Dragging Caste: Forms of Self-Making in Precarious Times

This chapter considers the logic of “passing, " by which the subject wears the veneer of a caste-other, as a subaltern strategy of social life. How does the everyday violence of a stratified society produce new social forms and ways of being? Yashica Dutt’s memoir, Coming Out as Dalit [2019], gestures to precisely that phenomenon. Costuming, cross-dressing, masquerade, and mimicry: as Dutt says, “Artifice is not easy.” In this chapter, I study caste evasion as a way to consider the precarity of Dalit life-temporary, in between, uncertain-and suggest that we consider the ‘drag’ that hangs on the subject-a conceptual space between the putative burden of authenticity and the putative freedom of fiction. I gesture to the history and contemporaneity of this phenomenon drawing on Ambedkar’s life narrative, Baburao Bagul’s When I Hid My Caste [1963], the African-American experience, and contemporary visual art that addresses the caste question (Rajyshri Goody’s Eat with Great Delight and Shilpa Gupta’s Altered Inheritances).