Living under Borrowed Skin: Caste Prejudice, Dalit Trauma and Surname Manipulation in Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out As Dalit: A Memoir

The way racist culture is a scar on professed Western liberalism, downgrading a group of people as Dalits and belittling them to the extent of non-humans is a similar indelible blot on Indian society. As an inevitable outcome of the constant negation of basic amenities and honour to Dalits and subsequent marginalisation of them to the bottom of society, Dalits, in general, share a collective consciousness of their eternal doom in a Brahminical society. Reservation of Dalits in educational sectors and jobs in India, on the other hand, makes them easy victims of mass hatred of job-hunting higher-class Hindu majority who feel Dalits are much below the level of standard of general category students to get access to education and jobs. Thus, a constant trauma of being outcasts is lived by the Dalits even today, so much so that they often resort to faking high-class social order to avoid humiliation, ostracisation, and confrontation with traumatic memories occasioned by a caste-prejudiced society. This situation is a trauma in itself, as it involves suppressing one’s true identity under threat from social injustice. Through a critical analysis of Yashica’s memoir, the present article will try to locate this trauma in an educated, apparently privileged Dalit who, though after initial hesitations over her Dalit identity for a significant period of her life, retorts back to the world declaring her true identity, can never get away with it.