When she arrived in the US, she thought that people would care about skin colour but not about birth status, and that she had left caste oppression behind. “One time in a bar in Atlanta,” Sujata Gidla writes in her intimate family history, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, “I told a guy I was untouchable, and he said, ‘Oh, but you are so touchable.’” Many people assume that such abuses are confined to India. Since the 1990s, as anthropologist Ajantha Subramanian points out, there has been an expansion of private engineering colleges, which have “become key sites of dominant caste technical science education”. Most of them, as Rajrah – a researcher at the University of Oxford – points out, were first-generation learners, including so-called untouchables, whose very presence in premier institutes of higher education symbolised the defiant spirit of such communities in the face of endless cruelty, oppression and hurdles put in their way.Īlthough India has a system of reserved places for those from castes classified as historically disadvantaged, this is limited to publicly funded institutions (which often fail to meet the targets). “What does it mean,” Simple Rajrah writes in anguish, “to lose Dr Payal Tadvi, Rajini Krish, Rohith Vemula, Senthil Kumar, Madari Venkatesh, and Aniket Ambhore, among countless others, to institutional murder?” All of these were university students from oppressed castes who died by suicide.

Yet the killer-Saraswati of Shepherd’s childhood nightmare also continues to haunt the corridors of India’s institutes of higher education. I write this as India sits under the pall of the brutal rape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit (“untouchable” in the caste system) woman in Hathras, a village in Uttar Pradesh.

Caste matters