Somewhere else could be somewhere ahead. Jai Bhim.

Barathi Nakkeeran

January 18, 2025

Every year, I try to write my thoughts on what Rohith’s death means to me, and I fail. At first, I felt it inappropriate to pen a note, irresponsible even. I belong to a dominant OBC community that has been responsible for caste murders of Dalits for decades now (Murder in Mudukulathur). Is the I useful at all? Especially, when it is all there is these days.

Two years ago, I wrote a couple of articles on caste discrimination in higher educational institutions, based on books I had read (Ajanta Subramaniam, N. Sukumar, Abhinav Chandrachud) and conversations with Dalit professors (Ramaiah, TISS; Lakshmanan, MIDS). I learned about the legal mechanisms and institutional efforts that impinged on the backs of these professors. Individual responsibility, but collective recklessness. The I is needed, for labour, for work, for emotional outsourcing. The weight and drama of difficult labour is reserved for Dalit bodies, even in intellectual spaces. The I matters, but whose?

In 2016, when I had just started to find elements of political thought in my environment, I swayed toward whatever I could find, which was mostly neoliberal ideologies moulded in human rights dialogue. Law school discussions, when they found the time for it—which was not often—around Rohith’s murder centred around the tragedy of mental health, which was also a vague and new thought for many of us. Suicide barely registered as a reality that happened to people. Probably why when I made a class presentation on ‘farmer suicides,’ it received the laughable response, how is this a socio-legal issue? Blaming your peers, poorly political students like yourself, is rarely productive. Every person is a product of time and the company they keep, generational and otherwise. Do you see how useless the I is?

Who to blame? What to do? How to talk about Rohith’s death, then? There are many ways. Anger, disappointment, fear—call it guilt of the dominant caste, but I feel these emotions are not for those who have not experienced the singularly violent and physically palpable feeling of caste discrimination. I have experienced the stray comments on my oddity among Brahmins in elite spaces, the gaze at my culture, the comfort in my passing off, but my group histories, a combination of generational wealth, political dominance, and what Bourdieu calls cultural capital, have helped me escape most of it, but there is no subjectivity to how Dalits are treated, seen. There is rebellion in their mere presence in certain educational institutions. Their I matters, because it is always, always rooted in their histories and collectivity. They are forced to reckon with it.

So, how to talk about Rohith? What has worked for me is to allow myself the emotion and let it move me, to write, read, find ways to communicate how utterly dangerous it is—the mere education of a Dalit child. Can you believe that around 68 ‘reserved category’ students have died by suicide in institutions like the IIT, NIT, from 2014 to 2021 (Hindustan Times)? Likely an understatement. Our I matters less. Does not matter that someone else did the teasing, the bullying. It only matters where we go from here. Somewhere, even if the writing is not perfect, the words clunky. The speech inpolite. The results slow. It is all somewhere ahead, progress.

Maybe this gentle nudge of the I off the table, like a cat would—potent with power, but knowing it is not needed—is Rohith’s legacy. Stay in the stars; look down on us. Jai Bhim.

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For those who don’t know who Rohith is:

https://m.thewire.in/article/caste/rohith-vemula-letter-a-powerful-indictment-of-social-prejudices

Somewhere else could be somewhere ahead. Jai Bhim.

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