Read this book with us and join us in our book club meetings where we dive deep into the book, and what it meant for us. Coming Out As Dalit: A Memoir Yashica Dutt Aleph 232 Pages DR AMBEDKAR, IN his classic text Annihilation of Caste, observed that the caste system is not a division of labour but division of labourers.

This October, we're reading ‘Coming Out As Dalit’ for the Champaca Book Subscription and Book Club. It brings forth an important perspective on what it means to seek and find community in a world standing on old social structures. Being a person of same creed it feels Im reading my ancestors life. She talks about the tremendous feeling of empowerment she experienced when she finally stood up for herself and her community and shrugged off the fake upper-caste identity she d had to construct for herself. Coming out as Dalit (English, Hardcover, unknown). She writes about having to hide her caste while growing up, the role of caste in the Indian feminist movement, and what it meant for her to rediscover community by connecting with Dalits from across India through her Tumblr.ĭutt’s writing helps us understand how marginalisation is embodied, and the isolation that comes with it. In Coming Out as Dalit, Dutt recounts the exhausting burden of living with the secret and how she was terrified of being found out. The soul of the memoir is in Dutt’s vulnerability, as she gives us glimpses of her life, and shares her emotional journey of growing into adulthood.

There is no one single Dalit identity or experience. In this book, she reflects on her relationship with her caste identity, traces caste across historical and political dimensions, and bears “witness to what it means to be Dalit in a grossly unfair society.” Coming Out covers the years of abuse her mother endured at the hands of Dutt's alcoholic father and his family for wanting to give her children an upper-caste education, to the double disadvantage of being a Dalit woman in a casteist and patriarchal society. Our book of the month is ‘Coming Out As Dalit’, a memoir by Yashica Dutt, a writer, and journalist, who was born into a Dalit family in Rajasthan from the untouchable Bhangi caste.

Coming out as dalit a memoir