Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir

by Yashica Dutt

Our Dalitness is imprinted onto us through the burned bodies of our children, suicides of our PhD scholars and college students, rapes of young girls and women, asphyxiation of our manual scavengers and ‘honour killings’ of lovers.

Instances of subordinates ignoring protocols because of the senior officer’s lower caste, the stonewalling of promotions despite possessing the requisite qualifications and the denial of desired postings are common experiences for Dalits in the civil services.

Caste Hindu men in many regions consider Dalit women as sexual property. ‘Access to a Dalit’s man land comes with access to his Dalit wife’ is a familiar sentiment across the country.

The British did not simply look the other way, allowing casteism to continue unabated. They built entire systems that they handed over to the upper castes so they could continue to discriminate against and exclude Dalits. The

the upper-middle-class habits of the early nineties, even when our financial situation didn’t. They were a curated performance designed mostly by Mum’s aspiration to break out from our lower caste. The biggest show of the year would often be my birthday party. Every year till I turned five, Mum baked elaborate cakes from scratch—her 2-kg rabbit cake and a three-tier witch’s house from the Hansel and Gretel fairy-tale were remembered for many years—and prepared a feast for at least thirty guests. It was an occasion to declare our ‘higher’ class status and an attempt to camouflage our lower caste.

Yet, to their surprise, I didn’t answer them with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when they asked me if I was okay with it. Instead, I remember asking ‘how’—as in how can you afford to send me to a hostel when paying my school fees is a struggle?

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the most acute commentators on race in America, writes about the need for black kids to be ‘twice as good’. He describes how black boys and girls have to work twice as hard as white kids to make it as far,

Psychologist Alice Miller explains in The Drama of the Gifted Child how some children who are ‘more sensitive’ intuitively understand their parents’ wishes, often without explicitly being told, and go to extreme lengths

A 2013 law, The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, aims to make up for the failings of the previous law. In addition to making the employment of manual scavengers and construction of dry latrines an offence, it also has a provision for the rehabilitation of manual scavengers.

Indian society’s instinct to look down on manual labour comes from the profession-based inequality that lies at the heart of the caste system. Since this central idea grades people unequally based on their work, it rules out any respect for an industrious work ethic. Non-caste-based societies tend to assign equal respect for all work. Garbage collection, plumbing, carpentry, electrical work, building construction etc. are well paid and even sought after trades in Western economies.

In July 2017, Zohra Bibi was reportedly beaten and accused of stealing cash when she claimed her dues from her employers who lived in a high-rise luxury building in Noida.

‘If paying collective reparations for collective guilt is appropriate, then how about India “atoning” for thousands of years of its caste system?’ senior policy analyst Shikha Dalmia asked in her column for Time magazine. The difference between the British and the Indian upper-caste establishment, Dalmia noted, was that the British were at least willing to reflect on their history. The upper castes, be it during the Mandal Commission protests, the 2006 anti-reservation protests or the private sector’s protest against reservation can’t even stand the idea of compensation for the discrimination and violence that still affects millions of Dalits today.