Attaining Dalit Personhood Essential for Expression of Desire & Intimacy

Desire for a Dalit is a dangerous territory.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

Desire for a Dalit is a dangerous territory.

Experiences of navigating love and sex have received very little attention within the Dalit community primarily because they have been regarded as irrelevant to movement-building.

Our attention lies with education, organisation, and moving towards the agitation for survival in a savarna world. Love, sex, and intimacies as a liberatory force within the Dalit community have received little attention. 

Who Is Seen Worthy of Love and Romance?

In 2018, writer, activist, and co-founder of Dalit History Month, Christina Dhanaraj, in a piece, Swipe Me Left, I’m Dalit, spoke about her experiences around intimacies where she details some of the most harmful stereotypes surrounding Dalit women from personality traits like the ‘angry’ Dalit women, unfeminine, and ascribing an (imagined) promiscuity while simultaneously seeing Dalit women as victims of sexual violence.

She advocated for understanding the politics of desirability, rethinking of sexual liberatory frameworks largely serving white-brahminical bodies, and cherishing and valuing Dalit women's perspectives in the article ending the piece with “apps don’t kill caste, we do”.  

A couple days ago, The Print's Manisha Mondal wrote an article about 'Being Dalit on a Dating App' which received wide attention from casteist internet trolls who have always existed due to the over-representation of savarna users.

The article was a short piece detailing the common experience of Dalit people on dating apps (being ghosted and blocked etc).

Any Dalit person reading the piece, at most, scoffed at the moral bankruptcy of the savarna in a post-liberal world where ethical skepticism plagues us like the most recent pandemic.

The abuse she faced after the article was published was staggering. Manisha subsequently left X (formerly Twitter) after the continuous trolling.

Beyond the trolling and questions raised about fatphobia and the deep hatred Indians carry for dark skin colour – the central theme that emerged from the article was regarding caste.

The article brought forth conversations where savarnas had to introspect if they were casteist in their choices of casual dating. 

Caste is not divorced from questions of who is seen as the ‘ideal’ feminine – a specific body type, colour etc, is derived from the ideal brahmin femininity where anyone violating such norms is considered unfeminine as Christina’s article addressed.

It is the same weaponisation of feminity that Gayatri Spivak, Indian scholar, literary critic, and ironically feminist critic, who penned the infamous “Can the Subaltern Speak?” invoked against a young Dalit male student during a talk in Jawaharlal Nehru University saying, “As an old female teacher confronting a male student, and especially since I had not been given the information that he was Dalit, my wounded remark that I did not want to hear his question was a gesture of protest.”

Regardless of gender, Spivak enjoys more power in society due to her caste location, a postulation that Indian feminist theory (largely brahminical) has refused to acknowledge.

The mention of caste, almost always causes a perturbation in the savarna conscience, inevitably leading to a defense which almost always follows the route of humiliation and degradation of the Dalit as witnessed in both cases.

Caste and Its Role in Intimacies

Akhil Kang, a doctoral scholar in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Cornell University (positionality: Dalit, Queer), who details the intercaste (im)possibilities on inter-caste love in his work, wrote an article, titled Brahmin Men Who Love To Eat Ass, in 2023, discussing the casteism present within queer communities which are often considered progressive in their sexual politics due to deviating from the punctilious nature of the caste system. 

Regardless of gender, sexuality, and disability, an echo of this theme is visible across Dalit voices. Thus, we must ask questions of a deeper nature – can love exist in a casteist society, first?

And, following a deductive approach, tackle questions of who experiences love, who is seen as worthy of love or acts of love, romance, courtship, and sex. Who are the performers and receivers of such intimacies? And ultimately, the caste location and the influence one’s caste location plays in such an act. 

It belies common reason to say that caste does not play a factor in intimacies.

If vulnerability is the cornerstone of building relationships with trust, we know that caste networks within group dynamics serve as a trust network. A requisite for a trust network is its exclusivity and homogeneity. Thus, caste networks act as primary trust groups for Indians due to its old, exclusive, homogenous nature.  

A 2019 study, titled Social Media Marketing: Comparative Effect of Advertisement Sources, outlines that trust may be built without applying cognitive judgement, instead, reliance on emotional affiliation can be used.

Extending these research findings supports the idea that peers on social media, with similar views and social commitment, exchange and support content leading to a spontaneous sense of belonging and benevolence and familiarity being a key factor in trust formation. 

A 2020 study by Bangladesh-based professor, titled Group Behavior in Social Media: Antecedents of Initial Trust Formation, identified social deficiency based on fulfilled expectations as the single most influential factor in initial trust formation among peers in a social group.

The operation of trust (occurring when relying willingly on an exchange partner), dependability (an intrinsic need to satisfy one’s deficiency leading to psychological confidence), fulfilled expectations (having the capacity, integrity and ability to overcome social deficiencies), conformity, familiarity, predictability, and credibility are key to caste kinship practices.

A Pretense of Choice

Caste actuates violence upon those who refuse to conform to its hierarchy, which extends it to anyone operating against its norms as non-dalit trans-queer people have repeatedly suggested.

However, my argument here is to say that due to the nature of caste hierarchy (consisting of brahmins, kshtariyas, vaishyas, and shudras), Dalit people by design fall outside the hierarchy regardless of their cisness, heteronormativity, neurotypicality, or able-bodiedness. 

Thus, in no uncertain terms, there are a group of people (Dalits) who will never be a part of savarna-brahminical kinship networks.

While we have another group (hindu touchable castes) and people belonging to other religions (operating from similar kinship ties due to the influence of brahminism) regardless of their gender, sexuality, sex, or ability, who have divine sanction for existing in a closed kinship network.

Choice is irrelevant in this discussion, merely because a Dalit cannot choose to integrate within this system even through marriage and a savarna cannot choose to give up such an enormous privilege.

Agency, thus, is robbed due to the nature and influence of brahminism on everyone. But, the danger of this lack of agency is experienced by Dalit people more than the average well-meaning savarna who thinks they have abandoned caste due to their non-integration within their familial system of caste. 

Capitalising on Queer Desire

Manisha’s article suggested adding a caste preference in addition to gender (an extant category on apps).

We are in a world where deconstructing gender and abandoning gender norms has gained prominence. But, dating apps have expanded their gender and sexuality labels (Tinder, Bumble) to capitalise on queer desire. 

In the Indian context, the discourse on dismantling gender norms is new compared to the call to dismantle caste norms. Yet, the former has gained more traction and received more attention purely due to queer and trans savarna agents.

Caste is not seen as central to dismantling rigid and violent gender norms and Dalit trans and queer people forming a small group lie outside these groups fighting to recognise the plurality of violence they experience.

Shripad (positionality: Dalit, trans-queer), a poet and researcher from Mumbai, who writes on caste, gender and spatiality, speaks about having similar experiences on dating apps where locational access, work, class, language, and education are barriers when navigating desire.

To expand further, having positive factors of English language access, higher education, and achievement are barriers acting in a negative manner where he says people do not talk to him after knowing he is a poet and researcher. 

Dalit Personhood and Its Role in Intimacy

Dalit people have been historically urged to ‘better themselves’ through education to attain self-respect (svabhiman) and self-reliance (svavalamban) for improvement (sudharana) as we find in Babasaheb Ambedkar’s works. We find that this seems to be a journey that is incredibly isolating in its nature.

Manisha’s article ends with “women like me…might die single. Although I do not mind that possibility. I pay my own bills.”

In the journey of attaining personhood (closely translated to manuski), the path to it is perilously loaded with violence, humiliation, and degradation.

An assertion for attaining Dalit personhood is seen as disrupting the existent caste structure thus leading to violence for Dalit people impinged digitally as witnessed in the aftermath of Manisha’s piece being published or being abused, violated, and killed for transgressing caste norms in the world outside.

Beyond desire, love can thus act as subjugation as Shripad observes. For such a force, how love can become a tool of subjugation lies in our histories where Dalit people faced enormous sexual violence for expressing their desire but more so suffered due to the expression of (deviant) desires of the savarna. 

Shailaja Paik, a US-based professor, in her 2021 article titled Dr Ambedkar and the ‘Prostitute’: Caste, Sexuality and Humanity in Modern India, talks about the violence Dalit women and specifically Dalit women sex workers faced.

She says that patriarchy allowed savarnas sexual access to Dalit women's bodies by associating them with excess sexuality and consequently having touchable savarna men to prove their virility through Dalit women’s bodies, thus leading to a degradation of Dalit men’s sexuality.

This articulation found in Christina’s piece should alert us to the historical violence and the debasement of Dalit people’s desire to find intimacies continuing to date. The implications of such a violent and brutal history speak to a reduction of Dalit personhood to our bodies where resistance to savarna sexual violence is met with the dismissal of the Dalit personhood. 

While we can discuss representation, education, equity, and equality – the vacuum of safety for Dalit people expressing their desire for intimacies due to existing in a caste society will not be remedied by merely focusing on the above-mentioned factors.

There is something fundamentally wrong about a society that simultaneously treats Dalit people as excess and thus disposable.

Irrespective of our achievements or ‘merit’, the shackles of caste still follow us both in body and mind because we share a world with savarnas who are bound to a system that benefits them. And, if we are to live with them, it seems like they are determined to bind us too within such shackles of depravity.

The brahminical order survives with a precision that requires a mimesis of the original caste structures and a Dalit person is often swimming against this current, regardless of whether they have a choice in the matter or not. Thus, as Dalit people, we owe it to ourselves to break from such shackles of caste desirability while articulating a future where we create safety amongst ourselves free from the savarna gaze. 

(Rachelle Bharathi Chandran is a writer and researcher exploring the complexities around the intersections of caste, gender, sexuality, disability, and neurodivergence. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)