Yashica Dutt is a New York based journalist who previously worked with HT and Brunch. She is the founder of Documents of Dalit Discrimination. 'Coming Out as Dalit' is the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar 2020. The book documents her life of hiding her 'dalitness' in India because immediately slots you; and shows how most dalits thinking of moving forward in the social or financial chain want to disown their dalitness and behave like a forward caste person.
Yashica writes about the burden and pain of hiding the fact that she was a dalit for most of her life. She recounts how her grandfather wrote the civil services to escape the burden and stigma of being a dalit, a bhangi, because education and a government job gave him the comfort of living life like other forward castes. However the price for progress or acceptance was that they had to blend with the forward castes and not let others know of their dalit status which would immediately attract discrimination - explicit and implicit. So for much of her young life, Yashica remembers trying to be like the forwards castes - clothes, birthdays, rituals, food - anything that gave her a cover from being seen as a dalit. Her mother realised the damage of the discrimination of being dalit and fought every inch of the way to provide good convent school education to her children and a good cover from the world. Yashica was bright and did well at school but the family also had to deal with her father's alcoholism which cost them in more ways than one - instead of supporting the family, the family had to support him despite the fact that he was a government servant. Her mother on the other hand (perhaps the one reason for Yashica being where she is today) put her through the best schools, bargaining, negotiating, working herself to the bone so that education can pull them out of the hole they were in. Mayo's at Ajmer, St Stephen's and another college in Mussoorie exposed Yashica to a network of high class contacts but also made her feel inadequate about her own double life. She brings that pain out very well as she writes about the subtle ways one feels the discrimination - socially, politically, financially. A job in a call centre, jobs in top newspapers give her the financial freedom to think beyond merely surviving, the realisation that she was as good or better than any and that this caste narrative of merit was flawed. Interestingly her foray into writing on fashion and other topics also exposed her to a life of the high societies, the aspirational stuff so far away for dalits. Until one colleague from work who went to the USA to pursue a course in Columbia University gave her the courage to try it out for herself too - despite having no money.
Her bosses helped - one with flight tickets and another with something else - showing that people are good and there will be no dearth of help when we set out on conquests beyond our reach. Her Professor waived her fees which reduced her financial burden considerably. But more than anything it is the essay she writes for her admission - something that truly is her story - that helps her to come to terms with her identity as a dalit. Writing about it to a foreign university gave her the freedom to explore her own identity without the fear of being ridiculed or looked down upon which could have happened in India. And while writing that, she experiences a freedom of stepping out of the charade, of accepting herself as she was, is. In a moment of truth, she hesitantly asks her colleague and friend if she could tell her a truth before she leaves for the USA (Columbia University where BR Ambedkar studied as well). Her colleague hears her double life story of being a dalit and laughs it off and says - so what's the big deal?
Yashica intersperses her narrative with a short history of dalits, their past, the burden they carry today, her introduction to Ambedkar, to discrimination and how important it is not to buy into the narratives that society is quick to thrust upon them - about merit, status, about greed at taking up merit seats through reservation. She writes about those who proudly proclaim their dalitness and talks of the long way ahead. More than anything else, by writing this book as honestly as she did, she opens to door for so many dalits who are confused about their identity, whether to reveal it or to remain silent and hope to be mistaken for a non-dalit. Accept it, revel in it, she says. That's your identity. There's nothing to be ashamed of. In fact there's everything to be proud of.
My father was a dalit. It took me years to know what I was because he never told us about it despite being a high ranking government official himself. It took me another three decades to understand what dalit means and what their history was. Like Yashica, my convent education and other social cover ups allowed me the comfort of not having to state my caste. Unlike most others who have to suffer the many daily ignominies of their caste.
Yashica dedicates the book to her mother and also to Rohith Vemula whose death once again brought to focus the discrimination that dalits face in India. Rohith, as is well known, was a bright scholar at the University of Hyderabad who committed suicide protesting the discrimination he faced on the campus. Today he is branded a dalit where convenient, and at the same time has had the label taken away from him by the system, where convenient. Proves the point Yashica is trying to make.
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