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 in Pune

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 something – I didn’t know what, 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 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 many Dalit writers of the late 90s have written about it, 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.

Our Hindu Dalit brother looks at one of the Dalit women who presented at the event and accuses her of laughing at the blasphemous satire, claiming that today it is laughing at this satire on gods, 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 key-turner to the local elected representative are all Dalits, modes of democracy changes, caste congeals into something else making for the micronetworks of caste, the undercurrents of informality.

This isn’t the same as class as an overarching category that subcedes 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, that wasn’t the strength of our togetherness, we were politically fragile, without infrastructures of politicians and cadres to support us. The local politician threatened to take us to the police, which he eventually did. We were aghast at the state of things, having to face this serious inconvenience 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 hurt Dalit 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 the 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 Sujat Ambedkar, and everyone went to the police station happily. Going to the police is the happily ever after in a Dalit story. The tensions dissipated at the station – a site of the most custodial deaths of Dalit. 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 contacts, if we held our grounds and refused to hurt our brother.

Kitty Ko in Bengaluru

The Blue Immaterial organised a Dalit Queer event in Bengaluru. At Kitty Ko. And the Dhobi OBC member of the organisation made sure to rhyme Da-Lit (Say that in Thenmozhi Soundararajan diaspora accent) with La-Lit as her way of gratitude to Lalit Groups and Keshav Suri for allowing them a lounge situated in the sideway, outside of the main building. In the lineup of whatever scarce Dalit artists were present, it was humiliating to see the reception of their work while people – mostly upper caste, including the UC queers whose pronouns are the only substitution for the lost legitimacy in the political discourse. Bhim geet was meant to be for the streets and perhaps watching 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 responded 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 off to the local goon or the police. It is one thing that Chandini Gagana sits next to Keshav Suri for an event to raise fundseed for queer organisation, after all Dalits become part of society through such 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 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. 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.

But this isn’t about the venue of the event or the not-so-funny brother’s organisation that upset me. I would not self-inflict this on myself but some of the artist-friends 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 of 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 immensely powerful, 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, mean, sassy about a mere piece of cake of which we deserve the entire bakery of. But when I raised my voice, I was a mad tranny, whose critique was shiny, crystal clear, palatable only over time which means in present I should become a bridge but since it was singular, bereft of the community like in the Pune, my critique became ornamental even among the Dalits in a Dalit Queer event. Not only was anti-caste misplaced in such a venue, so was my critique of it – it was useless for me to even speak against it.