Today, I’m Coming Out As Dalit
Today, I’m Coming Out As Dalit Yashica Dutt · Wednesday, January 20, 2016 Rohith Vemula, the Dalit scholar from Hyderabad Central University who took his own life on January 18th, wanted to write about the stars. His mind was a ‘glorious thing made of stardust’, whose proof he left in his last letter to the world. In life, his education – a chunk of it financed by his mother’s earnings as a tailor – was an act of rebellion. In death, he blazed a trail on Dalit rights, whose brightness refuses to be ignored. By the media, by the bureaucracy, by the Internet and by me. I was born in a Dalit family in Ajmer, Rajasthan. And I grew up learning to hide it. My convent school education, a non-Dalit sounding last name, and a skin color that was ‘dusky but still not dirty’ eased my passing as a non-Dalit. “Beta, what caste are you from?” “Aunty, Brahmin.” A lie I spoke so often and with such conviction, that I not only fooled my friends’ mothers but even myself. But I couldn’t foo...
