Feeling Like an Outcast
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 2001, at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, Indian Dalit activists were desperately rallying support to get caste recognized as a manifestation of racism. The term Dalit, derived from the Sanskrit word for oppressed, is used to describe people placed by India’s caste system at the very bottom of the social hierarchy and once called “untouchables.”
As delegates from around the world lobbied in Durban, Dalits had reportedly won the backing of the spokesperson of the European Union, as well as that of representatives from Guatemala and Switzerland. A handful of other Euro-pean countries had also promised their support. But months of strategizing and advocacy failed to materialize when the Dalits were let down by a crucial constituency: their own government.
For decades, New Delhi had championed boycotts against apartheid-era South Africa. But at an international platform designed to hold nations accountable for the continued mistreatment of marginalized populations, the Indian government informed the world that the issue of caste—and the institutionalized suppression of those who fall at the bottom of its hierarchies—was an internal matter.
In the new bestseller , a work Oprah Winfrey has said “might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning Isabel Wilkerson ensures that the topic of caste gets a major in India, which has lasted, in various forms, for millenniums. Wilkerson patiently peels each carefully matted layer of racial hierarchy to lay bare the history of oppression that people such as myself, a Dalit, have inherited from our ancestors. And in some 400 pages, she obliterates decades of New Delhi’s diplomatic attempts to prevent caste from getting the global notoriety it has always deserved.
