In fact, it was Rohith Vemula’s tragic suicide in 2016, that “made my silence impossible,” she writes. It prompted Yashica Dutt to stop living a lie—that she was upper caste, when she was Dalit, and in fact, a ‘Bhangi’. She writes of her grandmother working as a manual scavenger, cleaning dry excrement from people’s homes. She describes the exhausting burden of living with the secret of “passing” (as upper caste) and being terrified of being caught out. In a a deeply moving account of her family life, she describes how they struggled with her father’s alcoholism and violence towards her mother: her mother attempted suicide, though pregnant with Yashica, by jumping off the roof of the house; she survived--and amazingly, so did Yashica. Her father was earlier an Excise Inspector, but later, after he lost his job, her mother, who actually wanted to become a police officer, variously worked as a tailor, teacher, and Amway agent. At one point, there was only R4 in the house, and her mother sent her to get atta (flour) and say they were baking cakes. Still, when she was a kid, her mother would pamper her with expensive shoes with multicoloured lights that lit up when she walked, that they could ill afford, so she could feel upper caste. She writes of her determination to speak English, a sort of marker of being upper caste. She comments on the Mandal Commission report, which observed discrimination against the SC/STs, and suggested “a 27 per cent reservation for backward classes that made up almost 52 per cent of the population of the country. Along with SC/ST reservation, only 49.5 per cent of entry-level seats would be reserved for those who represented almost 75 per cent of the total population of the country.” The controversy continues unabated.

Along with her memoir, she takes us through a brief history of the Dalit movement, the Dalit community’s lack of access to education, jobs and culture, the need for reservation, and the paucity of Dalit voices in mainstream media, including Dalit women. She writes of the liberating solidarity of participating in the Ambedkarite movement in the US, and how Dalits and Dalit organisations, previously ignored, are changing the narrative by speaking for themselves, including on social media, such as UK-based Pradeep Attri’s Ambedkar’s Caravan, Round Table India (RTI), Ravichandran Bathran’s Dalit Camera, Savari and Velivada. She writes of Dalit artists creating “art that tells our stories,”including filmmakers like Nagraj Manjule, Neeraj Ghaywan and Pa Ranjith; Ginni Mahi, queen of Chamar pop; Ambedkarite Buddhist Gospel from Dhamma Angels, Mumbai, and Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s Dalit Blues.  The book calls out upper castes by forcing us to confront our prejudices by presenting facts. It’s a good way for upper castes to not only learn about Dalits, but also to learn about themselves. Highly recommended.

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Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist. 
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com