The narrative is a vivid description of the pressure and apprehensions with which the family has to lead a life with a secret. Dutt’s book is the story of a young lower-middle-class girl trying to make sense of her identity in the midst of having to hide who she really is. He qualifies ‘testimonios’ as a narration that is of the “margins” (Nayar 84).
The narrative can be read as a ‘ testimonio’, a narrative that Pramod Nayar calls “atrocity narratives that document trauma and strategies of survival”. With this framework of the oppression and shame inflicted on people from marginalized castes, the paper will interrogate Yashica Dutt’s recently published book Coming out as Dalit (2019) as a Dalit testimonio and situate the narrative within the intersecting axes of caste, class, and gender. As she expresses, “hiding my caste was something I internalised” (Dutt 37). The trauma associated with being a Dalit in a caste-ridden society is onerous. This fear was not just a feeling that the writer grew up with, but remained with her until she openly came out with her identity through her book, sitting thousands of kilometers away from her home, in New York. An emotion and a reality that the writer, Yashica Dutt, grappled with all her life until the death of a man belonging to the same caste as her pushed her to “came out” as a Dalit.
However, in matters concerning centuries of social and political discrimination, keeping one’s origins and caste under secrecy has to be problematized. Hiding a fact about one’s identity also amounts to leading a fractured life. “What if others find out?” Hiding a fact or lying to oneself or even to others is considered a matter of shame in our society. Concealing Caste Identity: An Intersectional Reading of Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit
0 kommentar(er)
