Thus, by the time she was working as a fashion journalist in Delhi, she was ‘passing’ as a young Brahmin woman, and was accepted as such. She had to constantly pretend that she was ‘upper-caste’ – and succeeded in doing so. But there was another, far greater cost – the young schoolgirl had to hide her Dalit identity. And this the young Yashica and her stalwart mother actually accomplished, at significant financial cost. Her remarkable and persevering mother realised that her daughter would need to attend good private schools in order to learn to speak English fluently. But the cost of this success was dramatically embodied in the young Yashica herself. Remarkably, Dutt’s family members in Rajasthan came from the ‘low’ manual scavenger caste, and yet they were able to climb up the social ladder. Nobody else wants to do these jobs – so impoverished Dalits are forced, by sheer poverty, to perform them. Dalit men die virtually every day somewhere in India, while doing this work, lacking the mandatory safety gear that ought to be provided to them. Fettered, above all, by poverty, and entrapped in despised, very low-paying manual jobs, Dalits have been deliberately immobilised in these dreadful jobs, of which the cleaning of sewers is the most deadly. Reservations have undoubtedly been the single most important policy instrument through which educated Dalits have been able to shake off their shackles. Dutt is the third generation of a family where her father and both her grandfathers had successful careers in government service, having gained their jobs through the affirmative action policy mandated by Ambedkar’s constitution.

It holds one’s attention from first to last, as she threads her life story through the horrors of Indian casteism, particularly casteism as practised against Dalits.ĭutt’s family story mirrors that of the most upwardly-mobile Dalits throughout India – reservation s in higher education and government jobs have been absolutely central to their success story. Though Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as a Dalit was published in 2019, its selection as the winner of the 2021 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar is a reminder of the timelessness of its appeal.

Coming out as dalit book