Author Archives: notsomeritorios

The Caste of Taste: Palates, Purity, and the Politics of Preference

Taste is often presented as the most personal of choices. What one eats, drinks, enjoys, or rejects is framed as an individual preference—an expression of upbringing, exposure, or refinement. Yet in a caste society, taste is never merely personal. It is cultivated, disciplined, and hierarchically structured. To speak of the “caste of taste” is to recognize that what appears as preference is often a deeply social and political formation.

Caste has long organized life through the logic of purity and pollution, and this logic extends into the domain of food. What is considered edible, desirable, or refined is shaped by these hierarchies. Certain foods are elevated as pure, light, and culturally superior, while others are stigmatized as impure, heavy, or crude. These distinctions are not neutral; they reflect the social positions of the communities associated with them.

Taste, in this sense, becomes a marker of caste identity. It signals belonging, distinction, and hierarchy. To consume certain foods is to align oneself with particular social values; to avoid others is to maintain distance. The palate becomes a site where caste is both performed and reproduced.

This extends beyond food to the broader domain of aesthetics. Music, language, clothing, and even humor are subject to similar hierarchies of taste. What is considered “refined” often corresponds to upper-caste norms, while what is labeled “vulgar” or “rustic” is associated with marginalized communities. The distinction between high and low culture thus mirrors the structure of caste.

The idea of taste as refinement is particularly significant. Refinement suggests cultivation, discipline, and elevation above the ordinary. It implies that some forms of enjoyment are superior to others. Yet this hierarchy of taste is not universal; it is produced within specific social contexts. What is called refined is often simply what aligns with dominant caste sensibilities.

For Dalit communities, this produces a double movement. On the one hand, their cultural practices are often devalued, framed as lacking sophistication. On the other hand, elements of these practices may be selectively appropriated and rebranded as exotic or authentic within elite spaces. This process resembles cultural gentrification, where aspects of marginalized cultures are incorporated without acknowledging their origins or the conditions under which they exist.

The politics of taste is also evident in everyday interactions. Comments about food habits, language, or style often carry implicit judgments. These judgments are rarely explicit about caste, yet they reproduce its logic. To say that something is “too loud,” “too spicy,” or “too crude” is often to invoke a hierarchy without naming it.

From a theoretical perspective, taste can be understood as a form of embodied social knowledge. It is learned through family, community, and environment. It feels natural because it is deeply internalized. Yet this naturalness masks its social origins.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste functions as a form of distinction, allowing individuals to differentiate themselves from others. In the context of caste, this distinction takes on a sharper edge. It is not only about class but about inherited hierarchy. Taste becomes a way of maintaining boundaries, of signaling superiority without overtly stating it.

At the same time, taste is not static. It changes with exposure, migration, and interaction. Urban spaces, digital platforms, and global influences introduce new forms of consumption and appreciation. These shifts can blur boundaries, creating hybrid forms that challenge traditional hierarchies.

Yet even within these changes, the underlying structure often persists. New tastes are incorporated, but they are filtered through existing frameworks. What becomes popular, what is celebrated, and what remains marginal are shaped by power.

The idea of the caste of taste thus reveals a broader truth: that even the most intimate aspects of life—what we eat, what we enjoy, what we consider beautiful—are shaped by social structures. Taste is not outside politics; it is one of its subtle expressions.

To challenge this requires more than expanding preferences. It requires questioning the hierarchies that define them. It involves recognizing that what is dismissed as inferior may carry its own forms of richness, complexity, and meaning.

Ultimately, the politics of taste is about recognition. It is about whose preferences are validated, whose are dismissed, and how these judgments shape social interaction. By exposing the caste of taste, we begin to see how deeply hierarchy is embedded in everyday life—and how it might be reimagined.

Curating the Subaltern: Gentrification, Sanitisation, and the Comfort Politics of Upper-Caste Allyship in Universities

In contemporary universities, especially within elite and metropolitan institutions, it has become increasingly common to witness upper-caste students and scholars publicly aligning themselves with anti-caste politics. They organize talks, share posts, cite Dalit thinkers, and express solidarity with marginalized communities. On the surface, this appears as a progressive shift—a recognition of historical injustice and an attempt to engage with it.

Yet beneath this surface lies a more complicated dynamic. The Dalit subject that is often welcomed into these spaces is not the one that exists in full complexity, contradiction, and discomfort. Instead, what emerges is a curated version of Dalit existence—one that is intelligible, presentable, and above all, comfortable for upper-caste sensibilities.

This process can be understood as a form of cultural gentrification. Just as urban gentrification transforms neighborhoods by making them aesthetically appealing while displacing their original inhabitants, cultural gentrification reshapes Dalit life into a form that can be consumed without discomfort. The rough edges are smoothed out; the inconvenient aspects are removed.

Upper-caste engagement with Dalit culture often privileges certain elements—resilience, resistance, creativity, intellectual production. These are celebrated, circulated, and incorporated into academic discourse. Dalit literature, poetry, and theory are discussed, often with admiration.

But what is excluded from this appreciation is equally important. The messiness of lived experience—abusive language, fractured family structures, economic instability, anger, contradiction—is often seen as excessive, inappropriate, or lacking refinement. These aspects do not fit easily within the aesthetic and moral frameworks of elite academic spaces.

This selective engagement produces a sanitized Dalit subject—one who is articulate but not abrasive, critical but not confrontational, reflective but not raw. The expectation is not only that Dalits speak, but that they speak in ways that are legible and acceptable within upper-caste norms.

The language of academia plays a crucial role here. Complex theoretical frameworks, abstract vocabulary, and polished articulation become markers of legitimacy. Dalit experiences are often translated into this language, making them more accessible to dominant audiences. While this translation can enable broader engagement, it can also strip away the texture and immediacy of lived reality.

There is a tension between representation and recognition. Representation involves making something visible, but recognition requires accepting it in its full form. The curated Dalit subject is represented, but not fully recognized. The parts that disrupt comfort are excluded.

This dynamic reflects what might be called the politics of comfort. Upper-caste allyship often operates within boundaries that do not fundamentally unsettle the subject. It allows for engagement with injustice, but in ways that remain manageable. The discomfort of confronting structural inequality is mitigated by focusing on aspects that can be appreciated rather than those that demand deeper confrontation.

The result is a form of engagement that is both genuine and limited. Genuine, because there is real interest and concern; limited, because it does not fully engage with the realities it seeks to address.

From a Dalit perspective, this can produce a sense of dissonance. The expectation to conform to sanitized forms of expression can feel like another layer of control. It suggests that even within spaces of supposed inclusion, there are conditions attached to visibility.

The issue is not that Dalit culture is being appreciated, but how it is being framed. Appreciation that requires sanitisation risks reproducing hierarchy. It positions upper-caste taste as the standard against which Dalit expression must be measured.

This raises important questions about the nature of solidarity. What does it mean to stand with marginalized communities if one is unwilling to engage with the full complexity of their lives? Can allyship exist without discomfort?

To move beyond this limitation requires a shift in orientation. It requires recognizing that Dalit life cannot be reduced to narratives that are easy to consume. It involves engaging with aspects that are difficult, unsettling, and resistant to neat representation.

This does not mean romanticizing hardship or reducing Dalit existence to struggle. Rather, it means allowing for complexity without filtration—acknowledging that lives are not always coherent, polished, or aligned with dominant norms.

Universities, as spaces of knowledge production, have a particular responsibility in this regard. They shape how ideas are framed, how subjects are represented, and how discourse evolves. If they reproduce sanitized versions of marginality, they risk limiting the scope of understanding.

Ultimately, the challenge is to move from curation to confrontation. To engage with Dalit existence not as an aesthetic or intellectual object, but as a lived reality that demands recognition in its entirety.

Only then can solidarity move beyond comfort and become something more transformative—an engagement that does not merely include, but truly listens, even when what is heard disrupts the very frameworks through which it is understood.

Surveying the City: Memory, Grief, and the Intimate Life of Urban Ruins

A city is often described through its infrastructure—roads, buildings, transport, expansion. It is mapped, measured, surveyed. Urban surveys promise objectivity: data about density, growth, land use, and development. Yet beneath this administrative gaze lies another city, one that cannot be captured through metrics alone. It is a city made of memory, loss, and intimate attachment. To conduct a “survey of cities” in this sense is not to measure space, but to inhabit it—to become an intimate participant in the city’s life of memory and grief.

Every city carries within it layers of time. Streets are not only pathways but archives; buildings are not only structures but sedimented histories. A demolished house, a renamed locality, a disappearing neighborhood—these are not merely changes in urban form. They are events of loss, often unrecorded in official narratives.

Urban surveys, in their conventional form, tend to erase this dimension. They reduce space to function, land to value, and people to data points. What is lost in this process is the affective life of the city—the ways in which individuals and communities remember, mourn, and attach meaning to places.

To reimagine the survey as an intimate practice is to shift its purpose. Instead of asking “What is here?” it asks, “What has been lost here? What remains? What is remembered?” The surveyor becomes not a distant observer but a listener, attentive to stories that are embedded in space.

This is particularly important in cities shaped by displacement and inequality. Urban development often involves the removal of informal settlements, the restructuring of neighborhoods, and the relocation of communities. These processes are framed as progress, but they also produce grief—a quiet, often unacknowledged mourning for places that no longer exist.

For marginalized communities, including Dalits, the relationship to the city is often marked by precarity. Settlements may be temporary, vulnerable to eviction, or excluded from formal recognition. Yet within these spaces, lives are built—relationships formed, memories accumulated, identities shaped. When such spaces are erased, the loss is not only material but deeply personal.

The survey, reimagined, becomes a way of documenting this loss. It attends to the traces that remain—a wall that stands where a house once was, a tree that outlived a neighborhood, a name that persists even after the place has changed. These traces are fragments of memory, resisting complete erasure.

Grief in the city is not always visible. It does not always take the form of public mourning. Often, it is carried quietly, embedded in everyday practices. A person returning to a site where their home once stood, a story repeated about a lost neighborhood, a hesitation in naming a place—these are subtle expressions of attachment and loss.

To be an intimate participant in the city’s life is to recognize these expressions, to understand that the city is not only lived in the present but also remembered through absence. The past is not gone; it lingers, shaping how spaces are experienced.

This perspective also challenges dominant narratives of urban progress. Development is often celebrated as improvement, as the transformation of “old” spaces into “modern” ones. But from the standpoint of those who have been displaced, development can appear as erasure. The new city is built upon the loss of the old.

The survey, then, becomes a critical tool. It can expose the gaps between official narratives and lived experience. It can reveal what is not counted, what is not recorded, what is not valued. In doing so, it expands the meaning of what it means to know a city.

There is also an ethical dimension to this practice. To survey memory and grief is to engage with vulnerability. It requires care, attentiveness, and a willingness to listen without appropriating. The goal is not to extract stories but to acknowledge them as part of the city’s life.

In contemporary contexts, digital technologies offer new possibilities for such surveys. Photographs, recordings, and online archives can capture fragments of memory, preserving them in ways that resist complete disappearance. Yet even here, the challenge remains: how to represent loss without reducing it to content.

Ultimately, to think of the survey as an intimate practice is to transform our understanding of the city itself. The city is no longer only a space of movement and growth; it becomes a repository of lived histories, marked by both presence and absence.

In this reimagined survey, grief is not an obstacle to progress but a form of knowledge. It tells us what has been valued, what has been lost, and what continues to matter. To attend to it is to engage with the city not as an object to be measured, but as a living, changing, and deeply human space.

And in that engagement, the surveyor becomes something else—not just a recorder of data, but a witness to the city’s ongoing negotiation between memory and forgetting.

Can the Subaltern Poop? Sanitation, Caste, and the Politics of the Abject Body

The provocation “Can the subaltern poop?” extends the critical lineage of questions posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and reworked through caste by B. R. Ambedkar. If the earlier question interrogated voice, and later ones intimacy and pleasure, this question turns to something even more fundamental: the right to bodily necessity with dignity. It asks not whether the subaltern can perform a biological act, but whether they can do so without exposure, humiliation, and structural violence.

Defecation is universal, yet the conditions under which it occurs are radically unequal. In many parts of India, despite state-led sanitation campaigns, access to private toilets remains uneven. For marginalized communities—particularly Dalits—this lack of infrastructure is not accidental but historically structured. Settlements are often placed at the margins, infrastructure arrives late or inadequately, and the burden of absence is collectively borne.

To “poop,” in this context, is not merely a biological act but a spatial and social negotiation. Without access to private toilets, individuals are forced into open spaces—fields, railway tracks, riverbanks, construction sites. These are not chosen environments but imposed ones. The act becomes public, visible, and vulnerable.

This forced visibility contrasts sharply with the experience of dominant groups, for whom sanitation is privatized, enclosed, and hidden. The toilet, as an architectural form, produces privacy, dignity, and invisibility. Its absence produces the opposite: exposure, risk, and stigma.

Caste is deeply implicated in this distribution. The same social order that historically assigned Dalits the task of handling waste denies them the infrastructure to manage their own bodily waste with dignity. This paradox reveals a fundamental contradiction: those closest to the system of sanitation are those most excluded from its benefits.

The politics of open defecation is often framed in developmental terms—lack of awareness, behavioral issues, or infrastructural gaps. While these factors are relevant, they can obscure the role of caste. The absence of toilets in marginalized areas is not simply a technical failure; it reflects broader patterns of neglect and exclusion.

For Dalit women, the stakes are even higher. The lack of private sanitation exposes them to risks of harassment, violence, and surveillance. The timing of defecation—often early morning or late evening—is structured around the need to minimize visibility. Even then, the possibility of being seen remains. The body is forced into a condition where its most basic functions are subject to public gaze and potential threat.

This reveals that sanitation is not only about health but about bodily autonomy and control over visibility. To have a toilet is to have the ability to withdraw from the gaze, to manage one’s body in privacy. To lack it is to be denied that withdrawal.

From a theoretical perspective, this can be understood as the politics of the abject body. Waste is something societies seek to remove, hide, and distance from everyday life. Yet for marginalized communities, the boundary between the body and waste is less easily maintained. The act of defecation becomes entangled with identity, reinforcing stigma and exclusion.

The question “Can the subaltern poop?” thus exposes a deeper inequality: the uneven distribution of dignified bodily existence. It is not that the subaltern cannot perform this act, but that they must do so under conditions that strip it of privacy and dignity.

At the same time, these conditions produce forms of collective negotiation. Open spaces become shared zones where individuals coordinate, communicate, and navigate risk together. These are not spaces of freedom but of managed survival.

Contemporary discourse, including initiatives like Swachh Bharat, has brought attention to sanitation. Yet the focus often remains on infrastructure and behavior, without पर्याप्त engagement with caste-based inequalities that shape access and use. Toilets may be built, but their distribution, maintenance, and usability remain uneven.

Ultimately, the question is not about the act itself but about the conditions under which it is performed. It is about the right to privacy, safety, and dignity in the most basic aspects of life.

To ask “Can the subaltern poop?” is to confront the limits of modernity’s promises. It reveals that even the most fundamental human needs are structured by hierarchy. And it insists that dignity must extend to all aspects of existence—not only in speech, not only in desire, but in the everyday realities of the body.

Until that extension is realized, the answer remains incomplete—pointing not to absence, but to the unequal conditions under which presence is lived.

Can the Subaltern Drink? Caste, Consumption, and the Politics of Intoxication

The provocation “Can the subaltern drink?” extends the lineage of questions initiated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and reworked through caste by thinkers like B. R. Ambedkar. It shifts the terrain from speech and sexuality to consumption, pleasure, and bodily autonomy. It asks: who is allowed to indulge, to relax, to intoxicate themselves without moral scrutiny? And conversely, whose drinking is always already marked, judged, and regulated?

Drinking is rarely just about alcohol. It is about who gets to inhabit leisure. In many social contexts, drinking signifies relaxation, celebration, or social bonding. It is associated with cosmopolitanism, modernity, and freedom. Yet, like all practices of the body, drinking is structured by hierarchy.

In caste society, consumption has long been regulated through ideas of purity and pollution. What one eats, drinks, and shares is tied to social status. Certain forms of consumption are elevated, while others are stigmatized. Alcohol occupies an ambiguous position within this framework. It can be associated with both elite leisure and moral degradation, depending on who is consuming it.

For dominant groups, drinking often appears as refined indulgence. It is framed through the language of taste—wine, whiskey, craft beer—embedded within spaces of privilege such as lounges, clubs, and private gatherings. Here, intoxication is aestheticized, even celebrated.

For marginalized communities, particularly Dalits, drinking is frequently framed differently. It is associated with excess, irresponsibility, or social disorder. The same act—consuming alcohol—takes on different meanings depending on the body that performs it. This reveals that drinking is not a neutral practice but a site of moral classification.

To ask whether the subaltern can drink is therefore to ask whether they can participate in pleasure without stigma. It is to question why certain bodies are allowed to indulge while others are disciplined for the same act.

This asymmetry is not only about perception but also about space. Where one drinks matters. Access to certain environments—bars, clubs, restaurants—is shaped by class and caste. Even within public spaces, the presence of marginalized bodies can be policed through subtle and overt forms of exclusion.

At the same time, drinking within marginalized communities often takes on collective forms. It can be part of social gatherings, rituals, or everyday interactions. These practices are rarely recognized as legitimate forms of leisure; instead, they are often pathologized. The subaltern is thus denied the aesthetic legitimacy of pleasure.

From a theoretical perspective, this reflects a broader pattern: the denial of unmarked humanity. To drink without scrutiny is to be seen as an individual making a personal choice. To be scrutinized while drinking is to be reduced to a type, a stereotype, a social problem.

The question also intersects with gender. For women, and particularly Dalit women, the act of drinking is doubly regulated. It challenges both caste norms and patriarchal expectations. A Dalit woman who drinks is not simply engaging in leisure; she is crossing multiple boundaries, risking judgment from different directions.

Contemporary urban and digital contexts complicate this landscape. Images of drinking circulate widely on platforms like Instagram, where they are often associated with lifestyle, glamour, and modernity. Participation in this visual culture can allow marginalized individuals to claim visibility within domains of leisure.

Yet, as with other forms of visibility, this participation is uneven. The same image can be read differently depending on who is in it. The Dalit body, even when placed within spaces of consumption, may still be interpreted through the lens of caste.

The idea of “drinking” can also be expanded metaphorically. It is about the right to consume the world without restriction—to access pleasure, to engage with leisure, to inhabit moments that are not defined by survival or struggle. In this sense, the question becomes broader: can the subaltern rest, enjoy, and exist without being constantly marked?

The answer, as with other such questions, is not straightforward. The subaltern does drink, does enjoy, does find moments of pleasure. But these acts are often shaped by conditions that limit their recognition as legitimate.

To transform this condition requires more than access; it requires a shift in perception. It requires a world where pleasure is not hierarchically distributed, where the same act does not carry different moral weights depending on who performs it.

Ultimately, “Can the subaltern drink?” is less about alcohol and more about freedom—the freedom to inhabit one’s body without constant scrutiny, to engage in pleasure without stigma, and to exist as a subject whose choices are not predetermined by hierarchy.

Until such a transformation occurs, the question remains open, pointing not to absence but to the unequal conditions under which presence is lived.

Can the Subaltern Have Sex? Desire, Caste, and the Politics of Intimacy

The question “Can the subaltern speak?”, posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, unsettled the foundations of representation by asking whether those structurally excluded from power can ever truly be heard within dominant frameworks. To ask, in a similar provocation, “Can the subaltern have sex?” is to shift the inquiry from voice to body, from speech to intimacy. It is to interrogate whether those positioned at the margins of caste and social hierarchy are allowed not just to speak, but to desire, to be desired, and to inhabit sexuality as subjects rather than objects.

Sex, like speech, is not outside power. It is governed by norms, regulated through institutions, and structured by hierarchies. In caste society, sexuality is deeply entangled with the reproduction of social order. As B. R. Ambedkar argued, caste persists through endogamy—the strict control over marriage and sexual relations. Desire is disciplined so that it does not cross caste boundaries. Intimacy becomes a site of surveillance, where the stakes are not merely personal but social.

Within this framework, the subaltern—particularly Dalits and marginalized communities—occupies a contradictory position. On the one hand, their sexuality is tightly controlled, restricted, and denied legitimacy. On the other hand, their bodies have historically been subjected to forms of exploitation that are deeply sexualized. This produces a paradox: the subaltern body is not outside sex, but it is denied the status of sexual subjectivity.

To “have sex,” in this context, is not merely a biological act. It is to participate in a recognized field of intimacy where desire is mutual, agency is acknowledged, and dignity is preserved. The question, then, is whether the subaltern is allowed to inhabit this field as an equal participant—or whether their presence is always mediated by power.

Caste society has often rendered subaltern sexuality either invisible or illegitimate. Inter-caste relationships are frequently met with resistance, sometimes violently so. The idea that a Dalit individual could be a legitimate partner—desired, chosen, and recognized—challenges the very structure of caste. Desire here becomes dangerous, not because of its intensity, but because of its capacity to disrupt hierarchy.

At the same time, the subaltern is often hyper-visible in distorted ways. Their bodies may appear in narratives of exploitation, scandal, or moral panic. This visibility does not translate into recognition; it reinforces their position as objects rather than subjects. The subaltern is thus caught between invisibility and misrecognition, unable to fully inhabit the space of legitimate desire.

Dalit feminist thought complicates this further by foregrounding the experiences of Dalit women, whose sexuality is shaped by the intersection of caste and patriarchy. Their bodies are sites of control, vulnerability, and resistance. To ask whether the subaltern can have sex is, for them, also to ask whether they can own their bodies, define their desires, and refuse imposed roles.

Contemporary contexts introduce new dimensions to this question. Digital platforms, changing social norms, and urban spaces create opportunities for interaction beyond traditional boundaries. Dating apps, social media, and alternative cultural spaces allow individuals to connect in ways that were previously difficult. These spaces can enable forms of intimacy that challenge caste norms.

Yet these possibilities remain uneven. Caste continues to operate through subtle markers—names, language, appearance, and cultural cues—that shape interactions even in digital environments. The subaltern may enter these spaces, but their participation is not free from the structures that define them.

From a theoretical perspective, the question “Can the subaltern have sex?” reveals that sexuality is not simply about desire but about recognition. It is about who is allowed to be a subject of intimacy, whose relationships are validated, and whose desires are considered legitimate.

To answer the question, then, is not straightforward. The subaltern does have sex, but often under conditions that deny full agency and recognition. The challenge lies in transforming these conditions—creating a world where intimacy is not governed by hierarchy, where desire is not restricted by caste, and where all bodies can participate as equal subjects.

In this sense, the question is less about possibility and more about freedom. It asks not whether the subaltern can have sex, but whether they can do so without the weight of structure—without surveillance, stigma, or violence.

Until that transformation occurs, the question remains open, not as a theoretical exercise, but as a lived reality that continues to shape the most intimate dimensions of life.

Polished Bodies, Denied Desire: Dalit Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Being Seen as Sexy

To be seen as “sexy” is often treated as a matter of personal style—confidence, grooming, presentation. It appears as an individual achievement, something one cultivates through care of the body: manicured nails, pedicured feet, styled hair, curated outfits. Yet this apparent simplicity hides a deeper structure. In a caste society, who gets to be seen as sexy is never neutral. It is shaped by histories of labour, stigma, and visibility. To think about Dalit women and the idea of being sexy is therefore to confront a difficult question: what does it mean to desire and be desired when your body has historically been denied both dignity and aesthetic legitimacy?

Beauty regimes—salons, skincare, grooming practices—are often associated with leisure and self-care. They assume access to time, money, and spaces where the body can be attended to without urgency. Manicured nails and pedicured feet, in this sense, are not just aesthetic choices; they are markers of a certain kind of life—one where the body is not constantly tied to survival or labour.

For many Dalit women, this relationship to the body has historically been different. The body has been read through labour—through work that is often physical, visible, and stigmatized. Hands are not neutral; they are marked by what they do. Feet are not aesthetic; they are shaped by where they must go. In such a context, the very idea of grooming becomes politically charged.

To have manicured nails is to interrupt this history. It is to say: these hands are not only for labour; they are for self-presentation, for care, for visibility. To have pedicured feet is to refuse the association between Dalit bodies and the ground, the dirt, the spaces of exclusion. It is a subtle but powerful shift—from body-as-function to body-as-image.

And yet, this shift does not automatically translate into recognition. The Dalit woman who enters spaces of beauty and fashion often encounters a paradox. She can adopt the markers of desirability, but she is not always granted the status of being desirable. The gaze that defines “sexiness” remains structured by caste-coded aesthetics—skin tone, features, language, style, and social background.

This is where the politics of being sexy becomes complex. It is not simply about appearance but about recognition within a field of desire that is already structured. The Dalit woman must navigate a space where she is simultaneously visible and illegible—seen, but not fully acknowledged.

Digital platforms intensify this dynamic. On platforms like Instagram, the curated image becomes central. Nails, feet, outfits, poses—all become part of a visual language through which desirability is communicated. The body is styled, photographed, filtered, and circulated.

For Dalit women, this creates both possibility and tension. On one hand, there is the ability to self-curate—to present oneself outside the constraints of immediate social environments. The image can be crafted on one’s own terms, shared with wider audiences, and received in ways that are not entirely controlled by local hierarchies.

On the other hand, the platform itself is not neutral. Algorithms privilege certain aesthetics, often aligned with dominant caste and class norms. The polished Dalit body enters a space where it must compete with already established standards of beauty. Recognition is conditional, mediated by likes, shares, and visibility metrics.

Yet something shifts in the act itself. The Dalit woman who chooses to present herself as sexy—through manicured nails, pedicured feet, styled images—is not merely conforming. She is claiming a space that was historically denied. She is asserting that her body is not outside the domain of desire.

This assertion is not without risk. It can invite scrutiny, judgment, and even hostility. The same society that denies Dalit women desirability can react strongly when they claim it. The act of being seen as sexy becomes a form of transgression, a crossing of boundaries that were meant to remain intact.

At the same time, this act can produce new forms of confidence and self-perception. To invest in one’s appearance is to engage in a form of self-recognition. It is to see oneself as worthy of attention, care, and admiration—even when external recognition is uneven.

Dalit feminist perspectives remind us that this process cannot be understood in isolation from broader structures of power. The body is a site where caste and patriarchy intersect, shaping how women are seen and how they see themselves. The politics of beauty is therefore inseparable from the politics of dignity.

Ultimately, the question is not whether Dalit women can be sexy, but why that recognition has been historically denied and what it means to claim it now. The manicured nail, the pedicured foot—these are not trivial details. They are part of a larger reconfiguration of the body, where care, visibility, and desire intersect.

In this reconfiguration lies a quiet but significant transformation. The Dalit woman is no longer only the body that works, serves, or is stigmatized. She becomes the body that appears, that styles itself, that demands to be seen—not as exception, but as subject.

And in that demand, the meaning of “sexy” begins to shift—from a category defined by hierarchy to a space where dignity and desire can coexist.

Laughing Out Loud: Dalit Women, Laughter, and the Politics of Uncontained Joy

Laughter is often treated as the most spontaneous of human expressions—an eruption of joy, humor, or release. It appears unstructured, ungoverned, almost natural. Yet, like desire, beauty, and speech, laughter too is regulated by social hierarchies. Who is allowed to laugh loudly, where, and in what manner is never entirely free from power. To think about Dalit women laughing out loud is therefore to confront a subtle but profound question: what does it mean to inhabit joy in a world that has historically disciplined your body into silence, restraint, and endurance?

Caste and patriarchy have long worked together to regulate the expressive capacities of women’s bodies. For Dalit women, this regulation is intensified by the intersection of both. The body is expected to labour, to endure, to remain contained. Laughter—especially loud, unrestrained laughter—disrupts this containment. It exceeds the boundaries of what is considered appropriate, respectable, or controlled.

To laugh out loud is to occupy space sonically. It is to make oneself heard without apology. In a caste society where Dalit presence has often been policed—through spatial segregation, through the disciplining of voice and gesture—laughter becomes a form of acoustic assertion. It refuses quietness. It refuses invisibility.

There is also a gendered dimension to this refusal. Women’s laughter is often subject to moral scrutiny. It is coded as excessive, improper, or lacking modesty when it exceeds certain limits. For Dalit women, this scrutiny is layered with caste expectations. The body is already marked; its expressions are more closely watched, more easily judged.

In this context, laughter becomes political not because it is explicitly oppositional, but because it refuses discipline. It is an embodied expression that cannot be easily contained within the norms of respectability. It interrupts the expectation that marginalized bodies must remain composed, subdued, or grateful.

At the same time, laughter is not only about resistance; it is also about survival. Humor, irony, and shared laughter have long been ways through which marginalized communities navigate difficult conditions. To laugh is to momentarily suspend the weight of social hierarchy, to create a space where the body is not defined solely by its position within the system.

For Dalit women, laughter can function as a form of collective intimacy. It emerges in conversations, in shared experiences, in moments of recognition. It binds individuals together, creating a sense of community that is not structured by hierarchy but by mutual understanding. In these moments, laughter is not directed outward but shared within—a circulation of affect that sustains connection.

Digital spaces add another layer to this dynamic. On platforms like Instagram and short-form video cultures, laughter becomes visible and shareable. Videos of women laughing, joking, performing everyday humor circulate widely, reaching audiences beyond immediate contexts. This visibility allows for new forms of representation, where Dalit women can appear not only as subjects of struggle but as subjects of joy.

Yet, as with other forms of digital visibility, this is not without tension. The circulation of laughter can be misread, appropriated, or trivialized. What is shared as an expression of lived experience can be consumed as entertainment without recognition of its context. The politics of visibility remains uneven.

Still, something shifts when laughter is made visible. The Dalit woman who laughs out loud disrupts the dominant narrative that confines her to suffering or silence. She appears as complex, expressive, and fully human. Joy, in this sense, becomes a form of assertion.

There is also an important relationship between laughter and the body. Laughter is physical—it shakes, it moves, it alters posture and breath. It is difficult to control completely. This bodily dimension makes it particularly resistant to discipline. Even when norms attempt to regulate expression, laughter can escape, revealing the limits of control.

From a theoretical perspective, Dalit women’s laughter can be understood as a form of affective resistance. It does not operate through formal political language, but through the reconfiguration of feeling. It changes how the body inhabits space, how it relates to others, and how it experiences itself.

At the same time, this laughter is not always carefree. It can carry irony, critique, and awareness. It can be directed at the absurdities of social hierarchy, at the contradictions of everyday life. In this sense, laughter becomes a way of naming without declaring, of exposing without formal confrontation.

Ultimately, to center Dalit women laughing out loud is to shift the frame through which their lives are understood. It moves beyond narratives of victimhood without denying the realities of oppression. It insists that alongside struggle, there exists joy—complex, embodied, and political.

In that laughter, there is a refusal to be reduced. There is a claim to space, to sound, to presence. And in the simple act of laughing out loud, the boundaries of what is allowed begin, however slightly, to loosen.

Urban Villages: Caste, Resistance, and the Refusal of Metropolitan Modernity

The metropolitan city is often imagined as the site where tradition dissolves into modernity—where anonymity replaces hierarchy, and mobility displaces inherited identities. Urbanism promises a break from the past: a space where individuals are freed from the rigid structures of village life. Yet within many Indian cities, this promise remains incomplete. Embedded within the metropolitan landscape are spaces commonly referred to as “urban villages”—settlements that retain the social, spatial, and cultural logics of the village even as they are surrounded by the infrastructure of the city. To theorize these spaces is to confront a paradox: the persistence of caste within the very heart of modernity.

Urban villages are not simply remnants of a pre-modern past. They are active, evolving spaces where older forms of social organization coexist with new economic opportunities. Often absorbed into expanding cities through processes of urbanization, these settlements maintain distinct identities, governed by kinship networks, community norms, and localized authority structures. The city grows around them, but they do not fully dissolve into it.

At the center of this persistence lies caste. While the metropolitan city is often associated with anonymity, urban villages remain deeply legible spaces, where identities are known, recognized, and enforced. The layout of these settlements, the organization of housing, and the patterns of interaction often reflect caste-based divisions that predate urban expansion.

This produces a form of spatial resistance to urbanism. Urbanism, in its ideal form, seeks to reorganize space through rational planning, infrastructure, and market logic. It assumes a certain uniformity—a grid of roads, zones, and functions that can be applied across the city. Urban villages disrupt this logic. Their narrow lanes, dense clusters, and irregular layouts resist standardization. They operate according to a different spatial rationality, one that prioritizes community and continuity over planning.

Yet this resistance is not neutral. It is intertwined with the preservation of social hierarchy. The same structures that maintain community cohesion also sustain caste boundaries. The village within the city becomes a site where traditional power relations are reproduced within modern contexts.

For marginalized communities, particularly Dalits, this creates a complex terrain. On the one hand, the city offers opportunities—education, employment, and relative anonymity—that can enable mobility. On the other hand, the presence of urban villages reintroduces familiar constraints. The proximity to dominant caste groups, the persistence of local authority structures, and the visibility of identity can limit the extent to which urban life transforms social relations.

The politics of mobility becomes central here. Movement through the city is not only about distance but about navigating different regimes of space. A Dalit individual may experience relative freedom in certain parts of the city while encountering restriction within urban villages. The city is not a uniform space of liberation; it is a patchwork of zones with varying degrees of openness and constraint.

At the same time, urban villages are not static. They are shaped by economic change, migration, and the influx of diverse populations. Rental housing, small businesses, and informal economies introduce new dynamics that can unsettle existing hierarchies. The presence of outsiders—students, workers, migrants—can dilute the exclusivity of community structures, creating spaces of interaction that were previously limited.

This introduces a tension between preservation and transformation. Urban villages attempt to maintain continuity, yet they are inevitably altered by the forces of urbanization. Caste persists, but it does so in changing forms, adapting to new conditions.

From a theoretical perspective, urban villages can be understood as threshold spaces—neither fully rural nor fully urban. They occupy a liminal position where different temporalities intersect. The past is not replaced by the present; it coexists with it. This coexistence reveals the limits of narratives that position urbanization as a linear process of progress.

The resistance of urban villages to urbanism is therefore double-edged. It resists the homogenizing logic of the city, preserving local forms of life and community. But it also resists the transformative potential of urban anonymity, maintaining structures that limit equality.

This duality complicates the idea of the city as a space of emancipation. It suggests that the struggle against caste cannot rely solely on spatial movement—from village to city—but must engage with the internal heterogeneity of urban space itself.

Digital technologies further complicate this landscape. Even within urban villages, smartphones and social media introduce new forms of visibility and connection. Information circulates beyond local boundaries, exposing individuals to broader networks and ideas. Yet these technologies do not automatically dismantle local hierarchies; they coexist with them, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes challenging.

Ultimately, the urban village reveals that modernity does not erase the past; it reorganizes it. The city is not a clean break but a layered space where different histories persist. To understand caste in contemporary India, one must therefore look not only at rural areas or formal urban structures but at these in-between spaces where the logic of caste is both preserved and transformed.

In this sense, urban villages are not anomalies but key sites for understanding the limits of urbanism. They show that the promise of the city—mobility, anonymity, equality—remains unevenly realized. And they remind us that the struggle against caste must engage not only with institutions and laws but with the everyday spaces where social life unfolds.

Jaat DNA: Blood, Bass, and the Sonic Assertion of Identity in “Jatt Da Muqabla”

Identity, in modern discourse, is often framed through the language of culture, performance, and self-expression. Yet certain identities continue to be articulated through a more primordial vocabulary—that of blood, lineage, and inheritance. The phrase “Jaat DNA” condenses this logic into a contemporary idiom, where caste identity is imagined as something carried within the body, inscribed at the level of biology, and expressed through style, posture, and presence. When this idea is placed alongside the cultural phenomenon of “Jatt Da Muqabla”, we begin to see how caste, music, and masculinity intersect to produce a powerful grammar of assertion.

The song Jatt Da Muqabla is not merely a musical track; it is a declaration. Its rhythm, lyrics, and visual aesthetics combine to produce an image of dominance, confidence, and invincibility. The refrain itself—“muqabla” (contest, challenge)—signals confrontation. It positions the subject not as one among many, but as unmatched, beyond comparison.

This assertion is not abstract. It is grounded in a specific identity: the Jatt. Historically associated with landholding, agrarian power, and regional dominance in parts of North India, the Jatt identity has been rearticulated in contemporary popular culture as a marker of masculinity, pride, and authority. The idea of “Jaat DNA” amplifies this by suggesting that such traits are not acquired but inherited—that strength, confidence, and superiority are embedded in the body itself.

From a theoretical perspective, this represents a form of biologization of caste identity. While caste has always operated through lineage and heredity, the invocation of DNA introduces a modern scientific metaphor that naturalizes hierarchy. It translates social privilege into biological destiny, making it appear inevitable and unchallengeable.

Music plays a crucial role in this process. The sonic landscape of Jatt Da Muqabla—heavy bass, repetitive hooks, assertive vocals—creates an affective environment where identity is not just stated but felt. The listener is drawn into a rhythm that reinforces the message of dominance. Sound becomes a medium through which caste identity is embodied and experienced.

This connects directly to the idea of Dalit sound and the politics of hearing. Just as marginalized communities use sound to assert presence, dominant identities use it to reinforce authority. The difference lies in the direction of power. In Jatt Da Muqabla, sound does not disrupt hierarchy; it consolidates it. The volume, repetition, and energy of the track create a sonic space where the Jatt identity becomes overwhelming, leaving little room for alternative narratives.

The visual aesthetics accompanying such music further intensify this effect. Expensive cars, branded clothing, weapons, and group formations produce an image of collective strength. The individual is always embedded within a larger identity, suggesting that power is both personal and communal. This aligns with the idea of boss power—the performance of authority through style, body language, and presence.

The notion of “Jaat DNA” also intersects with gender. The identity being performed is explicitly masculine. Strength, aggression, and competitiveness are valorized, while vulnerability is excluded. Women, when present, are often positioned as spectators or symbols, reinforcing the centrality of male dominance.

From an anti-caste perspective, this raises important questions. If caste identity is naturalized through the language of DNA, how can it be challenged? The danger lies in the transformation of social hierarchy into biological fact. When dominance is framed as innate, it becomes resistant to critique.

At the same time, the popularity of such cultural forms reveals the persistence of caste pride in contemporary society. Even as legal frameworks promote equality, cultural expressions continue to reproduce and celebrate hierarchy. The arena of music becomes a space where caste is not hidden but amplified.

Yet this amplification also opens the possibility of counter-sound. Just as Jatt identity is asserted through music, alternative identities can be articulated through their own sonic practices. The field of sound becomes a site of contestation, where different narratives compete for attention and legitimacy.

The phrase “Jaat DNA” thus encapsulates a broader phenomenon: the reconfiguration of caste in the language of modernity. It shows how traditional hierarchies adapt to contemporary forms, using the vocabulary of science, media, and culture to sustain themselves.

Ultimately, the analysis of Jatt Da Muqabla reveals that caste is not only a matter of social structure but also of affect, performance, and representation. It lives in the body, in the voice, in the beat. To engage with it requires not only critique but also an understanding of how deeply it is embedded in the cultural imagination.

In the end, the challenge lies in disrupting the equation between identity and destiny—between caste and DNA. Only then can the possibility of a different sonic and social order begin to emerge.