During the fall of 2022, I was entering University of Hyderabad (UoH), equal parts in love and in fear. A former UoH alumni and a friend once told me, "I cannot assure you that you will not face any discrimination here, but I promise there are avenues to fight it, in case you do." So I hitchhiked on with a little bit of hope and plenty of anticipation and enrolled for a master's in gender studies.
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I often visualize gender as a small circle, within a larger circle called caste. They speak to each other, but the bigger circle speaks louder. This visual imagery was apt for how the Centre for Women's Studies was located in the campus, a small drop sending powerful ripples across the vast ocean that this campus is. Caste shapes our experience of gender. If you take the circle of gender outside the circle of caste, feminism would stop making sense in the Indian context.*
Often in a Social Science classroom, our understanding of caste is limited to an illustrious text written by upper caste authors and discussed by upper caste students. But what if we were to read Dalit authors, and hear Dalit students speak in the classroom without the fear of being marked out?*
In Gender studies in my university, discussions around caste were woven into the very fabric of the gender discourse. There was a deliberate affirmation in the way the texts were chosen and the points of discussions that were raised. Dalit women's literature was not simply an afterthought in a forgotten segment at the end of the syllabus. There was a reverent centrality to the Dalit experience that echoed close to me.What does it mean to be an out and about Dalit Queer person in one of the most politically charged universities of this country? What does out and about even stand for? It can be an opportunity to tell my own story. It can also be a path towards misguided representation.
While classrooms are sites of transformations they are also spaces for transgressions. Often we risk locating the collective shame of a group into a person. The burden of caste often weighs heavily on Dalit and Bahujan students.
I remember working on my assignments during the first semester. Our professors would repeatedly assure us to not worry about the grammar but to ensure honesty in our engagement with the text. It was acknowledged that students came from diverse backgrounds and may not have the same command over the language.
Vijetha Kumar in her essay, "Hiding Behind Language" says,
"The point here is not that the English-speaking person sometimes has warped ideas about what privilege looks and sounds like. It is not even that they may or may not think in other languages, it's that there is a certain laziness around these words that prevents us from doing the thinking. The belief that we don't need to know what they mean in other languages even if we speak them comes from having spent a lot of time only with people who look like us and speak like us."
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Currently, I'm in the middle of my training to become a facilitator to host participants willing to unlearn caste biases. During every session, I grapple with the question of how do I put myself "out and about", this time as an educator, in front of a dominant caste audience. I only know that I could not attempt to pour love and courage into teaching, if I didn't witness and receive the same, for myself.One of my trainers mentioned how triggers are a gateway for our wounds to draw our attention to it. As feminist anti-caste educators, we have to be mindful of our wounded self who might lash out in anticipation of a threat which is not real.