Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir

by Yashica Dutt

Having been let down at the first conference, Ambedkar now asked Dalits to stop expecting ‘Brahmins to rise in revolt against the caste system’ and encouraged Dalits to tear down the ‘man-made’ barriers on their own. To underscore his ideas and further inspire Dalits to reject the artificial inequalities of the caste system, he invited G. N. Sahasrabuddhe, a Brahmin, to read out the most offensive sections of the Manusmriti. Then, in his boldest and most direct attack on the caste system and its roots in Hinduism, Ambedkar and the Dalit satyagrahis collected dozens of copies of the Manusmriti and set them on fire. Burning a Hindu religious scripture that many upper-caste Hindus consider an important treatise on various aspects of life, in particular the caste system, signalled the beginning of Ambedkar’s fight for Dalit rights. In 1938, he told author T. V. Parvate that even though he knew he jeopardized his life with the Manusmriti bonfire, he did it because ‘it was a symbol of injustice under which we have been crushed for centuries’. While the Manusmriti bonfire became the highlight of the second Mahad conference, Ambedkar had initially planned to lead the 3,000 Dalit satyagrahis back to the Chawdar tank and reclaim it for Dalits by drinking from it. But since the tank had been closed by a British injunction, this satyagraha would mean civil disobedience against the British instead of a revolution against upper-caste Hindus, which could lead to the imprisonment of thous...