India's caste system might be impossible to dismantle, but Yashica Dutt wants to try

Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Yashica Dutt had just finished a glass of falooda when the sweetness of the milky drink, layered with vermicelli, rose water and basil seeds, dissipated on her tongue.

There was nothing wrong with her order. The bitter aftertaste only settled in when the small talk crescendoed into the familiar guessing game Dutt would rather not play.

"You must be Brahmin," the man at the Devon Avenue restaurant deduced. "No," Dutt, 38, said. The Brooklyn-based journalist continued to tell the stranger she was of a "lower caste," but she didn't volunteer much more.

"I felt that shame again," Dutt said to me, recalling the late April incident that took place right after she gave a talk on her book, "Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir of Surviving India’s Caste System."

"I immediately regressed into someone who was hiding."

Living a lie and "passing" as an "upper" caste Hindu opened doors, Dutt discovered as she attended India's most prestigious schools and eventually landed a job writing about fashion. But when a Dalit Ph.D. student died by suicide in 2016 and left a note that read "my birth is my fatal accident," a triggered Dutt, by now in New York, felt compelled to shed her armor and publicly reveal in a social media post that, she too, belonged to the community long-maligned as "untouchable."

The ancient caste system, although outlawed in India, is "the gear that turns the wheel of Indian society," Dutt said. While the affirmative action policies instituted by Dalit icon Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar remain, the social hierarchy cemented by caste and religion is preserved by an overwhelming amount of people who benefit from it.

Casteism is so influential in India that non-Hindu Indians, including Christians, Sikhs and Muslims, have adopted similar pecking orders within their own smaller populations.

In the United States it is race that "embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics and sets forth the rules, expectations, and stereotypes that have been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species," Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues in her 2020 best seller "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents."

Dalits, Indian Muslims face similar discrimination

Dalits, like Black Americans, have historically persevered through ingenuity and civil disobedience, Dutt points out in her acclaimed book, first published in India in 2019. Dutt's great-grandfather, who was denied an education, learned to write by scrawling in the dirt with a stick. Another one of Dutt's heroes, Ambedkar, banded fellow Dalits together to a public water tank where they sipped water, sparking a violent backlash in 1927. I was embarrassed that I didn't know much about Ambedkar, the chief architect of India's constitution who butted heads with Mahatma Gandhi over how to address caste inequities in the newly independent India's electoral system. Decades later, in the early 1970s, the Dalit Panther movement, inspired by the Black Panthers, emerged to tackle caste prejudice.

Mahesh Kumar A./AP

Reading Dutt's book, I was also reminded of the parallels between the struggles of Dalits and India's Muslims, who have been facing unprecedented intolerance and abuse. Muslims and Dalits deal with the worst residential segregation in Indian cities, a 2022 study revealed. A 2007 field experiment, Dutt cited, also found that when fake resumes of similarly qualified candidates were sent out to Indian companies, Dalit "applicants" were called 33% less often, and Muslims 66% less often, than Hindu candidates from privileged castes.

I can attest that being Brown and Muslim in America isn't a walk in the park either.

This shared suffering has resonated with many people of color who came up to Dutt during her recent book tour and told her, "My experience is different than yours, but I know exactly what you mean."

The expanded edition of "Coming Out as Dalit," which was published in the U.S. earlier this year, includes two additional chapters on casteism in America and the efforts to silence concerns over caste-bias in the workplace.

In 2022, a caste-bias presentation by leading Dalit rights activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan was canceled at Google after some Indian employees there raised objections, calling Soundararajan "Hinduphobic" and "anti-Hindu."

Two cities, Seattle and Fresno, banned caste-based discrimination last year, but when a bill outlawing caste discrimination landed on California Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk last October, he vetoed it, saying it was unnecessary because that type of bigotry is already prohibited under existing civil rights protections.

And here in Illinois, anti-casteism language proposed to be included as part of an updated description of the state's Indian American Advisory Council ended up on the cutting room floor.

"You cannot deny the existence of caste (in South Asian spaces) any longer," said Dutt, frustrated that some fellow Indians obsessed with perpetuating the myth of a "post-caste" world keep a tight-grip on the narrative.

Dutt wants equity for all and to steer clear of probing questions about caste and bullies like the person who sent her an email, threatening to "bash" her head in for daring to tell her story.

That is not too much to ask.

Rummana Hussain is a columnist and member of the Sun-Times Editorial Board.

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