Some Indian-language Dalit writers portray caste concealment because caste identity can shape how a person is treated—and whether disclosure brings stigma or danger. In these works, concealment is not one uniform act: it may mean staying silent, allowing a mistaken assumption to stand, or navigating different identities in public and private. The stories also ask who gets to decide when caste is visible.
What “hiding caste” means in these stories
The everyday Hindi phrase jāt chupāke rahnā means “living with one’s caste concealed.” It can describe deliberate silence, but the literary theme reaches beyond a person actively pretending to belong to another caste. A character may be misidentified by others, avoid correcting them, conceal identity in one setting but not another, or test what life might be like outside caste’s inherited status.
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Baburao Bagul’s 1963 Marathi collection Jevha Mi Jaat Chorli Hoti—translated as When I Concealed My Caste—gave the theme an influential formulation. The Hindi wording can make concealment sound like theft or deception. Yet the writers Kusuma Satyanarayanan and Joel Lee argue that focusing only on the person who hides risks accepting a casteist premise: that caste should be visible and disclosed. In their reading, Bagul’s first-person “I” asserts a Dalit subject’s ability to choose how caste identity is represented. Scroll’s discussion of the anthology develops this interpretation.
How caste assumptions shape the choice
In Ajay Navaria’s short story “New Custom,” an educated Dalit protagonist is mistaken for a darbar, a socially and economically dominant landlord caste. He initially lets a tea vendor’s assumption stand. For a moment, he inhabits a position that the caste system would ordinarily deny him. Keeping up that appearance requires him to read local social cues and improvise.
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The episode shows how concealment can arise from an opportunity created by someone else’s assumption, not just from a planned false identity. If a person is treated with deference when perceived as belonging to a dominant caste, correcting that perception may mean surrendering an advantage—or inviting stigma. The story makes the performance precarious: it depends on the people around the character continuing to read him as they already do.
Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan offers another angle. When people who had assumed a speaker was Brahmin learn he is Dalit, a character asks, “Should we go around beating drums and announcing it?” The line pushes back against the expectation that Dalits must proactively disclose caste to satisfy others. It is a character’s line in the work, not a statement attributed here to Valmiki about his personal views. Scroll’s excerpt and commentary discuss both examples.
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Different forms, settings, and stakes
Across the literature discussed in Concealing Caste: Narratives of Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature, concealment takes several forms. The distinctions below help explain the stories; they are not a formal taxonomy or a measure of how often any strategy occurs.
| Form or situation | What happens | Question the story raises |
|---|---|---|
| Silence or equivocation | A character does not disclose caste or gives an uncertain answer. | Who is entitled to demand disclosure? |
| Passing through mistaken identity | Others read a character as savarna—a member of a caste regarded as socially privileged—and the character may let the assumption stand. | What access or deference becomes possible, and what must be done to maintain the assumption? |
| Divided public and private identity | A character presents or manages identity differently at home and in school, work, or the neighborhood. | How does the risk change across settings and relationships? |
| Disidentification or severed ties | Some characters approach relationships beyond caste; a few nearly cut ties with their birth community or marry without a spouse knowing their origins. | What might be gained, and what personal or communal costs follow? |
| Experimentation and play | A character explores a social role opened up by others’ assumptions. | Can briefly inhabiting that role expose the unequal rules that govern it? |
The stories therefore do not treat concealment only as a route to safety. It can also concern access to ordinary treatment, freedom from inherited status, intimacy, or the chance to test how caste shapes a social encounter. The consequences of exposure matter too, but they differ by character and context.
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Why these stories shift attention from the individual to caste
Calling a character’s action “concealment” can make it sound as though the central problem is the person’s failure to disclose. The authors caution that this framing can reinforce the very expectation the stories question: that caste is an identity people must make legible to others. It can also distract from the structure of dehumanization that makes concealment seem useful or necessary.
Read this way, a story about passing is not simply about whether a character is honest. It asks why perceived caste changes access, respect, relationships, or safety in the first place—and why the burden of explaining or proving identity falls on the person targeted by caste hierarchy.
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What the anthology covers—and what it cannot tell us
Edited by Kusuma Satyanarayanan and Joel Lee, Concealing Caste: Narratives of Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature brings together short stories and autobiographical writing, including essays and memoir excerpts. Its contributors write in Marathi, Telugu, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, English, and Malayalam; Scroll describes selections spanning the 1930s to 2020. OUP India’s catalogue lists the hardback as 208 pages, ISBN 9780192865243, with a publication date of 26 April 2023. OUP Academic lists 5 July 2023 as the publication date, so the dates reflect different publisher records or listings.
The anthology includes works by Baburao Bagul, Omprakash Valmiki, Ajay Navaria, B.R. Ambedkar, Urmila Pawar, Manoranjan Byapari, and Yashica Dutt, among others. It offers a way to follow the theme across literary forms and languages; its examples do not establish how common caste concealment is among Dalit writers or the public today. The reviewed material provides no representative survey or prevalence estimate, and does not support regional comparisons.
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