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- [00:00]
Yashika Dutt
Foreign.
- [00:09]
Ajantha Subramanian
Welcome to the CAST Pod, where we assemble scholars, activists, community organizers, artists, and others to make sense of what CAST is, how it works, how it's experienced, and how it has traveled and taken root both inside and outside of South Asia. What have people done to perpetuate, transform, and even attempt to abolish caste? I'm your host, Ajantha Subramanian, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, and my guest today is Yashika Dutt, a journalist who has covered a range of issues such as gender, caste, internationalism, and US Politics. Yashka's writing has appeared in Indian publications including Hindustan Times, Live Mint Stuff, scroll, and the Wire, as well as in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the BBC, the Guardian, and PBS NewsHour. In 2020, her book, Coming out as a memoir of Surviving India's Caste System, received an award from the Saeedya Academy, which is India's National Academy of Letters. Yeshika is also an independent journalist whose writings have appeared in a substack newsletter titled Featuring Dalits that I urge our listeners to check out. And she's also written in a number of other news sites. If you if you find her on Instagram, you can get links to all of her stories. So welcome to the CAST Pod, Yeshika.
- [01:37]
Yashika Dutt
Thank you so much, Ajanta. It's always a pleasure to be in conversation with you.
- [01:41]
Ajantha Subramanian
Awesome. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to start with your book, your amazing book, and then move on to talking about your journalistic work. So my first question about the book is about the genre. You published your book in 2019 in the midst of pursuing a career as a journalist. And this choice of genre places you in a long line of Dalit men and women who have used their own life histories to illuminate the role of caste in society. So I wanted to ask, what led you to write a memoir? Not every journalist does so, and you chose to do so. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on what prompted you to do so. And in general, I mean, how do you, how do you understand the role of memoir as a genre for representing Dalit's life? Why has it been such a popular genre?
- [02:37]
Yashika Dutt
Yeah, Ajanta, I think some of your listeners who are familiar with caste might know my book coming out as Dalit. It published in the Indian subcontinent in 20, in South Asia in 2019, and then it came out in the US via Beacon Press last year. It was a long journey to get the book published in India and then bring it to the United States. I think when I was doing my press tour the first time around, which was around 2019, before the pandemic, I talked a lot about why I decided to write this book. And that was because I, you know, I was at a point in my life where I was not considering writing books or revealing any part of my story. And as many of your listeners know, that I came out as Dalit in 2016 in response to the last letter left behind by Rohit for your listeners. Rohit was a Dalit scholar and activist from Hyderabad University who was forced to give up his life because of institutional discrimination and casteism that he experienced. There was an intersection of mental health that Dalit people often challenges, that Dalit people often encounter, and of course, institutional pressure, structural discrimination that led him to take this decision. And it was at a time when, you know, we weren't hearing a lot about castes in mainstream discourse, certainly not from Dalits and certainly not in North India. The conversation in the part of the country that I was, where I grew up, where I worked, which was in Delhi, grew up in Rajasthan, we heard about caste from pundits, from consultants, from dominant caste people, and rarely did we have conversations by Dalit people. And of course there have been robust political movements in up. You know, in my childhood, Kumari Mayawati was a prime minister. I knew about the BSP party, I obviously knew about Dr. B R Ambedkar, but none of my contemporaries were talking about caste. And Rohit was the first Dalit person whose writing I encountered and whose writing was so brilliant and moving, but also extremely powerful that I think it inspired generation of Dalit leaders and Dalit folks, including myself, to own our identity and to tell our own stories. And in 2016, when I came out as Dalit, you might remember, folks might remember as well that it was quite the moment because there was so much attention on Rohit's passing. There was a lot of politicking that was happening. It was the early days of the BJP government. They were still kind of settling in and the responses were being watched. So there was a lot that was going on and caste truly became a flashing point. And in that, that moment when I realized that I am at Columbia, I had the opportunity to leave the country and really examine my caste, which is, you know, I was hiding my caste identity. Growing up, my entire life, I did not talk about caste. I did not associate with any anti caste movements or literature or thinking what ideology even Dr. Pierre Mader is somebody I did not feel like I could claim And Rohit's writing is what did that for me. And I wrote this note. Today I'm coming out as Dalit. And it kind of, you know, took the country by storm. I think it's fair to say at this point. It went viral within the diaspora here in the US in the uk. It was shared. I remember I worked at an ad agency, and one of my Indian colleagues said, oh, my God. I read about your story on ndtv, and we were both in New York, and it was quite the moment. So that made me realize that there was an impact that my work had had in a way that my journalism before that hadn't. And I continued writing stories on Cast because I realized that there was this brief window that as a Dalit person, I had. I had a voice. Any marginalized person who's listening to us right now knows that we only get tiny, brief flashes where we can make an impact. And I recognize that, having seen the patterns of media behavior, that this was my moment. And I wrote a ton of stories talking about why we need to think about caste in this way. Why I'm talking about coming out as Dalit. What does coming out as Dalit even mean? I got so much backlash from everybody you can imagine about, you know, even from the Dalit community that them saying, why do you need to hide your caste? What is this absurd term, coming out as Dalit? Why are you talking about in this way? There's so much resistance to, like, new language and new modes of thinking within our space spaces, within South Asian spaces in general. And seeing the prominence of my work, I think I was offered a book deal. And I think to answer one of your questions, why do Dalit people end up writing memoirs? Is because our lived experience doesn't. In the eyes of the intelligentia, the academia, it doesn't make us experts on our own lives. So the only kind of story that we are credited with telling is the one that is our own. You know, I realized that even though I had a lot of experience as a journalist, I had been to a really good school to study journalism. I would not be taken seriously if I wrote about caste unless I showed people that this is what I'd been through, unless I talked about my pain and unless they could see me bleed on the page. And this is something that all marginalized writers, whether they're black folks, whether they're indigenous folks here in the US all over the world, African writers have talked about this, that they need to see us bleed, and only then our stories are believed.
- [08:28]
Ajantha Subramanian
You know, It's. It's so powerful, what you're saying about. Needing to start with your own pain in order to be granted the authority to speak at all. Right. And I think one of the things that your book does so well is it doesn't remain at the level of the personal, right? I mean, it moves between the personal and the structural right, the contemporary and the historical. I mean, you scale up and down in a way that makes it clear that this is not just the story of an individual or a family. Right. It's the story of a society. Right. But coming to your family, I mean, one of the figures who really jumps off the page is your mother. Your mother who had this will, this iron will to educate you despite the opposition of male family members. Right. I mean, that comes through so strongly, the kinds of sacrifices that she made to make sure that you were educated. But what also comes through was her conviction that your success, that your upward mobility could only happen by passing as upper caste. Do you think of your mother as a feminist?
- [09:52]
Yashika Dutt
Yes. I think the simple answer is yes. I always have thought of my mom as a feminist. And, you know, I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, and that was not a word that was being thrown around a lot of in those times. The feminism in question at that time was you had to be part of a movement, you had to be an organizer. That's the kind of feminism we understood. The reason I call my mother a feminist and has she has been, is because she talked about equal rights for men and women and boys and girls since I, as long as I remember, since I was a baby, she would always say in Hindi that, you know, met. I'm not going to discriminate between a girl child and a boy child. And that might seem simple, like, of course, why would you. But you have to remember I grew up in Rajasthan and Rajasthan in the 90s, and I think still continues to be one of the places in the country where gender discrimination is extremely pervasive. To the extent that I was born and I was the first girl child in the entire family, and apparently extended family members, even immediate family members, weren't happy about it. So that kind of gender discrimination that I experienced growing up, and my mother was like, dress me as a boy. I think this is something a lot of girls in that era experience. But they're like, oh, we're going to raise her like a boy. We're going to give her the kind of education that boys are meant to receive, and we're going to give her, quote, Unquote, the freedom that boys are meant to receive. And she'll constantly remind me that she's raising me like a. Like a man, not. Not in a way that I was trans, but it was its own specific rebellion towards the gender notions in Rajasthan at that time, which were so toxic. So my mother raised me in tiny rebellions every day to make sure that I could be this person that I am today. It was not easy, and it was a truly difficult road where she had to fight against not only her in laws, but even her immediate family, who had these specific notions of how women should be raised, how girls should be raised, what is their place in the society? Because in my Dalit family, and this is not comment on other Dalit folks, but in my family there was this deep entrenched desire to conform to Brahminical patriarchy. And we learned from Brahminical patriarchy that women have a specific space. They are meant to do all the work, but never be seen or heard. And they are essentially second class citizens. And somehow in the generation of my parents, those norms were fully adopted and my mother rebelled against them. So was she an organizer who was leading nonprofit organizations that were based on gender justice in the 70s and 80s? No, but my mother was a feminist because she maintained the fact that we had to be equal. There was going to be no discrimination between my brother, who is my third sibling, and my sister and me. And we would be given the same access to education. We would be given the same access to food. Food. Because that kind of discrimination happens in families as well, where let the boy eat first, let him eat the bigger piece of meat or protein or the. The best thing that comes. It's the boy's thing. And it was just those things not happening in my family. And my mom telling me that we're not doing this because we cherish you and because we think of you as equal in my eyes, made her a feminist. I associated that term with her much later. I associated that term with myself much later, like in my twenties. But yes, in. For all practical purposes, my mother was a Dalit feminist.
- [13:47]
Ajantha Subramanian
Effy, do you think that this adoption of like, Brahminical or patriarchal norms is more true of the Dalit middle class? Or do you think this is a more kind of pervasive phenomenon within sort of Dalit communities?
- [14:08]
Yashika Dutt
I might not have empirical data to obviously back this up, but my sense is that it is a mobility aspect. The sense to assimilate happens among a lot of Dalit families who aspire to class mobility and who have Maybe not been exposed, and of course, this is not for everybody, but maybe not been exposed to a maker's ideas, or an idea of owning Dalit's identities, or an education about the inequality that so persists in a society, or who, for example, just choose to line with the status quo because, you know, that is the easy choice. As somebody who has spent at least last, the last decade completely going against the grain and calling out these systems of discrimination and, and through my work and through my personal life just standing up for values that I believe in, I can attest that it is a hard thing to do. Yeah, when you go against the grain, there is friction. It makes your life so much more challenging. So for people who make the choice to just assimilate, to put their head down and do what is being asked of them, that makes their already extremely challenging lives 5% easier. I think that is a valid choice. And a lot of people do make those choices. Now, in following those systems, they also adopt the toxic ideas of dominant caste spaces, especially about women. And this is, you know, I'm not saying that in Dalit families, discrimination against women doesn't happen or those norms don't exist, but at least there is an open acknowledgment of women being allowed to go and work. And I will still say allowed because the decision comes from the top. The men, the older men of the family, decide whether the woman will be allowed to go or work or not. And women are allowed to do that. And that provides them some degree of mobility, some degree of autonomy. Like, for example, my mother, who went out to work when my dad wasn't working. It wasn't the worst thing that anybody had seen because her mother worked. She worked in a. You know, as. This is not something that my family likes me to talk about, but she worked, you know, as in a manu. Scavenging job.
- [16:29]
Ajantha Subramanian
And this is your. Was it your grandmother?
- [16:31]
Yashika Dutt
This is my grandmother, which, you know, I've talked about repeatedly. And she worked in that job. And my dad's grandmother also did a lot of that work. My dad's mother did some of that work as well. So the women in our families were working, were they being paid fair wages? No, the. The conditions were extremely horrible and exploitative, and they were not earning equal to the men even, and doing dangerous jobs that were detrimental to their health. So to that degree, I think there is a difference, but in adopting or aspiring to move into middle class. But it's not even just a class aspiration towards class mobility. It's more about Assimilation into a caste. Mobility, which is understandably not possible. Like, you cannot change a caste, but you can hide, you can move to a different city and you can pretend to be from a middle caste and sort of change your last name and adopt a different identity. And I think it's about living in a society that treats Dalits as subhuman and not equal in any way. And it's the desire for Dalit people to snatch back some of their freedom by trying to make their lives easier and trying to assert their equality in any way that is available to them.
- [17:54]
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- [19:14]
Ajantha Subramanian
You know, it's so this. The idea of both gender justice and class mobility and mobility out of some of the most horrendous forms of caste. Labor. Caste marked labor. Right. That. That so often has to come at the expense of a shared struggle. Right. It's the poignancy of that kind of social isolation. Right. The fear of. Of exposure leading people to. To isolate themselves from larger Dalit networks. I mean, this is something that you write about in your book, right? This constant fear that dogged you of. Of exposure. Right? Right. And. And that if you were exposed as Dalit, that somehow that would invalidate all of your accomplishments, right? Yeah. That they would immediately be seen as undeserved.
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Yashika Dutt
I mean,
- [20:20]
Ajantha Subramanian
pervasive is this problem of passing. And, you know, you talked about pushback that you got from Dalits themselves when you wrote your book, right? Who, because you had passed for as long as you had, that somehow denied you a platform to speak to why passing is even necessary. Right. In caste society. I wonder if you can say a little more about just that experience of a backlash from other Dalits, Right. Who criticized you for passing. And I mean, in some ways, you know, it was Rohit Vemula's writing that made passing suddenly intolerable for you. Right. I mean, it. It forced you to recognize that this, that this was a. You were doing a violence to yourself. Yeah. Right. So it must have been an incredible act of bravery to even write the book. Right. Or to write the articles that came out before the book and then to face this kind of backlash from other Dalits. Can you say something about the controversies around passing within the Dalit community?
- [21:35]
Yashika Dutt
Yeah. I firstly want to say that a lot more people pass as dominant caste toward Dalit than we know or understand. The response to my book over, you know, the book came out in 2019, we're in 2025 now. And I continue receiving letters. I mean, messages. Who Receives letters anymore? DMs and emails from folks who are saying that I was passing. And I am trying not to after reading your work, or I still am. And I never thought that anybody would talk about this phenomena. Just last week I met somebody here in New York who moved here from India just a couple of years ago. And their parents were terrified that if they talk about their Dalit identity here in the US that the same harm that could happen to them back home in India could. Could also follow them here in the US and they use my work as an example to tell their parents that it's okay, they're not going to be in the same kind of danger that they are back home and where they are forced to hide their caste identity. So this binary idea that there is only one way of being Dalit, I think makes very little sense when that is so far from the ground reality of how people live their lives. There are so many people who are continuing to pass, who feel the pressure to assert their identities because everybody around them is telling that they should, who then put themselves in dangerous, violent situations because it's not the right thing for them. And I think there has to be a space for people who are going to those tensions in their lives. I think the most important aspect of us Being Dalits as a community is to have empathy and understanding for each other's experiences. We have learned from the time of Dr. B R Ambedkar. Baba Sahib has said that we must follow certain things if we are Dalit. And one of them is obviously educate, agitate, organize. And the educate part most people understand. But the agitate and organize is not what a lot of people understand and, and want to follow. And is it their loss? Absolutely. But also they're allowed to make that choice. And I firmly believe that. Not if the Dalit population in India is above 200 million from last I checked and I think it's much higher now. Not every single person is going to think the same way or behave the same way or have, you know, the sameness of thought or identity. I mean, Dalits from Maharashtra, where Dr. Miyamidkar was born and has such a powerful impact in, will be very different from Dalits like myself from Rajasthan, who have not had any association or contact with Ambedkar, in fact, who live in these feudal, patriarchal, casteist societies where all they can do is hide. We have to understand that we come from different spaces and we have to have respect for that.
- [24:53]
Ajantha Subramanian
That's so well put. Place matters, Right. And that the, there are certain that every choice is structured. It's not that some are free and some are unfree, that every choice is conditioned by a set of circumstances. Right. And as you say, there are huge regional variations in India, you know, places where Dalit political assertion has flourished and places where it has not, you know, for a variety of structural reasons. So yeah, I think that was just, just very eloquently put. And, and just this, this, this is call for empathy, right. That people sort of find their own way. And it's, and it's not necessarily because of false consciousness or self hatred or anything, but because it's hard to be brave. And it's, and it's, and it's also hard because there's ample evidence of the kind of stigma that follows. Right. That follows an active coming out. So I, you know, the educate piece, you said that this is something that, you know, most Dalits are sort of on board with. Right. Even if they're not on board with the agitated and organized. Yes. I think education as a vehicle of social mobility is almost a kind of uncontested truth.
- [26:27]
Yashika Dutt
Right.
- [26:28]
Ajantha Subramanian
And yet, you know, going back to Rohit Vembala, I mean, this is a guy who was a PhD student in a highly reputed institution who took his own life because of the kind of stigma and discrimination he faced on a daily basis at his university. So, you know, the kind of the, the, the outrage and tragedy of young Dalit people making it to these coveted spaces and then feeling utterly marginalized and taking their own lives as a result. I don't know, I mean, to, to. For me, it feels like education is, is necessary but insufficient, you know, that there needs to be a much broader sort of revaluing of caste, of labor. Right. That has to accompany mobility through education. Because it's, that's, it's only through a kind of two broader sort of structural changes that people can inhabit these educational spaces equally. Right. Without feeling like they're a threat to their sanity.
- [27:48]
Yashika Dutt
Absolutely.
- [27:49]
Ajantha Subramanian
Right. So I think that's where the social movement piece of anti caste politics is important. Right. Yeah. That it's only through that that you can have these kind of broader structural changes. Right. That make absolutely make these individual choices to avail of education livable. Right. I wanted to ask you about. Because the other. This is a bit of a jump, but I, I was quite struck by a part of your memoir where you say that in, when you were doing journalism at Columbia, that you started to read widely on race, on colonialism, et cetera, and part of it was reading black feminism that was transformative for you. And of course, the kind of race, caste dialogue, the kind of Dalit African American conversation is a long standing one. And it's, and it's one that I think has been very productive. And now that you live here in the United States, I wonder if you can say something about your own engagement with black thought, black politics, what it has meant to live as a Dalit person in the United States with this incredibly rich history of sort of rich and kind of transformative history of, of black struggle. I mean, I think the civil rights movement sort of laid the ground for South Asian migration in many ways. Right. I mean, and the, the kinds of minority rights or rights in general that South Asians enjoy in this country have to be credited in part to black struggle. And yet that's so rarely recognized. Right. So what is your relationship to African American history? How do you position yourself in relation to it here?
- [30:06]
Yashika Dutt
I think the reason I ended up writing my book, the way it came out was because I was exposed to these conversations around the struggle of black folks in this country and how they had asserted themselves over the decades and the impact of that assertion, the Civil rights movement, that I saw in people around me, in black folks around me, and how they own their identities in this very definitive way. I think My evolution and understanding of feminist thought and black feminist thought is what I think they were interconnected with how I thought about Dalit feminism. Which is not to say that Dalit feminists in India are not remarkable and have not contributed in this incredible and amazing way. It's just that that is not, for various reasons, something that I had access to. And when I moved here, I had access to black feminist thought and theory and writers. And I was able to read them and feel extremely inspired and feel really connected and feel an immediate kinship and association with the struggle that folks were experiencing here and how I had lived my life until then. Which, you know, this is 2015, when I was not talking publicly about being Dalit. And I think reading those works gave me the courage to also accept my own identity in a big way. And I think having the distance from India is also what you mentioned and described as bravery allowed me to be brave. Because the consequences of coming out in the US where, which is a country where black folks have really created a culture where it is okay for folks to have identities that are different, which is a multiracial society where, like you mentioned, because of civil rights and because of the perennial struggle of black folks, South Asians enjoy so many rights. Other minorities enjoy so many rights. And that forced me to think about, where does my Dalit's identity lie? In the context of the larger Indian caste system. But I don't expect or harbor any illusions that black folks here also think about Dalits the same way. Like, of course they don't. Many folks still believe, as the American education has taught them, as our country, India has done, you know, has tried to make sure that the narrative of caste is preserved in a way that we understand it to be gone, that it no longer exists. So a lot of folks that I've encountered are often surprised that caste is still a thing. But at the same time, they will also tell me how the South Asian folks they encounter, who are high caste, who are dominant caste, will treat them in similar ways that white folks treat them. We'll have this understanding of hierarchy that is something that they don't experience with other minorities in the same way, where the caste systems are not as codified. So that experience has always stood out to me, where they see folks, whether they're from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, understand hierarchy better than other people because we have these concepts of caste that are so baked in our culture. And when we move here to the US we don't need anybody to tell us there is a racial caste system here in place. And we are not at the top, but we are not at the bottom either. And then a lot of we see this assimilation into whiteness that happens in South Asian spaces where they aspire to be white or they perform blackness in a way, knowing that they will never face the violence or they will never face the structural discrimination or structural violence even that black folks experience. So I think, like, we have a lot to prank, to be thankful for to black folks in this country and the black movement as South Asians, whether we are dominant caste or Dalits to just the rights that we enjoy here. But even beyond that, I think in terms of the Dalit spaces here, there is an increased effort to build solidarities. I want to mention Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste, which was extremely powerful and came at the height of the George Floyd Floyd movement here in, in the US in 2020. And then Ava DuVernay's film origin that followed that was based on the movie that came out in 2023. I think, have done more to educate the general mainstream audience in America about caste than any South Asian person has done. Dominant caste, especially not. So I think that is the kind of power that we have to acknowledge that while it might be more of a one sided relationship, when black folks do take the time to understand how Dalit people share this immediate kinship with them and how there's so much commonality, there is an immediate understanding of icu. And I see you too, like, you know, we see each other. And that is a really beautiful thing. Which is not to say that race and caste are the same. I think there is also this narrative which is pitiful and incorrect and inaccurate, that caste and race are the same because it flattens the nuances of both and it frankly, angers and upsets. Right. For me. So Dalits in India and black people here.
- [35:47]
Ajantha Subramanian
Since you are a journalist as well as a memoirist and you have covered US politics, you've covered social life in the US You've covered. I wonder if you can say something about the differences that you've noticed between how caste functions here versus how it functions there. Right. It is certainly present in both geographies. Perhaps there are differences that are worth noting.
- [36:16]
Yashika Dutt
Oh, absolutely. There are so many differences. One of them being that Indians are a minority in this country. So the way our influence over this, the culture in this country, it does, it functions, is very different from how dominant caste Indians are able to shape culture back in the subcontinent. Back in South Asia, specifically speaking in India, dominant caste Indians, whether it's bureaucracy Judiciary, culture, media, politics, journalism, arts, anywhere. It's all dominant caste folks. They decide what is culture, music, dance, all of it. They decide what is respectable, what is high culture, what is low culture, what is worthy to be put in an institution or a museum, what is worthy to just be performed on the street and can never. The twain will never meet. So that difference is very stark in India. Obviously, cast is people try to deny. People try to say we are post caste, but you can't deny that caste ever existed. There is a historical documentation and an ongoing present reality of how caste operates in our country. Nobody can say, I see this and I don't believe that caste is a truth. I mean, of course people try, but it does not make sense here. A lot of South Asian spaces, Indian American spaces, try and say that caste does not exist. Right now here in the US Conversations around caste are being policed. There is a bill, you might know, in Georgia, which is in the legislature. They are trying to make Hindu phobia criminal, like engaging in Hindu phobia a criminal act. And that will certainly include talking about caste. That will certainly include talking about any kind of caste assertion that exists, pointing out how caste identity is prevalent here in the US Pointing out how Dalits experience discrimination might also be under the purview of Hindu phobia, that we are sort of this term that we are now seeing on the rise. So there are very different aspects of how caste operates here because caste is invisible more than it is back home. And we don't have the protections that we have in India. We have the SCS Prevention act, which, you know, which punishes people for and very strongly, at least on paper, if they're engaging in discriminatory behavior here, we don't have any of those protections except anywhere else but Seattle and Fresno, which are the two cities that offer cost protections. And now there is a huge backlash to, even though that, you know, the protections that have been offered in colleges and universities and Seattle and Fresno. So what's happening, in my opinion, here in the US Is there is a constant struggle within Indian spaces, specifically about what is going to be the dominant culture that is seen as Indian American culture here in the US what will Americans understand Indian culture to be? And for the longest time after the second, you know, 1960s, 1965 Naturalization act, when which, you know, allowed a lot of Indians to migrate to the US that culture was defined by dominant caste Indians. Right. Indians don't eat meat. That's a very common myth. When, you know, when they see meat eating Indians they're kind of surprised. Or Indians are probably from a particular religion. Maybe they're all Hindu. That's another assumption. Or all Indians think a certain way or have similar politics or, you know, those ideas, the big wedding, the association with Bollywood and all of that, that is understood and known to be Indian culture for a long time. But now, because of the presence of Dalits and this discourse around caste, that culture, that primacy of that narrative is being challenged. And that is creating a lot of discomfort and frankly a lot of anger among the dominant caste elites who are used to setting the terms and the narratives both back home as well as here in the US So now there is a violent pushback against us even talking about caste. Like I mentioned, Georgia is one place. But even outside of that, these whole narratives that if you engage in any conversations around caste, you're labeled as Hindu phobic. That is the blanket term that is. And because a lot of these organizations who are perpetuating these narratives do have an immense amount of power. They have a lot of lobbyists, especially in D.C. and even other states, where they're able to exert their will, their narrative, and create a political narrative around that that is extremely worrying and troubling. In fact, that that's what's going on at this moment. And another byproduct that I want to mention is that it has made the rest of the American public that is not South Asian extremely wary of getting into these conversations. Even well meaning media spaces will say, oh, there's a conflict within the Indian American community, there's a conflict within the South Asian community. It's not a conflict. There is a clear hierarchical difference. There is a set of people who are marginalized and discriminated. And when they talk about the marginalization, they are being method violent outcomes. This is not a conflict. This is a power imbalance. But that's how it's being framed. And I'm hearing constantly that, you know, in terms of caste, most nonprofits even, or, you know, the, the spaces in the US in general, they are way, they're wary of taking on these conversations because they don't want to offend the 90%, more than 90% of dominant caste Indians that form the Indian American population right now, not knowing that not everybody thinks the same way. I mean, there was, we all read the Carnegie, you know, the Carnegie Institute study that came out, which provided, I think, a significant number of Indian Americans who want to have caste protections for Dalit people and who want to have more conversations around caste. So only a few People who have power, who have visibility, who have access to bureaucracy and who have money, most importantly are setting the terms for the entire community. Not knowing or not will being willing to acknowledge that not everybody agrees with them. And that's what's happening here right now.
- [43:09]
Ajantha Subramanian
I wanted to end with the Xoran campaign, which I know you've covered. And I, and I wonder, I mean, you know, I've read about Jiran's solidarity work with South Asian New Yorkers and you had him participating in this hunger strike called by the New York Taxi workers Alliance in 2021. He worked on affordable, affordable housing with the Committee Against Anti Asian violence in 2022. So, you know, he's been very sort of upfront about addressing the concerns of working class South Asians. Right. I. Has he been outspoken about caste?
- [43:48]
Yashika Dutt
Yeah, that's been the big question that came out from this campaign for me, for your listeners. I started covering Zoran's campaign in April, which was at a time where he was receiving media attention, obviously, but not in the same way that it is now. It was nowhere close and in fact, nobody was looking at South Asians. And I started going into South Asian communities and asking them what they felt about the South Asian candidate who could be mayor. And there was not the same level of awareness that is obviously now. And that shows the kind of work that they've done over the months and how they've galvanized South Asian New Yorkers to really historically, I think South Asian, Indo, Caribbean New Yorkers increase their water turnout by 350%, which is a remarkable number. And it's testimony to the organizing work that has happened here. Whether it's drum beats or Cab Voice or these South Asian based organizations that have really taken the mantle of reaching out to South Asian New Yorkers and activating them politically and making them aware that even if they're new citizens, it is the civic duty to vote and why they should not, you know, just embrace the fear that a lot of communities have had since, you know, 9, 11, since the days of heavy surveillance around those spaces. So I think those have been extremely exciting and interesting developments. And I've seen the campaign evolve from, you know, I wasn't covering it when they were at 1%, but I was certainly covering it when they were in low double digits. And to see that happen now, Zoran Mandani's campaign has had to navigate a very tricky space because, you know, in a mayoral forum right before the primary, I think a couple of weeks before the primary, Zoran went with New York Focus, which is a local publication, and talked about Prime Minister Modi. And he basically labeled him as a war criminal and said that he would not host a joint Promise press conference with him. And when those views sort of disseminated in the Indian American communities, and then they woke up to the fact the possibility that this candidate could win the primary, and that's when they started mounting a challenge to him. And then we saw this banner over the Hudson river in New York come up. Save NYC from global Intifada. Reject Zohar Mandani, which was in early June, a couple of weeks before the primary. And that kind of made some impact and the opportunity to sort of attack Zoharan was seized upon by his opponents, notably Andrew Cuomo, who was his challenger. And there was a lot of backlash that followed. And after he won the primary, I think we've seen aspects of Zoran Ramdani's campaign consolidate in so many different ways where, you know, he sort of softened his stance on the police department, the nypd, whom he had, you know, made comments calling them racist and anti queer. And he then later on apologized for those comments. And there are so many aspects of his campaign that changed. And one of those aspects was also his outreach with the Hindu New Yorkers. And I think there were groups like Hindus for Zoran who were instrumental in turning that tide and showing that there was the Hindu community in New York was not a monolith, that they had diverse opinions and they supported this candidate who was talking about affordability. In doing so, the narrative around caste was completely erased. And this is something that I've talked about in several of my pieces. One notable piece that I did was for New Lines magazine. I would encourage your listeners to go in and read it, where I really explore about how this whole trajectory came about, despite the fact that Zoran Mandani also is a co sponsor of a caste protection bill here in New York, New York State. So that bill he co sponsored early, I think in April this year, and it's now since put on hold. And we are hopeful about what happens when he assumes his mayorality, when his mayorality begins in January, and what happens to that. And also he has been in conversation with anti caste caste activists. He was in conversation with Prachi Pratankar. This was in 2021. And that was a conversation that I was a part of as well. I was not in conversation with Zahran. We weren't on the same panel, but I was on another panel talking about caste. So those two conversations, talks were Both centered on caste. And so obviously Zahran has. I mean, not that I know him personally, but seeing his work, I think there is a sense that there is a sense of solidarity towards the anti caste movement. Did it come up during the campaign? No, it did not. And also there was no visibility or presence of Dalits, New Yorkers, which, like I mentioned in the piece, are not an insignificant group here in New York. Like a lot of people said, well, Dalits want to be a part everywhere. Well, first of all, yes, we absolutely do. And secondly, Dalits are an important political group here in New York City. This year in New York in April, the Eric Adams administration declared April 14 as Dr. B. Arambedkar Day, which is a massive thing to happen in the city. And it shows the significance of Dalits as a political group. And when all South Asians, whether they are Nepalese New Yorkers, whether they're Bangladeshi New Yorkers, Pakistani or foreign course, and Indian Americans and Sikh New Yorkers, when they're all visible parts of the coalition to not have Dalits there. And which is not to say that Dalits didn't canvass for him or volunteer for him. I'm sure all of that happened. But in a visible way, Dalits were absent. And that absence speaks about the current state of the anti caste movement here in the US and it also speaks about where caste conversations have landed in 2024 and how a candidate like Zoran, who is clearly has solidarity with the anti caste movement, is not able to, for whatever reason, extend that solidarity publicly because of how the issue is perceived here in the US And I understand I'm being very charitable to his position because also I have seen the kind of challenges that the campaign has had to navigate to come to this point. The insane Islamophobia that, that he experienced, the insane racism that he experienced, the constant threats of violence and, you know, attacks, the threats of attacks that he encountered, the backlash towards his family, towards his wife. So all of those were challenging things. And he made the choices that he made. But at the same time, it is now up to us as New Yorkers, as Dalit folks in New York City and South Asians, to hold him accountable, to make sure that caste is a part of the conversation. And I feel somewhat confident knowing that organizations like Drumbeats are a part of his coalition who have extended solidarity towards the movement in the past, who are present in spaces, in Dalit spaces here in New York. So I'm fairly hopeful that caste is not going to be forgotten come January. But the truth Also remains that it was nowhere part of the coalition, the bright, beautiful, big South Asian coalition that is credited to the Zorat Mandani mayorality for God balance.
- [51:46]
Ajantha Subramanian
Well, I think that that's a, it's not really a negative note to end on. I fear that, you know, the fact. I think it's hateful. No, no. But I think you're right that, you know, there are strategic choices that are made in a campaign. He has been an ally of the anti caste struggle and there's no reason to expect that he isn't still an ally. Right. And so once he assumes the, the mayorship, let's see what he does. But it's not just up to him, right, as you're saying, it's up to South Asians and their allies in the anti caste struggle to hold him accountable, to insist that caste be part of the conversation moving forward.
- [52:31]
Yashika Dutt
I think it is up to the South Asian New Yorkers who are part of Zoran Mandani's coalition and other folks who are maybe not organizers, but everybody who canvassed for him, who went out and tried to convince people to vote for Zoran to make sure that caste is an important aspect of the coalition when he assumes his responsibilities as a mayor in January. We cannot let it be forgotten. And we also have to understand why it is important to talk about caste. Because this administration, which is a democratic socialist administration, or at least he is a democratic socialist and that's how he's going to run his agenda on affordability. That when he's talking about working class New Yorkers, it was also important to talk about the struggle that working class New Yorkers from caste oppressed backgrounds experience that is on a different level if compared to people who are from a dominant caste.
- [53:29]
Ajantha Subramanian
Fantastic. Yes. It's. It's wonderful to share a city with you that looks like it's going to have a bright future. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Jessica. This was wonderful. I'm really, really honored that you came on the podcast.
- [53:53]
Yashika Dutt
I appreciate you. Thank you.
- [54:04]
Ajantha Subramanian
Thanks to all our listeners for joining us. The cast pod can be accessed through our website thecastpod.org and through our partner, the New Books Network. Sound editing and website design are managed by Siddharth Ravi. And the opening and closing theme music is from the song Combat Breathing written by Vijay Iyer and performed by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han oh and Tishan Sori. If you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to share it on social media and send us your suggestions for future episodes@thecastpodmail.com this is Ajantha Subramanian signing off. Until next time.