Notes on Two Anti-Caste Events in Pune and Bengaluru

There were many anti-caste events I was part of this year, organised by various groups of people, but I want to recount two events here.

Indie India (name changed to protect… nobody) organised an event in Pune, sometime in August 2025. It wasn’t strictly an anti-caste event, nor were the organisers Dalits; they were a bunch of well-meaning, dyed-hair, many pin-pierced, OBC non-binary folks with corporate jobs who knew better to channelise their guilt by organising such events rather than pet-dating a Dalit person. They made sure most artists featured were affiliated with anti-caste politics in some capacity – they were all friends and acquaintances and after all, anyone who needs a cigarette break for a minor inconvenience is its own collective in itself. Anti-caste gathering and mobilisation are restricted so much by funding that such a gathering was a rarity. The event was a mix of artists and their varied practices – puppetry, Parai, stand-up comedy, Bhim geet, filmmaking, poetry, etc. It was a fun gathering: some eye-rolling, bullying, laughter, catching up with old friends from across the country and those on the internet we never met or could’ve guessed the height or voice. Some new faces too, like one of the artists who accused Ambedkar of being incapable leader – I didn’t know what exactly, I had dozed off in a corner – the OBC organisers thought he was Dalit, so they gave him a license to do so, but later he turned out to be Savarna. The old, familiar faces like Rupali of Roots Revolution – we love grassroot Dalit entrepreneurs, unlike the neoliberal Elite Dalits who cannot see beyond their own asses. Some invited themselves in and pretended that they were invited, so it was a good blend of folks. The best way to describe this public is that they were people who recognised real artists, which is another way of saying they all knew who the artist Prajakta Kedare and her iconic Van Gogh-inspired Namdeo Dhasal portrait. The place was, to put it in neoliberal terms, a safe space – except for some liberal Savarna women there who felt so left out that they cherry-picked on queer performers to call them cute, infantilising them to feel something about themselves (you best believe nobody like that came to me, regardless of my dozing off). I overheard a little scruple at lunch hour. There was a segregation of veg and non-veg food stalls. The veg was served in steel plates and the non-veg in paper plates. The service department was a bit cocky about taking non-veg in steel plates, straight-up rude. Any other incidents I do not recall; I was sleepy and the chicken was tasteless too. What a waste! Amidst this was my interaction with neo-Dalits I am forced to keep it cute with amidst their narcissism over the little work they did: like this one Dalit boy from Bengaluru who started a film production, lies on the stage that there are no Dalit women actresses in order to justify casting OBC women in his films, whose production goes around as the most important anti-caste production in neoliberal circles. Post-lunch, I was sleepier and the next performances were lined up as per schedule. Two of the performers, comedians, were from – let’s call them – Blue Immaterial. I heard no one laugh at their jokes, but one audience member did get offended – a lot. And by that I mean a lot. It was the audio technician near the stage, who also happened to be Dalit, a Hindu Dalit. He wasn’t even a proper audience member. The joke had something to do with insulting one of the popular majoritarian gods. So our respectable Hindu Dalit brother from Pune – this is all you need to know about this man – did not take that well. He was visibly hurt and started fighting with the organisers. To pacify him came another respectable Ambedkarite Dalit brother, preparing to leave for the US to pursue his studies, who also happened to be an Instagram celebrity. He started off the conversation by preaching about Ambedkar’s philosophy, his straightforward views on Hindu gods, which are plain as water. He did this in a better-than-thou tone – now I don’t think any other mode of understanding him would have worked either – which our Hindu Dalit brother did not take well; if anything, it only aggravated things. None of this I knew – mind you, I was dozing off in some corner, I only cared about my poetry performance. After the event, my good Ambedkarite brother tells me about his premonition of something upcoming, who later left from there for his own good. And then came our good Hindu brother at the end of the show, threatening us with politicians, police, and I don’t know what else. I like this kind of power and mobility for our audio technician Dalit man; see this isn’t any different from them marrying a Savarna. Because a local Right Wing politician was there in five minutes. A bunch of us who were celebrating, laughing, and dancing inside the auditorium were plunged into the hurt of our Hindu Dalit brother, who demanded that the comedian from Indigo Material come and apologise. A hurt that did not make sense to us. A hurt that eighteen volumes of BAWS would have been enough to account for. But now there was also a local politician in his quintessential white shirt present to overpower us. Because an insult on a Hindu god had deeply injured him – it was brash, uncalled for, he was just an audio technician, a member who was supposed to only facilitate the event and not someone who is accounted for while organizing such an event. Remember, we were just a bunch of Dalits celebrating, laughing, and dancing just an hour ago. While it is true that Ambedkar criticised Hindu gods and philosophy, and so many Dalit writers of the late 90s have written about it, sadly our time could not be in continuum with their work. Translating this carefully terse philosophy into satire – a laughable matter – was meant to refuse the sovereignty of that religion. So our Hindu Dalit brother looks at one of the Dalit women presented at the event and accuses her of laughing at the blasphemous satire, claiming that today it is the laughing at this satire on his god, tomorrow she might elope with a Muslim man, tomorrow they might sanction men loving men. It was late in the evening and late for dinner, a bunch of Dalits on the forefront were left to pacify our injured brother. One does not reason with a hurt (man)child. Our single shared history of caste oppression was rendered useless, like it does in most Dalit neighbourhoods and colonies – we cannot stand each other. And why should we? When the first to cut line at the water, or start a motor in the morning for their convenience, the municipal employee who turns the water value on to the local elected representative are all Dalits, nature of democracy changes – caste congeals into something else making for the micronetworks of caste, the undercurrents of its own informality. This isn’t the same as class as an overarching category that supersedes caste, but class as a mode of subcategorization of caste. Our anti-caste language use would not stand the strong upper caste Hindutva network that makes up Pune, we were politically fragile, without infrastructures of politicians and cadres to support us. It was only a few hours ago when we all gathered under a roof to celebrate, dance, learn and share our anti-caste knowledge and now we all – some 20 of us – were being reprimanded over a satire, even though slights on Hinduism by anti-caste artists are well documented. The local politician threatened to take us to the police, which he eventually did. After two hours of berating and demanding the contact of the comedian. We were aghast at the state of us, having to face this that threatened to drag the comedian to the police. But we wouldn’t hand the comedian over to any of these people – politicians, police, or this very hurt audio technician. We weren’t kin, community, or friends with this comedian. We didn’t even know what he looked like – especially me, because I had dozed off in a corner. As much as we were tolerant and diplomatic, nursing the hurt of this really insecure Hindu Dalit audio technician, we did everything to protect the comedian. Someone pressed some buttons, phoned a well-known politician, and everyone went to the police station happily. Going to the police is the happily ever after in this Dalit story. The tensions dissipated at the station – a site of the most custodial deaths of Dalits. All that malice, threatening, rigidity, and hurt dissolved at the handshake of a well-meaning, politically astute Dalit, because there is nothing that could have saved us. We might have failed in front of the intimidation in the locality of a goon, but institutionally we held some leniency. I wonder what could it be if we did not have political contacts, if we held our grounds and refused to surrender our boy.

The Blue Immaterial organised a Dalit Queer event in Bengaluru. At Kitty Ko. And one of the members of the organisation made sure to rhyme Da-Lit (Say that in Thenmozhi Soundararajan diaspora accent) with La-Lit to show gratitude to Lalit Groups and Keshav Suri for allowing them a lounge situated in a far corner, away from the main building. In the lineup of whatever scarce Dalit artists were present, it was humiliating to see the reception of their work while the audience – mostly upper caste, including the UC queers whose pronouns are the only substitution for the lost sense of legitimacy in a political discourse – sat idly like Sisyphus boulder. Bhim geet was meant to be for the streets and perhaps witnessing that in a Lalit Lounge was my share of torture in life that I could resent my whole life, you see I have read so many literature of men who have returned traumatized from War, this wasn’t any different. The contrast of the ambience of the lounge with the shahir singing about Bhim and lackadaisical the audience response to it, I am having a stroke as I remember it. Space has everything to do with justice – ask someone fighting redevelopment and those rendered homeless. And it was particularly hurtful because this was co-organised by the Dalit brother whose name we had refused to give away to the local goon or the police. It is one thing that Chandini Gagana sits next to Keshav Suri for an event to raise seed funds for early-stage queer organisations, after all Dalits become part of society through reinstitution because if a sole Dalit is a part of a Managerial role in IT Company and it could be a matter of pride and mobility and she would be guileless and hardworking, then why throw fits at Chandini for sharing a stage with that gay ogre. At the risk of unintentionally being sardonic, it matters that the President of India is an Adivasi, who even cares about the bill she signed that was already passed in parliamentary houses in just two days because Virendra Kumar got his heart broken by the cuntiest tranny in the country. These forms of representation is one thing and it is another to be a Dalit artist invited by another Dalit – who doesn’t share the same experience and conditions as the former – to perform in a Lounge for a mere 3,000 rupees fee. When I was briefly working with Dalit Queer Project as a project coordinator it mattered less how skilled, capable or good artists were, or how popular they were on Instagram to merit into the curation, or the degree at which they would self-posture as the epitome of Dalit suffering; all it mattered was they were Dalit and Queer they produced their work without any support and the allotted commission per artist were more than any organisation would have given them at that time. If a Dalit has to perform in that gay ogre’s establishment for mere 3k, then we might as well not. But this isn’t about the venue of the event or the not-so-funny comedian brother’s organisation that upset me. I would not self-inflict this on myself but some of the artist-friends – Dappu players – were invited to be part of it and it was spirit-breaking how difficult imagining refusal is for a Dalit artist. That a mere compensation for the art was all the market value for Dalits when they do not speak English or are not part of liberal-savarna circles. Being in such a place is a matter of feeling immense power, to ask for more than what their share is (something we did not ask at Indie India because it was a sociality of friendship and Kitty Ko is not a friend just because Lalit rhymes with Dalit), and not showing any subservience. Would we want our Dalit students in University to be grateful for the Scholarship they receive despite the fact that they deserve it, have all the rights over it. Shouldn’t we be righteous over a thing that is ours but denied for centuries, even be a little mean, and throw slights? But when I raised my voice, I was made into a mad one, whose critique was shiny, crystal sharp, palatable only over time which means in the present I should become a bridge in order to reach a future where such critique loses its edges and becomes a practice, but since that critique was singular in that venue, bereft of any community – how could there be – like the one in Pune, it became ornamental even among the Dalits in a Dalit Queer event, at best to be in a Museum. Not only was that anti-caste at Kitty Ko misplaced in such a venue, so was my critique of it – it was useless for me to even speak against it.

But all I could do was curse a little at the venue and its people. And watch as friends play Dappu. I wondered how a space could undo itself. I could not help but think of the place Dappu came from and it came straight from a heartbeat, a casted beat. I felt as lonely as those beats echolessly circulating in that venue, and so were my friends dejected since I threw so much tantrums at them for performing there. But Dappu, just as disrespected as Dalits, could not have been made any more lonely than its origin was, so I decided to dance for friends because no one in the room would. It mattered less where we were performing and how much our labour was dignified, it was outside the measure of any scale, despite everything working against us, there was nothing bigger than us or our dance or this Dappu.