Tale of a new generation’s Dalit awakening

Raja Sekhar Vundru

Marathi literary world was taken by storm in 1963 when Dalit writer Baburao Bagul’s  sensational short story collection, Jehva Mi Jaat Chorli Hoti (When I Hid My Caste) hit the scene. In the story, a Mumbai-bred Dalit goes to Surat to work as a railway engine shed worker. As he enters the premises, his fellow workers look at him with awe as he appears in upper-class clothing: a coat, topi, dhoti, Kolhapuri slippers, with a book of Russian poet Mayakovsky’s poems in one hand and a trunk in the other. Impressed with his appearance, one of the workers offers him a room to rent and asks for his caste. Masthur evades claiming he is a Mumbaikar and a universal citizen. 

Everyone takes him as a Brahmin or a Kshatriya. Eventually, he gets beaten up after his Dalit identity is discovered after a sumptuous meal at a Brahmin’s house. He is saved by a fellow Dalit worker, Kashinath, and both decide to return to Mumbai. 

Bagul’s story was inspired by Dr BR Ambedkar’s own experience in 1917, narrated in his autobiographical note, Waiting for a Visa. Ambedkar fails to get any room on rent when he reaches Baroda to join the Maharaja’s government, after his Columbia University education. He enters a Parsi Inn, where he hides his caste and claims to be a Hindu but enters the records as a Parsi on the inn keeper’s suggestion. 

After 11 days, he faces a large crowd of Parsis ready to beat him up, calling him names “You arrant knave, you are the despicable untouchable we know.” The New York-returned scholar couldn’t muster a room to rent in a society full of prejudices and untouchability. Rendered homeless, he returns to Bombay. 

It was exactly after hundred years sitting in the same Columbia University, Yashica Dutt, a Dalit NRI, who successfully hid her caste in India to reach New York, reveals her Dalit identity. The book, as a Dalit’s memoir, is not just a plain narrative but a narrative of marginalised identity. Yashica Dutt (33) chose to tell what she wanted to tell, reflecting how her life shaped her identity. 

She builds a gripping story of her young life, as she herself pauses and reflects that her life read like an art-film script. The memoir reads more like a mother-daughter story, where Dutt’s mother appears with a strong resolve to rise above her lower-caste origin and class. A Dalit can rise above his caste probably by hiding it, and above his class by copying the upper-class lifestyle, mannerism and clothing, and in case of Yashica, even acquiring a fairer skin.

Yashica’s mother, while trying to hide her caste (as a Parashar Brahmin), sacrificed and painfully struggled, like all Dalit mothers and fathers, to ensure English education, best schools and colleges possible for her children. The family passes through deep penury as Yashica’s father loses his government job, forcing Yashica to take up odd jobs during her graduation.

While trying to get into the best college in India, St Stephen’s, Yashica’s mother, despite her struggle to rise above her caste, decides to claim reservation quota and tells Yashica to tick the reservation box. Despite her searing poverty, Yashica rides the crest of a top-college platform, makes the best of Delhi metropolis and after a stint as a journalist in fashion reporting, lands up in Columbia University with a full scholarship on her own merit.

Interestingly, it is in the new generations’ platform of social media and internet, that Yashica broke the cocoon of her caste, after she was moved by the suicide note, written in immaculate English by student leader Rohith Vemula, on Facebook. Her post-Vemula expressions on the social media since 2016 attracted the attention of Dalit diaspora and it was there in the USA she got introduced to Ambedkar, reflecting the strength of Ambedkarite movement abroad. 

Yashica’s memoir is a fascinating tale of a post-liberalised, millennial generation coming to identity, unlike Sujata Gilda, another Dalit New Yorker, whose Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India  is a highly celebrated memoir of her struggle in India as a Dalit radical in pre-liberalised era. This time it is Dalit NRIs writing back. Dutt intersperses chapters in the book — chronicling every aspect of discrimination, prejudices, atrocities, apathy and ignominy faced by Dalits and the memoir comes out as a fast-paced socio-political tale from a generation which has just arrived and will play a major role in influencing the Millennial expression on being a Dalit.