As for her Dalit identity, it lay “deeply buried beneath layers of convent education, urban upbringing and a hardened resolve to avoid engaging with anything related to caste.”Ĭoming Out. Whenever anyone asked her about her caste, she told them she was a brahmin. Though financial hardship made it tough, Dutt became adept at living the lie. This entailed, among other things, pressuring her daughter to follow, from a very young age, a regimen of personal grooming designed to make her look fairer, and unlike the stereotypically dark-skinned Dalit. An integral part of her strategy to achieve that aim was to pass them off as upper caste, middle class. What stands out in Dutt’s account of her childhood is her mother’s determination to give her children an upper caste, middle class upbringing. Her mother, whose dream of joining the IPS was wrecked by a difficult marriage to an alcoholic, worked a series of hard, low-paying gigs to put her children through school. Her father was a civil servant with the State government. The personal narrative alternates with observations on caste, “the invisible arm that turns the gears in nearly every system in our country,” in Dutt’s memorable words.ĭutt was born in Ajmer, Rajasthan. The book is a mix of memoir - of a Dalit who pretends to be a brahmin, until she doesn’t - and social commentary, interspersed with brief historical fragments about the Dalit movement. One such is being forced to live your life pretending to be of another caste, terrified of your true identity being discovered.Ĭoming Out as Dalit documents the torment of such a life, and how she worked up the courage to discard pretence and embrace her identity as a Dalit.

There are other, more insidious, yet equally devastating forms of abuse that caste inflicts. But violence and humiliation are not the only forms of caste oppression.

They are testaments of the atrocities heaped upon them by India’s indigenously developed misery-generating machine known as the caste system.

Memoirs by Dalit writers tend to be documents of suffering.

Yashica dutt books