face a peculiar problem that the mass of Dalits do not. We have moved up in education and employment, but our caste status has not improved. How can we ever fit in socially with our upper-caste classmates and coworkers?
Dutt’s family tried to solve this problem by pretending to be upper caste. This surprised me, but Dutt reports it is not uncommon among Dalits in circumstances like hers. She compares it to sanskritisation, the adoption of upper-caste customs by members of a lower caste to support their claim to higher status. This is typically carried out by a whole caste or some section of it. In Andhra Pradesh, the goldsmith caste, which is a lowly artisan caste, has asserted upper-caste status because they work with a precious material. The men started wearing a sacred thread across their chests and secluding women from their community, as upper-caste men do. They changed their caste name from Kamsali, the Telugu word for goldsmith, to Vishwa Brahmana. But it is one thing to declare a higher caste status and another to get others to accept this rank, and some aspirants are more successful than others.
Dutt also compares her family’s efforts to conceal their caste to what is known as “passing” in America. That is when a black person presents herself as white. You may ask how this is possible. In America, having even a single black relative by blood makes you black, no matter how you look. Of course, only those with the fairest skin and most European features can hope to pass as white.
Likewise, only a small fraction of Dalits can hope to be taken for upper caste. The obstacle is not their physical appearance, though, as Dutt explains, fairness is important in India, too. Rather, what it takes to pass as upper caste are things such as middle-class employment, refined manners, elite tastes in fashion and consumer goods, and above all education—particularly, fluency in English. Not that all upper-caste people are like this, of course—many are as poor and illiterate as any Dalit. But for a Dalit to credibly present herself as upper caste, she would better appear to be as unlike a typical Dalit as possible.
I used to avoid admitting my caste while living in India. When asked about it as a child I would reply, “We’re Christians, we don’t have caste.” As a teenager, I would simply say, “I don’t believe in caste.” When I was studying in Warangal, in Andhra Pradesh, if others mistook me for a caste Hindu, I never corrected them. After I graduated and started working, my mother and I had to stay in Chennai for a few months. The summer was especially hot and the only drinking well around belonged to a Brahmin family. When we went to fetch water, they asked our caste. We told them we were Balijas—toddy tappers—a very low caste, but not untouchable. Until I left India, I never told anyone in so many words that I was Dalit.
But I also never actively pretended to be upper caste, and had always looked down on Dalits who do. Coming Out as Dalit taught me that for many Dalits lying about their caste is a necessity. It is done not out of vanity or aspiration, but a real need to avoid social isolation. For some, I now realise, it is a question of survival in the most concrete sense. Last month, Payal Tadvi, a tribal second-year postgraduate medical student at Topiwala National Medical College in Maharashtra killed herself after months of relentless harassment by three of her seniors. A student at the college with whom Tadvi used to share her troubles told a reporter that she consoled Tadvi but begged her not to tell anyone that she too was from the Scheduled Tribe community.
While it may be possible for an educated, middle-class Dalit to pass for upper caste, it is never easy. If someone is curious about your caste, they can sniff you out in a thousand ways—your name, manners, dress, diet, family customs, ritual practices. The very fact this person is curious means they have some doubt. In an interview with the Hindustan Times available on YouTube, Dutt says whenever she meets another Indian while trying to find a rental place or waiting for a bus, the second question she is asked is invariably, “What caste are you?” The woman interviewing her, plainly upper caste, is incredulous: “Really?” Clearly, it never happens to her.
Dutt’s family’s claims to be upper caste never add up. The Bhangi surname “Nidaniya” dropped by her grandfather is replaced with Dutt. Dutt is a Brahmin name in Bengal, and possibly Punjab, but the Dutts could not pretend to be Bengali or Punjabi. The name Dutt must have served to confuse as well as to deceive—had they taken a Rajasthani upper-caste name they would no doubt immediately been exposed as impostors.
Dutt recalls as a young child hearing her mother “awkwardly try to explain how she, a Brahmin girl from Uttar Pradesh, married a Dalit boy from Rajasthan, without them ever having met.” An arranged marriage between a Brahmin and an untouchable? No wonder that, as Dutt writes, “it was rare for the recipient of that lie—a new neighbour or a classmate’s mother—not to see through it. And when they did, they often wanted nothing to do with us.”
Further attempts of Dutt’s mother to represent herself and the family as Brahmin sound equally desperate. She goes to great lengths to adopt upper-caste customs and rituals, though her idea of what these consist of may be open to question. Trying to look more Brahmin than actual Brahmins, she buys a cow and keeps it in a garage in her in-laws’ urban residence. Brahmins may own cows, but I have never heard of them tending one themselves, let alone the housewife milking it.
She has more success in this charade with her daughter. From an early age, Dutt is sent to English-medium boarding schools. Here, she initially claims to be Brahmin when asked, as her mother instructs; later, she will more commonly avoid the question while implying she is upper caste. This must have grown increasingly convincing as she receives an elite education, masters English and mingles with upper caste girls, picking up their tastes and mannerisms. She attends St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, “where only rich, cool, urban kids studied.” Here she seems to have had a fair amount of success fitting in with her upper-caste classmates, despite occasional giveaways such as her name appearing publicly on an examination list under the Scheduled Caste category. By the time she launched herself, largely on the strength of being a Stephen’s alumna, as a fashion journalist for major outlets, few would suspect a woman in such a position to be Dalit.
She had made it. Or had she? Dutt was always haunted by “the fear of being caught, the fear of losing friends, respect and even my bylines.” This last concern was a serious one. Had she continued to work in the Indian media, she could advance only so far before barriers would be put in her way. At this stage, her caste credentials would be scrutinised more closely. Dutt recounts an incident that took place in 2008 in which an American reporter turned to paper after paper in India looking for a Dalit journalist on staff whose opinion he needed for a story. He could not find a single one. And then there is the problem of family. Dutt does not go into this, but when it comes to marriage, Dalits in such situations cannot conceal their true caste status from potential suitors. Like me, Dutt needed to leave India to disentangle herself from daily oppression, find the space to come to terms with her caste status, and write her book.
Apart from recounting this personal journey, Dutt writes informatively on a number of related topics. She presents various theories on the origin of the caste system in one chapter and in others, addresses caste and colonialism, Ambedkar’s contributions to the Dalit cause, reservations, the oppression of Dalit women, caste and skin color, caste discrimination in higher education, and manual scavenging (practiced by her grandfather’s first wife). She also touches on caste and cinema, caste and cricket, and—as mentioned above—caste and media. Readers of my book who expected a general introduction to the subject of caste and didn’t get one will find it here.
In the process of coming out as Dalit and investigating her identity, Dutt accepted the perspective currently dominant in Dalit activism, which is Ambedkarite. Ambedkarism is a caste-based, middle-class movement that seeks Dalit advancement through self-improvement and social reforms under capitalism. Asking, in the book’s epilogue, “What does it mean to be a Dalit in the second decade of the new century?” Dutt answers, in part: “Some of us protest, organize and write. We study Ambedkar and try to live by his values; but many of us don’t. We go to school, raise children, have jobs, run businesses, experience joy and success, and that in itself is our biggest challenge to caste.”
She is speaking here for the two percent of Dalits who, like her family and mine, have made it out of abject poverty and oppression. She does not speak for those who perform caste-based occupations or work in the fields or as casual urban labor for a pittance. Those who cannot send their children to school, who cannot hope to get middle-class jobs, let alone run businesses.
Yet, whatever discrimination educated Dalits experience is merely a reflection of the oppression that confines this vast majority to their traditional place at the bottom of society. When the millions who are trapped there try to demand something better for themselves, they are reminded through horrific violence where they belong. And where they belong is the same place Dalits from my background are routinely told, implicitly or outright, to go back to.
Caste persists because it serves the economic interests of a few. In the countryside, cheap, caste-based labor is the key to maximising agricultural profits. In other sectors of the economy, pitting workers against each other along caste lines benefits those who pay their wages. The root of caste oppression lies in exploitation, and exploitation is essential to the profit system. Dalits will never be free unless the productive resources of society are collectivised, centrally planned, and democratically managed.
In the twenty-first century, and especially in the wake of the recent Lok Sabha elections, this perspective may sound far-fetched. But India remains a tinderbox of vast and growing inequality. Mass struggles have risen up historically, and they will continue to do so. With the right leadership, I believe they can succeed.
What has proven far-fetched is the opposite outlook—steady progress toward Dalit emancipation under capitalism. After seventy years of independence, things are headed backwards even for the middle-class minority. Reservations are under constant attack, and as liberalisation erodes the public sector, the benefits of the system are diminishing. Universities are killing fields for Dalit students. Meanwhile, even the slightest show of assertion by Dalits brings down on them violence abetted by the state. For instance, on 2 January 2018, a peaceful gathering of Dalits in Bhima Koregaon, Maharashtra to commemorate a historical victory by British colonial troops, including Mahar soldiers, against the Peshwa was set upon by Hindu fanatics. Police let the assailants go free and rounded up 300 Dalits.
As scarcity worsens across society, so will conflicts among castes vying for ever more limited resources. Unemployment is at a 45-year peak. Degree-holding upper-caste men now compete for sweeper jobs, pushing out Dalits who are forced to invoke their caste “privilege” to monopolise this degrading work. Severe water scarcity bodes more violence against Dalits desperate for access to village sources, which are always controlled by caste Hindus.
For Dalits the only way forward is to find common cause with other sections of society. It is not only Dalits who suffer under the caste system. The appalling oppression of Indian women is inextricably bound up with caste. And about 85 percent of Muslims in India are low-caste or untouchable—a fact little noticed in the mainstream. Traditionally known as ajlaf or azral, they have lately started to organise as the pasmanda. Most fundamentally, wage workers and poor peasants have an interest in doing away with caste oppression, which inhibits their uniting in struggle against exploitation.
Such a viewpoint contrasts with that of Dutt’s Ambedkarite co-thinkers, who organise solely on the basis of caste. This way of thinking leads her to grotesquely praise Ram Nath Kovind, appointed by the Hindu-chauvinist far-right BJP to the figurehead position of president, as a “powerful role model.” Naming a Dalit president is not merely a useless thing for the Dalit masses, but a cruel joke at their expense. The BJP cannot offer them hope for a decent life, and neither can the Congress or the Bahujan Samaj Party.
These political criticisms aside, Coming Out as Dalit should be required reading for anyone interested in the Dalit cause. Whatever one thinks of Dutt’s views, they represent the prevailing current of Dalit activism today. Readers unacquainted with such views will have an opportunity to learn about them. All readers will find in her personal story a fascinating case-study of the far limits of Dalit advancement in contemporary India.