Coming Out as Dalit
A Memoir of Surviving India's Caste System
$35.49
- Paperback
264 pages
- Release Date
6 May 2025
Summary
“A moving personal story and a useful educational examination of persistent discrimination” - Kirkus Reviews
Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puruskar, 2020
Born into a “formerly untouchable manual-scavenging family in small-town India,” Yashica Dutt was taught from a young age to not appear “Dalit looking.” Although prejudice against Dalits, who compose 25% of the population, has been illegal since 1950, caste-ism in India is alive and well. Blending her personal history wi…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807016602 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0807016608 |
| Author: | Yashica Dutt |
| Publisher: | Beacon Press |
| Imprint: | Beacon Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 264 |
| Release Date: | 6 May 2025 |
| Weight: | 308g |
| Dimensions: | 23mm x 222mm x 142mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
“Dutt reveals the persistent prejudice still surrounding this ancient system of oppression … Both a moving personal story and a useful educational examination of persistent discrimination.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Coming Out as Dalit exposes the blurred lines between caste and race, for both are fabrications meant to preserve the power of a few and require the ideological purchase of the many. And for women, for whom ‘purity’ is a measure of status and value, the traps of caste are even more sinister, even deadly. Yashica Dutt exposes the absurdity and terror of a purportedly ‘dead’ caste system by telling her truth in and against a world built on lies. A beautiful and courageous book we all must read.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“A deeply felt, eminently readable, eye-opening book about the continuing presence of caste discrimination in India—and the US. We should all be grateful to Yashica Dutt for coming out with this very necessary book.”
—Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found and This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto
“Yashica Dutt brilliantly distills the history and decodes the hidden dynamics of caste oppression in a way that everyone can understand—and no one can deny. A heartrending, eye-opening, game-changing revelation of one of the most urgent yet unseen social issues of our time.”
—Rachel Sanders, PhD, senior diversity and inclusion specialist
About The Author
Yashica Dutt
Yashica Dutt is a journalist, an activist, an award-winning writer, and a leading feminist voice on caste. Born “in a formerly untouchable ‘lower’ caste family,” she passed as dominant caste to survive discrimination. Dutt moved to New Delhi at 17 and became one of the most widely-read culture journalists at a leading English language paper. Eventually coming out as Dalit, she introduced this expression which powerfully resonated in India. Her site, Documents of Dalit Discrimination, was among the first highly visible media spaces for caste oppressed people. Dutt’s work has been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy and the Atlantic, and she has been featured on The BBC, The Guardian, and PBS NewsHour. Dutt lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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