Born into a "formerly untouchable manual-scavenging family in small-town India," Yashica Dutt was taught from a young age to not appear “Dalit looking.” Although prejudice against Dalits, who compose 25% of the population, has been illegal since 1950, caste-ism in India is alive and well. Blending her personal history with extensive research and reporting, Dutt provides an incriminating analysis of caste’s influence in India over everything from entertainment to judicial systems and how this discrimination has carried over to US institutions.
Dutt traces how colonial British forces exploited and perpetuated a centuries old caste system, how Gandhi could have been more forceful in combatting prejudice, and the role played by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, whom Isabel Wilkerson called “the MLK of India’s caste issues” in her book Caste. Alongside her analysis, Dutt interweaves personal stories of learning to speak without a regional accent growing up and desperately using medicinal packs to try to lighten her skin.
Raw and affecting, Coming Out as Dalit brings a new audience of readers into a crucial conversation about embracing Dalit identity, offering a way to change the way people think about caste in their own communities and beyond.
After its enthusiastic reception in India upon publication in 2019, Yashica Dutt’s much-awaited Coming Out as Dalit has recently been published in the US with two new chapters, covering how the caste system traveled to the US, its history here, and the continuation of bias by South Asian communities in professional sectors. Amid growing conversations about caste discrimination prompting US institutions including Harvard University, Brandeis University, the University of California system, and the NAACP to add caste as a protected category to their policies, Dutt’s work sheds essential light on the significant influence caste-ism has across many aspects of US society.
Dutt will read excerpts from the book, speak about anti-caste movements in India and the US and engage in a scintillating conversation with historian and associate professor at the University of Delaware, Ramnarayan Rawat.
Advance registration recommended and appreciated.
Yashica Dutt is an internationally acclaimed journalist and one of the leading feminist voices on caste. Dutt's work has been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy and The Atlantic, and she has been featured on the BBC, The Guardian and PBS Newshour. Her writing has been part of Pen America’s India at 75 anthology that featured prominent Indian writers looking back on India’s history in its 75th year of independence, and a collection titled Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best Writers. Coming Out as Dalit is currently part of the curriculum in over 50 colleges and universities worldwide, including Harvard University and UC Berkeley, and won the prestigious Indian Arts and Letters Award for young writers in 2020. She graduated from Columbia Journalism School and lives in Brooklyn.
Ramnarayan Rawat is a historian of South Asia with particular interests in colonial and postcolonial India, racism and social exclusion, subaltern histories, and histories of democracy. His research focuses on Dalits of India and their engagement with colonialism, nationalism, spatial and social exclusionary regimes, and democratic thought and practice in modern India. His first book 'Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India' is the recipient of Joseph Elder book prize awarded by American Institute of Indian Studies (2009) and received ‘Honorable Mention’ in 2013 Association of Asian Studies Bernard S. Cohn book prize.