About Yashica Dutt.
From growing up in a formerly untouchable manual scavenging family in small town India to becoming one of the most recognized openly Dalit journalists across the world, Yashica Dutt’s story is one of aspiration and achievement against all odds.
After graduating from Columbia Journalism School, Dutt was still hiding her caste in 2016 when she read the moving letter left behind by Rohith Vemula, a student activist at India’s Hyderabad University who had been forced to give up his life due to the institutional discrimination he faced there. It was then Dutt decided to break her silence and reveal how severely her life was impacted by her ‘lower’ caste.
Disillusioned by Indian media’s myopic coverage of Dalits and lack of representation in newsrooms, Dutt launched Documents of Dalit Discrimination — a one of its kind safe space for Dalits to discuss their trauma with caste based discrimination and seek solidarity and support from shared experiences, which also led to her writing Coming Out as Dalit.
Through ‘coming out’ as Dalit, Yashica Dutt established a new vocabulary to express the unique experience of Dalits who are forced to subvert their entire identities for survival in India’s caste based societies.
Since then, coming out as a Dalit has become a part of the cultural lexicon within Indian communities across the world, commonly understood as the practice of Dalits shedding the shame surrounding their formerly untouchable origins and stepping into their caste identities with pride.
A journey from shame
to pride
“We leave behind our food, our songs, our culture and our last names, so we can be ‘better’ and ‘purer’, more ‘upper’ caste and less Dalit. We don’t leave our Dalitness behind just so we can blend more easily. We do it because sometimes that’s our only option.”
Yashica Dutt in Coming Out as Dalit