129T
he 2011 National Census
estimates that there are
more than 300 million Dalits,
Bahujans and Adivasis in
the country – about 15 or 20
per cent of the population.
While media reports suggest
that caste is primarily
a problem in India’s villages (think of the
coverage of the Una or Badaun cases, or an
article published in the New York Times last
year titled, “Tell Everyone We Scalped You!
How Caste Still Rules In India”), the ground
reality is more complex.
Alongside IT parks and ve-lane highways
in our metros, there are Dalit women still
cleaning up shit; a recent study by three IIM-
Bengaluru researchers, “Isolated By Caste:
Neighbourhood-Scale Residential Segregation
In Indian Metros”, shows how the caste divide
“is equally stark in newer areas.”
In May this year, 26-year-old Payal Tadvi’s
“institutionalised murder” in a Mumbai
medical college brought casteism into sharp
focus in one of India’s largest metropolises.
Coming from the Tadvi Bhil Muslim
community (a Scheduled Tribe), Tadvi was
allegedly emotionally abused on account of her
background, and not allowed to perform certain
procedures. Eventually, she hung herself.
Education for Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi
youth is often a double-edged sword.
Reservation has gone some way in redressing
historical inequities, but educational
institutions in India can often be rife with
caste-based prejudice. (Many of the people I
spoke to for this piece came face-to-face with
their caste for the rst time in college.)
The Wire recently started a series
documenting such discrimination on campuses
across the country in order to give students a
voice. Assistant Editor Aleesha Matharu told
me, “Payal Tadvi’s suicide played an essential
role in sparking this [series]. We realised there
are so many voices that need a platform in an
age where caste atrocities continue unabated
but are never really spoken about.”
Yashica Dutt – a Columbia University-
educated journalist based in New York – talks
about how covert caste in India can be in her
memoir. In Coming Out As Dalit, Dutt shares
the burden of hiding her caste through college
at St Stephen’s, Delhi, and the freedom she
felt at nally throwing off the pseudo-upper
class persona she had constructed. “The truth
is that I don’t ‘look like a Dalit’ – or the kind of
Dalit we are used to seeing in media, cinema,
pop culture, when we see them at all.”
Also someone who doesn’t look like a Dalit:
Chandrashekhar Azad. With his trademark
upturned moustache (long the preserve ofupper-caste men in the villages of North
India), sunglasses and straddling a Royal
En eld, he rst hit headlines for a signboard
he painted outside his village that read,
“The Great Chamars Of Dhadkauli Welcome
You”. He laughs at the suggestion that the
word chamars is demeaning. “How can the
government ban this word when every villager
here has it written on his birth certi cate?”
Azad has since gained notoriety for being
a co-founder of the Bhim Army, begun in
2015 as a support system for young people in
western Uttar Pradesh’s schools and colleges.
In 2017, the “army” held a large rally in Delhi
to protest caste-based violence against Dalits,
with Azad addressing a 10,000-strong crowd
at Jantar Mantar. It now runs 350 free schools
closer home.
“The educational system is one that we have
to join at all costs in order to change it from
within,” says Rajyashri Goody, a Pune-based
visual artist, ethnographer and former Visiting
Artist Fellow at Harvard. For her, it’s the only
way “to be able to tell our own history and
assert our identity within the nation, which has
been denied to us for thousands of years.”
Goody’s own work interprets narratives
of resistance within Dalit food practices. Her
art is tactile and evocative – recipes made
from the leftovers of upper-caste weddings,
or laddoos made from the shredded and
pulped pages of the Manusmriti, the Hindu
“book of law”, which contains rules that
are “discriminatory in nature, particularly
towards lower castes and women”.
An “Artist as Activist” fellow at the Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation in New York,
US-based multimedia artist and Dalit rights
activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan kick-started
Dalit History Month in April 2015 to address
the absence of an alternative history to the“Ga�n� w�s s�n�t�s�d,
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a�d o�l� t�e m�l�d�e�
w�r� u�e� f�r t�e l�n�e�t
t�m� [i� t�e Ta�i� fi l�
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IMAGE: COURTESY OF RAJYASHRI GOODY (BHAAKAR, LADDOOS), t� t�e “b�u�s o� Ch�n�a�”