You can't really escape from your caste. The more you try the more people are going to remind you about your place through their subtle and wilful actions.
*
'Words' are interesting things. But I feel I don't have the vocabulary to speak. I always have this huge urge of expressing myself but as soon as I do, there is this huge amount of shame that comes with it. This shame is a ghost.*
This ghost has been on my shoulder since childhood moreover it is constantly devouring me as the clock is ticking. I don't know how to navigate this passage between the urge of expression and the shame of wordlessness.*
Then comes the violence that is there to eat me up, from the outside. This violence has created a void inside my body. Inside this void there is a wound, which is the wound of untouchability.*
I constantly feel that somebody is watching over me. I feel like people see me as invisible, like a ghost. But this feeling isn't just about me, it's also about my caste. You can never truly escape your caste; it takes over your existence like a shadow, a shadow which is very dense and thick in nature. It never leaves you. It is always there to remind you, your place. It's like a ghost that haunts you, no matter how far you try to run. And over time, this ghost just doesn't follow you, it starts to devour you from the inside. I can still feel its weight pressing down my shoulders, reminding me that I am never free from it. In some ways, this has turned me into a ghost too- something people notice but don't truly see, they don't want to see.*
In front of my house there was a gutter. I was born close to that gutter. The gutter whose water was thick black in nature, which is filled with the yellow colour shit, which is filled with plastic, wood and bones of humans and animals. The smell of that gutter never leaves my consciousness. Where I was born there were two things common one was the gutter and the another was pigs. Now after coming to JNU I still see those pigs. Or myself as a pig. I still remember the time I had fallen inside that gutter. People were laughing at me.*
Inside JNU, what I really understood is equality and equity. Our consciousness forms through the social background that we grew up in. JNU has become an accumulation of upper-caste(s) consciousness. I often used to think how can a person know about my caste if I do not tell him. It is impossible. Actually it is opposite of that, it is really easy for an upper caste person to find out your caste.Upper caste consciousness always needs bodies, especially of the lowered castes, to perform their intellectuality, political theories and what not! It subtly works through endogamy, political correctness and criminal silences.
*
Feeling extremely dehumanised. Coming from a marginalised community, my experience has been not at all peaceful. In my whole one year I have always been sad, lonely, feeling extremely anxious all the time.*
Caste functions in very minute details. It is like a nexus. Like a spider's net. Which upper caste person, through his/her cunning consciousness is constantly creating. Creating this net is their playing ground. On which an untouchable will be systematically and structurally murdered emotionally.*
The upper caste consciousness has become sublime in the very nature of its way of committing caste based discrimination. It's been year since i came into JNU, and this very moment i am thinking of this sher of Bashir Badr, which goes as follows:Koi hath bhi na mileyega jo gale miloge tapak se,
Ye naye mijaz ka shehar hai jara fasle se mila karo