By TCN News,
A book written by Yashica Dutt, a journalist living in New York, who concealed her identity of being a dalit for a decade and came out openly after the dalit student Rohith Vemula’s tragic suicide on January 18, 2016, is set to be released next year.
This was announced recently by Aleph Book Company, an independent Indian publishing firm. It is presently entitled as ‘Coming Out as Dalit’.
Dutt is a New York-based journalist who writes on gender, identity and culture. She was previously a principal correspondent with Brunch and Hindustan Times and is the founder of
dalitdiscrimination.tumblr.com
Death of Vemula was the moment for Dutt to stop living a lie, and admit something that she had hidden from friends and colleagues for over a decade—that she was Dalit.
“I was born in a Dalit family in Ajmer, Rajasthan. And I grew up learning to hide it…”, she wrote at dalitdiscrimination.tumblr.com soon after Vemula’s death at Hyderabad Central University.
In Coming Out as Dalit, Dutt recounts the exhausting burden of living with the secret, terrified of being found out, and dealing with the crushing guilt of denying her history. In this personal memoir that is
at the same time a history of the Dalit people, she writes about the journey of coming to terms with her identity and chronicles the Dalit movement.
She writes about the consequences of the lack of access to education and culture; the paucity of Dalit voices in mainstream media; and attempts to answer crucial questions about caste and privilege. Woven from personal narratives from her life as well as that of other Dalits, this book forces us to confront the injustices of caste and also serves as a call to action.