Concealing Caste Identity: An Intersectional Reading of Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit

Introduction

“What if others find out?” Hiding a fact or lying to oneself or even to others is considered a matter of shame in our society. Hiding a fact about one’s identity also amounts to leading a fractured life. However, in matters concerning centuries of social and political discrimination, keeping one’s origins and caste under secrecy has to be problematized. An emotion and a reality that the writer, Yashica Dutt, grappled with all her life until the death of a man belonging to the same caste as her pushed her to “came out” as a Dalit. This fear was not just a feeling that the writer grew up with, but remained with her until she openly came out with her identity through her book, sitting thousands of kilometers away from her home, in New York. The trauma associated with being a Dalit in a caste-ridden society is onerous. As she expresses, “hiding my caste was something I internalised” (Dutt 37). With this framework of the oppression and shame inflicted on people from marginalized castes, the paper will interrogate Yashica Dutt’s recently published book Coming out as Dalit (2019) as a Dalit testimonio and situate the narrative within the intersecting axes of caste, class, and gender. 

The narrative can be read as a ‘testimonio’, a narrative that Pramod Nayar calls “atrocity narratives that document trauma and strategies of survival”. He qualifies ‘testimonios’ as a narration that is of the “margins” (Nayar 84). Dutt’s book is the story of a young lower-middle-class girl trying to make sense of her identity in the midst of having to hide who she really is. The narrative is a vivid description of the pressure and apprehensions with which the family has to lead a life with a secret. The secret about her caste identity stays with her even after she travels to St. Stephens college in Delhi or to New York for further studies and employment. The journey that we embark upon with the writer is not just about experiencing the trauma of hiding her caste identity and putting up a show, but also about coming to terms with it and narrating it years later. It is when she is confronted with the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula that she feels compelled to unravel what she has been hiding and her life feels like a manufactured fabrication. She says that in a “split second, I evaluated my life” (prologue xvi) and found nothing worthwhile in it compared to Rohith’s letter of suicide. The writer also mentions that she unsuccessfully tried to look for stories written by the Dalit community that might relate to her peculiar state fraught with anxieties, tensions, and apprehensions because of living in a constant state of fear of giving up. This state is also associated with the anxiety that she feels for not owning her Dalit identity and trying to pass as ‘superior’. This is the reason why her autobiography is different from the others that were written before. It is not only situated in a much bigger global context and urban spaces but also takes us on a journey of hidden fears and anxieties along with the author. Sitting in New York, she writes about the truth of her caste identity, fearing one last time how her family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances would react to her “coming out”. The title of the book has connotations of queer vocabulary and equates the revelation of the writer’s caste identity to that of a queer individual coming out of the closet. The narrative can be read as the writer’s personal journey, where she recalls events from her past, interspersed with social commentary about living life as a Dalit in Indian society. The testimonio is similar to many that have come before it but also departs from its predecessors in a way that it deals with the problematics of caste in a much wider global arena. It maps her journey as a Dalit woman who hides her caste identity in order to survive the subtle and sophisticated mannerisms through which casteism operates in urban spaces. Her alternate narrative of resistance nudges upper-caste readers as well as Savarna feminists to assess the role of caste in their own lives. In affirming her identity as a Dalit, she gains a new perspective with which she recounts incidents from her childhood. 

Contextualising the Novel within Dalit Studies

Dalit women’s autobiographies expose the fundamental deletion of the gendered experience of caste both in mainstream Indian feminism and Dalit literature. They present a counter-argument and constitute what we understand to be Dalit counter-publics. The theory of intersectionality provides the necessary framework that refuses to homogenize the experiences of Dalit women and recognizes them as identities different from ‘woman’ and ‘Dalit’. Uma Chakravarty in her book Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens talks about graded patriarchies instead of overlapping patriarchies, within the framework of Brahmanical patriarchy. As Gail Omvedt in Dalits and the Democratic Revolution puts it, Dalit women have the greatest interest in dismantling Brahmanical patriarchy which works intrinsically within the caste system. Intersectionality as a theoretical framework emerged in the 1980s from the legal discourse, especially with Kimberle Crenshaw’s famous article titled Demarginalising the Intersections of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’. It emerged out of the theorization of women of colour to address the issue of race, gender, and class-based oppression of black women. 

In the 1990s, Dalit women began talking about their experiences openly with renewed zeal. The emergence of Dalit women’s autonomous groups like the NFDW (National Federation of Dalit Women) gave a push to the agenda of ‘difference’ that Dalit women emphasized. The concept of ‘difference’ was proposed by Sharmila Rege in her essay “Dalit women talk Differently”. Rege argues for a recognition of the plurality of Indian women and their experiences (42). They decided to take the mantle of self-representation and started to challenge the very language and symbols that defined their identity in a particular form in the dominant discourse. What emerged in this course of resistance was a new culture with its own symbols, icons, celebrations, and form of writing. Inspired by the philosophy of Phule and Ambedkar, Dalit ‘testimonios’ emerged as a powerful instrument of resistance for Dalit women. They function as a collective document that is the voice of one who witnesses for the sake of a larger community. The writer is the “speaking subaltern subject” (Nayar 84) and voices the lived realities of not just herself but others on the margins as well. This genre opened up new avenues for Dalit women to construct a narrative that elucidated their experiences as identities marginalised because of both gender and caste. Sharmila Rege in Writing Caste/Writing Gender foregrounds the fact that Dalit Life Narratives are ‘testimonios’ that speak for both the community and individual, in the process fight caste oppression. The analysis of the self and the larger community is of greater value in Dalit women’s testimonios, since they bring in the problematics of gender and dismantle the monolithic concept of the Dalit community being centered around Dalit men. As Anandita Pan argues in Mapping Dalit Feminism: Towards an Intersectional Standpoint (2020), these texts function as ‘counter-narratives’ by revealing insight into Dalit education, culture, religion, and class. Further, Gopal Guru states that Dalit testimonios fulfil a double function: they exhibit Dalit triumph against their adversaries and they ensure that upper-castes are made to feel enough guilt by exposing the oppression done by their ancestors (Guru 2549). 

The Secret and the Shame: Exploring Caste performativity in the novel

Dutt and her family always lived a life dominated by artifice. The evils of the caste system and the manner in which they manifested in the life of the author and her family, made them live a life of pretence. As a child, the author is unable to decipher the rationale behind her father and grandfather not using their surname. During her formative years, it became imperative for her to conceal her caste identity as it brought only humiliation and embarrassment. It was only later that she began to realise that her sense of shame stemmed from a system that is a social construct; a system that continues to hold because it serves the interests of those in power in society.

Within this fabric of how inherent caste is to our lives, we read Dutt’s narrative as also delving into the axes of gender and class along with caste. This is significant in analyzing the way in which gender plays a role in exhibiting a fresh perspective on understanding the aesthetics of caste. The novel delves into the mother-daughter relationship and portrays the tensions and conflicts between generations. Both the writer and her mother can be seen as victims of caste, class, and gender oppression. The influence that Dutt’s mother has over her occupies the major part of the narrative. She understands her identity as inferior only when her mother makes them ‘perform’ as elite and upper class. Her mother is fighting a constant battle to hide their Dalit identity but, in the process, makes her children very insecure about their identities. Dutt’s mother feels a constant need to ensure that their caste identity is never revealed through their mannerisms. She spends excessively on the way they dress, eat, and especially the ‘elite’ education that she struggles to provide to her children. The writer describes at length how her childhood was spent imitating upper-caste lifestyles to pass as belonging to a privileged caste.

It became a way for the family, especially her mother, to strive to achieve social acceptability. The way her mother used to dress her up or speak perfect and fluent English, were modes of achieving self-upliftment. As Dutt recalls about her mother, “Sometimes she wore tiny kitten heels when we went out” (19) or “movie nights, occasional eating out,…were a curated performance designed mostly by Mum’s aspiration to break out from our lower caste” (20). 

The book also illustrates various ways in which education is given prime importance. The manner in which the writer’s mother is adamant in educating them in a certain way. As Dutt mentions, “the toughest act of the performance was speaking perfect English” (20). She states that “only if I excelled in English-reading, writing and speaking- could I compensate for our Dalitness” (22). Dutt mentions, “Mum believed that good schooling was our only ticket into upper-casteness” (34).  When Dutt is admitted to a boarding school, she realises that she would have to “pretend I was upper caste in nearly every breathing, waking and sleeping moment” (26). The majority of the Indian population still lacks access to quality education. Dutt explicitly shows in her narrative that the spirit of Manu still treads in the corridors of most educational institutions. Whether it is schools or institutes of higher education, disparity and discrimination against the students of marginalized communities continues to hound them. The memoir exhibits how institutionalized casteism functions and considers the presence of students from the Dalit communities to be illegitimate in the corridors of these institutions. The most poignant illustration of the nexus between casteism and education in the narrative is that of Rohit Vemula’s institutional murder. It not only proves to be a trigger for the writer to accept her caste identity but also exposes the institutional discrimination that goes unchecked in overt and subtle ways alike. 

A major segment of the book grapples with probing the question of reservation. Dutt directly confronts this question and the way upper castes view it. It exposes the anxieties of the upper castes in seemingly progressive urban spaces. Dutt exposes their mentality of looking at Dalit students as undeserving and their viewing their presence as a product of the “quota system”. This aspect of the narrative makes it unique in the already distinct discourse of Dalit literature. The writer positions herself as someone who feels ‘guilty’ because she thinks she doesn’t deserve the education she receives. The justification of the argument of merit stems from the fact that we live in a post-caste world and “caste is over” statements. The book is replete with examples of various students who died by suicide because of what is now termed institutional murder. She describes universities and colleges as “places of discrimination, exclusion and institutional harassment” (Dutt 79)

In the book, Dutt writes an independent chapter on the discrimination Dalit women undergo, not only from upper-caste men and women but also from Dalit men. Here she talks about how Dalit women live through a life of public humiliation, mental trauma, and ruthless violence by upper-caste men. Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon in We Also Made History: Women in the Ambedkarite Movement postulate that sexual violence against Dalit women is more public than domestic because to be employed as labourers is peculiar to the lived realities of Dalit women. 

The reader also stands witness to the mechanism in which the family’s shameful inner secrets are exposed in the public domain, as her father is portrayed as an alcoholic who participates in domestic violence. His addiction takes away a major portion of their earnings and it becomes an impediment to the kind of life Dutt’s mother wants them to live or perform. Dalit aesthetics have historically shied away from recognising and acknowledging the presence of patriarchy as it is claimed that all Dalits are victims. There exists a gap in the intellectual attention given to the nuances of patriarchy in Dalit households. However, Pan argues that patriarchy in the Dalit community is not only present in a “powerful form” but functions under the larger concept of “Dalit as a singular, fixed category” (35) where caste is the only determining factor. Dutt in her narrative succinctly mentions how her mother (and Dalit women in general) are “exposed to a more vicious strain of patriarchy within their own families” (7). The following incident is particularly revealing how patriarchy is at work:

“He would start drinking early in the evening and by the time Mum had cooked and served dinner and finished cleaning up, he would be intoxicated….she testified that he would drag her from the makeshift kitchen at the back of the house to their room, beating her all the while.” (6). When her mother had no way out, “she decided to kill herself” (6). 

Her narrative is heavily influenced by the relationship between her parents. We see a sustained effort on the part of her mother to fight her way out of her violent circumstances. It is in instances like these that we get a glimpse of an alternate or a counter-narrative to the way Dalit experiences have been chronicled. These experiences have been, majorly about Dalit men and their struggle to fight oppressive classes. In texts like Dutt’s, we get to witness the gender perspective being an inherent part of understanding the aesthetics of caste. In contrast to writing by Dalit women, these gendered narratives are either invisibilised, omitted, or assimilated into other narratives. 

Conclusion

There have been many critics of the book asking whether Dutt isn’t privileged enough to take up the cause of Dalit women. At the beginning of the narrative, she confesses that she could ‘come out’ as a Dalit only because she knows she never will have to go back to India for good. Her parents also reacted to the book with a mix of “joy and caution” (prologue xx). She could break the fetters of fear and shame but only because she did not have to face the “consequences” of doing so in her lived reality in a foreign land. This brings us to the larger question of who or what constitutes a ‘Dalit’ identity in the twenty-first century. Dutt could talk about her caste identity fearlessly as she is comfortably positioned in a space that isn’t menacing in any aspect. Her story of shame and guilt that her caste identity brought with it seems to have been resolved with her changed urban location. But in the epilogue, she states that in order to be “purer” and “better”, Dalits “leave behind our food, songs, culture and last names” (181). Thus the idea of a “resolution” is frayed. The author in the epilogue also talks about developing strategies and synergies to function as a Dalit in a largely upper caste world despite “extreme violence, injustice and discrimination” (181). The narrative should be explored as an endeavour by the writer to “come out” of years of oppression and social obscurity not just for herself but to probably inspire someone else the way Rohith inspired her. This story should therefore be read as a narrative of legitimization and hope that the writer feels while standing up for herself and her larger community.