Out of the caste mould

Coming Out as Dalit
 

Yashica Dutt

Aleph, 207 pages; Rs 599







It is not often that a memoir is able to transcend its writer’s own lived experience to become a powerful social commentary. Journalist Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit is one such work. It takes off from a unique springboard — growing up, Ms Dutt’s mother ensured that their caste identity remained a secret. So she buried her identity as a Dalit deep within, but years later, realised that she could no longer ignore this intrinsic aspect of her identity. So she decided to “come out of the closet”, so to speak. Her skillful juxtaposition of her experience with a nuanced retelling of Dalit history weaves a not very pretty picture of the society in which she grew up.  

Ms Dutt writes that caste is “the invisible arm that turns the gears in nearly every system in our country”.  Indeed, that’s how it seemed to a brilliant young girl who spent her impoverished childhood grappling with secrets. When she went to boarding school, her mother packed all sorts of home remedies to ensure her skin did not darken (fair skin equalled upper caste, she was told). She also instructed her daughter to say she was a Brahmin if asked about her caste. A picture emerges of an intelligent child who constantly thinks of ways to portray herself as rich and, of course, upper caste. And so, through those early years, Ms Dutt’s Dalit identity lay, as she eloquently writes, “deeply buried beneath layers of convent education, urban upbringing and a hardened resolve to avoid engaging with anything related to caste.” This, the author writes, was less a quest for upward mobility, than it was a stratagem to avoid victimisation by peers for an identity into which she has simply had the misfortune of being born.

The personal narrative is interspersed with acute observations on Dalit history, Ambedkar, the Indian tendency to look down on manual labour, the preference for fair skin and more. The author’s experience in Delhi University shaped her views on reservation, and she argues her case compellingly. Seen through Dalit eyes, Delhi University, like several universities across the country, is steeped in caste discrimination where lower caste “quota” students and faculty alike have to jump through hoops. Before ragging of freshers was banned in Indian universities, traditional hazing rituals of Dalit freshers often involved casteist slurs based on toxic beliefs about reservations being anti-merit. Even today, most Indian institutions, she writes, instead of being centres for learning new ideas and questioning the status quo, are arenas of discrimination, exclusion and institutional harassment. She points out that even with reservations, Dalits are discriminated against regardless of their economic background.

Fear of discrimination compelled Ms Dutt to hide her caste identity from the world for over two decades. But she could not erase the shame, fear and ignominy of it from herself. For inside, she knew exactly who she was: The granddaughter of a man who taught himself to write in the mud with a stick because he was not allowed to hold a pen. The member of a community that has, for generations, carried what is euphemistically known as “night soil” in baskets on their heads. And an individual who chafed when peers dismissed the government’s reservation policies for being unfair to “meritorious” upper caste individuals. However hard she tried, caste was never far from her mind. A brilliant student, Ms Dutt studied in premier institutions in India and abroad — Ajmer’s Sophia School, St Stephens College Delhi and Columbia University in New York for a degree in journalism.

Life in New York, where people knew little about the caste system in India, should have finally enabled her to forget. Instead, the news of the suicide of a Dalit student in faraway Hyderabad shook her to the core. Ms Dutt realised that Rohith Vemula, whose suicide had suddenly brought caste back into the national discourse, had sent her a friend request on Facebook weeks before he died. She had ignored his request, but something about his death and his powerful suicide note affected her profoundly. Not only did it compel Ms Dutt to “come out” as a Dalit on social media, it also made her set up a group on Tumblr for Dalits to share their experiences.

Lucidly written and intelligently argued, the memoir locates Ms Dutt in the larger socio-political context that she has so proudly embraced. In parts, her arguments may come off as extreme, shrill even, but it is worthwhile to remember she is arguing with people who fail to see the irony in demanding compensation for two centuries of colonial rule — but do not think they need to make reparation for thousands of years of discrimination against their own citizens. Although caste may not be a significant construct for people who take their privilege for granted, the memoir reveals how it corrodes the Dalit psyche constantly. In this sense, Coming Out as Dalit is a book everyone should read, especially upper castes who believe caste is dead without sparing a thought for the people who clean their toilets, septic tanks and sewers. More crucially, the book is for every lower caste person who aspires to get ahead in life, for Yashica Dutt is a rare role model, not merely because she managed to escape the clutches of her Dalit birth mould — but because she found the courage to emerge from her self-created closet and find pride in her identity.