While the saga of pressing hunger and smacking caste discrimination are absent in her memoir, by no means is it devoid of the monster of caste that B R Ambedkar so presciently warned about. Dutt has now written a memoir about growing up in a Dalit family, and the compulsions of hiding her caste while others flaunted theirs for social capital.
To this polyphony of voices, Dutt’s memoir adds a somewhat different note in the sense that it is not a raw and ragged Dalit life-writing that we have witnessed so far. 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. After living what she calls a “lie”-“pretending to be from a caste that’s not Dalit” (p xi) for a long time, she finally “came out,” declaring (and thereby asserting) herself to be a Dalit in the aftermath of the Rohith Vemula incident in January 2016.ĭalit memoir writing as a potent and preponderant genre of self-expression can be broadly affixed (but by no means fixated) to such leitmotifs as pressing penury and hunger, everyday engagement with dirt, caste/gender oppression, raw discrimination and humiliation, unflagging struggle for education, the seminal legacy of social revolutionaries and intellectuals (for example, Savitribai Phule, Jotirao Phule, B R Ambedkar), a certain attainment of material decency, contestations contra the structures of inequality and oppression (for example, caste, gender) and the continuous collective struggle towards achieving unbranded human personality or liberation.
Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir by the New York-based journalist Yashica Dutt is in many ways an informative, insightful, damning and somewhat cathartic compendium of personal/political awakening by a “nouveau Dalit” who was obsessively “schooled” since childhood in many detours to duck her “ex-untouchable” identity.
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