Coming out as Dalit

Illustration/Uday Mohite

A petition has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking a review of its August 1, 2024 judgment which allows the States to sub-classify Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to provide preferential treatment to the disadvantaged groups among them in government jobs and education. Like the Mandal Commission report, this Supreme Court ruling has stoked a controversy that will continue for some time. Meanwhile, it is a good time to revisit Yashica Dutt's book Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir (Aleph, 2019, R599), that gives personal insight into what it actually means to be Dalit or lower caste in India. It is useful reading, especially for those who consider themselves modern and liberal, yet discriminate against lower castes in many ways - by being outraged at reservations, by serving ‘low' caste people in different plates, endlessly humiliating them as being a "quota-wallah." School and college staff routinely ask for a student's caste, which affects admission, the marks they get, whether their meagre Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe allowances for tuition/accommodation will be delayed or disbursed at all (remember Rohith Vemula's suicide?). Quick test to check your liberal credentials: how many of your close friends are Dalit or Bahujan or Muslim? How many of them are your colleagues at work or your bosses? Does that reflect a society of equal opportunity, merit and social privilege?

Also, Yashica Dutt, a New York-based journalist, author and activist, is a prime example of the "new Dalit", who has come out as Dalit, is an accomplished achiever, dresses smartly and is articulate in English. At her whirlwind book launch tour in the US (see Instagram @yashicadutt), she is seen wearing a Rani-pink knee-length dress, black leather gloves and knee-high jack boots, with flashy rings and a gold bracelet worn over the black gloves, and heavy make-up. And why not? She had arrived, and in style. When you read her book, you understand the long and painful road from poverty and humiliating discrimination, and can better appreciate her remarkable achievements. Dutt, who grew up in Ajmer, Rajasthan, managed to study at St. Stephen's in Delhi, then did a Master's in Journalism at Columbia University. A former journalist at Hindustan Times, she is also the founder of Documents of Dalit Discrimination ("all I saw in the media were stories about victimised Dalits or those undeserving of reservation. There were no stories about people like me.")

In fact, it was Rohith Vemula's tragic suicide in 2016, that "made my silence impossible," she writes. It prompted Yashica Dutt to stop living a lie - that she was upper caste, when she was Dalit, and in fact, a ‘Bhangi'. She writes of her grandmother working as a manual scavenger, cleaning dry excrement from people's homes. She describes the exhausting burden of living with the secret of "passing" (as upper caste) and being terrified of being caught out. In a a deeply moving account of her family life, she describes how they struggled with her father's alcoholism and violence towards her mother: her mother attempted suicide, though pregnant with Yashica, by jumping off the roof of the house; she survived--and amazingly, so did Yashica. Her father was earlier an Excise Inspector, but later, after he lost his job, her mother, who actually wanted to become a police officer, variously worked as a tailor, teacher, and Amway agent. At one point, there was only R4 in the house, and her mother sent her to get atta (flour) and say they were baking cakes. Still, when she was a kid, her mother would pamper her with expensive shoes with multicoloured lights that lit up when she walked, that they could ill afford, so she could feel upper caste. She writes of her determination to speak English, a sort of marker of being upper caste. She comments on the Mandal Commission report, which observed discrimination against the SC/STs, and suggested "a 27 per cent reservation for backward classes that made up almost 52 per cent of the population of the country. Along with SC/ST reservation, only 49.5 per cent of entry-level seats would be reserved for those who represented almost 75 per cent of the total population of the country." The controversy continues unabated.

Along with her memoir, she takes us through a brief history of the Dalit movement, the Dalit community's lack of access to education, jobs and culture, the need for reservation, and the paucity of Dalit voices in mainstream media, including Dalit women. She writes of the liberating solidarity of participating in the Ambedkarite movement in the US, and how Dalits and Dalit organisations, previously ignored, are changing the narrative by speaking for themselves, including on social media, such as UK-based Pradeep Attri's Ambedkar's Caravan, Round Table India (RTI), Ravichandran Bathran's Dalit Camera, Savari and Velivada. She writes of Dalit artists creating "art that tells our stories,"including filmmakers like Nagraj Manjule, Neeraj Ghaywan and Pa Ranjith; Ginni Mahi, queen of Chamar pop; Ambedkarite Buddhist Gospel from Dhamma Angels, Mumbai, and Thenmozhi Soundararajan's Dalit Blues. The book calls out upper castes by forcing us to confront our prejudices by presenting facts. It's a good way for upper castes to not only learn about Dalits, but also to learn about themselves. Highly recommended.

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist.
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com