"Cast, Color & Gender" Panel at JLF - New York

[Note: This is one of the blog posts I wrote covering the Jaipur Literature Festival in New York.]

The panel “Caste, Color, and Gender,” moderated by Prajwal Parajuly, opened with Yashica Dutt’s account of how she’d spent a lifetime pretending to be someone else by claiming that she was a Brahmin. When she came to the U.S. in 2014, her professors helped her understand systemic discrimination and privilege. The suicide of a fellow Dalit student in 2016 shook her to the core. She had never read a Dalit write in English, or so beautifully. She decided that she needed to do something, so she started a Tumblr, which she called “Documents of Dalit Discrimination” and where she invited people to share their stories of oppression. But first she had to tell her own story, and she does just this in her memoir COMING OUT AS DALIT.

Sharmila Sen came to the U.S. in 1982, when she was 12 years old. She’d grown up in a society full of different hierarchies—language, religion, social class, gender—but not race. There’s a historic and political reason for this: Unlike the U.S., India doesn’t include race as a category in its census. India also doesn’t offer dual citizenship, so Sen had to surrender her Indian citizenship, for which her grandparents’ generation had fought, and became an American citizen. Sen didn’t feel she was American, however, until she “got race.” She explained that people “got race” in the same way they “got the chicken pox, or a pair of shoes or a cell phone. It was something new, something to be used to communicate with others.” The author of NOT QUITE NOT WHITE, Sen discussed how she silently accepted the honorary badge of white adjacency without thinking much about it. Unlike Dutt, she didn’t tell others she was from a different caste or class, but if she was seen as “kind of white,” she accepted it, and it’s taken her 35 years to understand what the cost of this was.

Margo Jefferson pointed out that she didn’t grow up “rich.” “You would say ‘comfortable.’ It was considered vulgar if you said you were ‘rich,’” she explained about her upbringing in Chicago, which she details in her award-winning memoir NEGROLAND. She chose this title in part because the word “Negro,” capitalized, was considered a respectful term. She also wanted to shock readers into an awareness of the boundaries and ambitions of linguistic proprieties, and to signify land as something that people long for. “Whatever bigotry and discrimination takes place in your homeland, it remains your homeland,” she said. Like Sen, Jefferson is indebted to the writing of James Weldon Johnson, whose anonymously published AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN is “an astonishing document of the psychological, political, and sociological network of choices—that aren’t entirely choices—that go into the construction of racial identity.”

All three panelists talked about the role of language in shaping their identity. English was Sen’s third language, and when she came to the U.S., she was determined to acquire a new accent. For Jefferson, growing up, “you learned not only standardized English, but also how to modulate your voice, which also has to do with gender. You didn’t shout. You didn’t slump when you laughed. You thought about speech patterns, manners.” For Dutt, English was an indicator of privilege. In the 90s when she grew up, “you could only learn English if your parents spoke it or you went to a certain school.” She shared an anecdote about how, when she was five or six, she used the English term for “khajoor,” “dates,” in front of her family of Dalits. Their begrudging admiration told her that, if she continued to speak this way, in the right tone and manner, she would be respected by the world at large.

Dutt also talked about reservation policy, the Indian equivalent of affirmative action. Although quota students already live with the shame of taking someone else’s seat, some argue that too many Dalits are benefitting from this policy. According to Dutt, this simply isn’t true, especially considering that those who oppose reservations make up such a small percentage of Indian’s population but are arguably more educated and successful than Dalits, who make up a quarter of the population. “Attacking the reservation system is an attack on Dalits,” she said.