More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We create upper-caste identities—stolen badges—that help us gain entry to a space that will reject us the moment it finds out who we really are.
We nervously flash these IDs anytime we are grilled a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Discrimination, humiliation, oppression are all penalties for not being upper caste, or simply for being Dalit.
These penalties are so routine that they aren’t even considered worthy of shock and outrage.
sections. Hipster jazz bars don’t flinch before announcing a music group called ‘Bhangijumping’ and show little remorse after being informed about its grossly offensive undertones.
jazz club that can painstakingly educate itself about a musical tradition that originated from black musicians in the United States in the late nineteenth century can’t be bothered to understand how ‘Bhangi’ is a term of abuse much closer to home.
When I was a child it puzzled me that my father and grandfather didn’t share their last name, unlike other father-son pairs in the neighbourhood.
Two generations of prestigious government jobs and concealed last names had somewhat diluted the obvious markers of Dalitness.
But not enough had changed that I could give a straight answer to the question: ‘What caste are you from?’ My Dalitness still weighed heavy on me; I dragged its carcass behind me through my childhood and into adulthood.
As a child, I worked harder to hide it, every tiny nudge throwing me off balance, every new interrogation about caste assaulting my spirit. My civics textbook educated me about ‘The evils of the caste system’ but didn’t equip me to deal with its manifestations in my own classroom. It didn’t explain the stinging shame that pierced me every time one of my classmates or teachers called someone ‘Bhangi’—a slob. I didn...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
part. She would awkwardly try to explain how she, a Brahmin girl from Uttar Pradesh, married a Dalit boy from Rajasthan, without them ever having met.
So it wasn’t unusual that when I first saw the Facebook post about a Dalit boy who had committed suicide in Hyderabad University, I didn’t open the link. He was not the first Dalit boy who had died and he was not going to be the last. Dalit boys and girls, men and women, children and old people, have regularly died because of caste violence.
Rohith Vemula, raised by his mother, Radhika, was from the untouchable Mala caste. When the news of his death appeared a second time, a third and eventually became a fixture on my Facebook timeline for twenty-four hours, I thought to myself: Who is this Dalit boy who made all the non-Dalits care?
‘My birth is my fatal accident.’ ‘Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust.’ I read it once. Twice. And then once more. I had never read anything written by a Dalit before! I had certainly never read anything written by a Dalit in English—the language I had hoped would help me escape my own Dalit identity.
It’s very likely that, like me, he too had recognized that our education was our only strength.
Who was this boy whose life sounded so similar to mine, but was so much harder?
Unlike me, Rohith did nothing to bury his Dalitness. Instead, he used it as a shield to stand up for his fellow Dalit students in Hyderabad University against the caste-based prejudice of members of the administration.
I ducked whenever someone casually used ‘Bhangi’ as an epithet, struggling to sustain a blank expression and hoping that no one had noticed the actual Bhangi in their midst.
The fear that my Dalitness would be ‘discovered’ made me hate it all the more. I wanted to be like my colleagues who were not hiding, not scared, not Bhangi and therefore better than me. I had to work twice as hard to be half as good and all the trying and hiding had me exhausted before I turned twenty-two. But I couldn’t stop hiding.
It was at Columbia University that I had recognized a parallel between hiding my caste and the phenomenon of ‘passing’—the distinctly African American practice of hiding one’s (racial) identity and assuming a different (white) one to escape systemic discrimination.
Dalits only appeared in the media when someone wanted to discuss how ‘unnecessary’ and ‘unfair’ reservation was to upper-caste people. We were largely either pathetic victims or corrupt, immoral opportunists. At that time, I failed to find stories that spoke of the emotional, mental or physical damage I had experienced daily by trying to hide my caste.
Before I could ask anyone to share the truth about their lives with the world, I needed to do it first. I needed to come out as Dalit.
I imagined that the bitter caste supremacists among them would be disgusted with the idea of sharing space with a Bhangi as an equal, some would discredit my career as an outcome of my ‘reservation privilege’.
I had pulled the wool over their eyes for years and the effortlessness of my decades-long attempt at passing as upper caste was impressive even to me.
I was putting an end to my constant struggle of hiding behind my education or my career, escaping through my proficient English or my (not so dark) skin colour.
I was going to proclaim openly and proudly that I was DALIT.
A lie I spoke so often and with such conviction, that I not only fooled my friends’ mothers but even myself.
But I couldn’t fool the shame that spread across my face each time someone mentioned ‘caste’, ‘reservation’, ‘bhangi’—the common slur, which loosely translates to a human scavenger and the name of my exact caste.
The ones who did (a friend, who along with her parents witnessed my first public admission of being ‘low-caste’ at 15) stopped being in touch.
I know I am not alone to feel this. There are many of us whose experiences of growing up Dalit and navigating a society that forces us to feel shame, need to be told and heard.
He showed me that it was possible to be Dalit and proud.
UNTIL THREE GENERATIONS AGO, DALITS were denied access to learning.
The system is designed to keep Dalits confined to undesirable professions. Dalits who use the reservation policy to advance are accused of being ‘opportunistic’ for using their only option for progress. Thousands of years of religious and social policies that denied education to Dalits are discounted and they are regularly challenged to prove their talent without using the ‘crutch’ of reservation. Reservation allows Dalits entry into the upper-caste system, but only their drive, talent and ability creates genuine, viable opportunities for them to get ahead.
Black Americans often pass as white by dressing, speaking and gesticulating like white Americans to escape systemic racism and violent oppression.
They also adopt elaborate lifestyle changes—changing their last names, moving cities, following rigid Brahminical traditions, turning vegetarian, exhibiting excessive religiosity—to appear more like upper-caste Hindus.
Why I am not a Hindu (1996) explains how ‘Shudras’—constitutionally termed as Other Backward Classes (OBCs)—in a bid to acquire greater political power imitate caste structures that closely align with Kshatriyas—the ruling caste. As ‘Neo-Kshatriyas’, they also seem to buy into the notion of caste hierarchy, and take to practising caste supremacy and casteism against Dalits who are directly beneath them in the caste structure.
In the past few decades, ever since Dalits were able to reach out to global communities to discuss their experiences, those belonging to the upper castes have become more vehement in their attempts to distance Indian/Hindu culture from caste. They posit that the caste system was not truly a part of Hinduism until the arrival of the British in the 1600s when they created these artificial categories to divide the local population. As plenty of data and research suggests, that is a cover-up for a much deeper and older malaise.
More recently, there has been new evidence that indicates that the ‘Indo-European language speakers’ did not invade but migrated to the subcontinent around 2,000–1,500 BCE. This coincides with the composition of the Rig Veda, the oldest known Hindu scripture.
Manu—considered the first human by some—is believed to have written Manusmriti, a code of conduct, around 1,800 years ago.
As per Vedic scriptures and the Manusmriti, Dalits were considered pollutants. They lived outside the villages or main residential areas in bastis or wadas, used separate roads and water bodies and we...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The concept of karma—paying for the sins of previous lives in subsequent lifetimes—was one means of accomplishing that. It convinced those who were born as lower caste that their status was a result of their own actions in previous lives.
For all their rhetoric about India’s cultural and social backwardness, they did nothing to knock down a system as grossly unequal as caste and, in fact, exploited it to suit their interests.
during the Kala Ram Temple Entry Movement in Nasik in 1930, when they banned Dalits from entering because it was ‘against the established custom’, or when they paid damages to upper caste people after Dalits led by Ambedkar drank water from the public Chawdar tank, British laws let the upper castes get away with noxious discrimination and abuse. Phule and Ambedkar both criticized the British for their spineless policies with regard to caste.
When Brahmins complained of textbooks that criticized the caste system, the British removed those textbooks.
Since the presence of a Dalit was considered polluting, they were not allowed anywhere near the Brahmin assistants of the judges. Instead, they would shout from one end of the room (sometimes from outside the room) and important details were often lost as a result of this practice.
At the time of Independence, when most Dalits were still learning to read, upper-caste people had been businessmen, bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, judges and politicians for several generations. When the British left, they were trained and ready to take over the reins of the new country. Dalits continued to struggle in the system that was still controlled by the upper castes.
In fact, Dalit movements in Kerala started as early as the late 1800s. Among the most significant was the one led by Ayyankali, who was born in a non-slave agricultural Dalit Pulaya family. One of his earliest political acts in 1898 was defying the Dalit ban in public spaces by riding in a decorated bullock cart, which was only reserved for the upper castes.
Perhaps this is what Rohith meant in his letter when he wrote: ‘A vote, a number, a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust’.
For them, we are just Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, and Buddhist votes ‘reduced to our immediate identity and nearest possibility’.
