<h1 class="left">The word armour comes from the Latin armare, which means to arm oneself. Leaving the comfort and safety of home demanded that I do just that. The world outside has always been unkind. Dalits riding a horse, wearing a suit or even just a watch are acts transgressing caste boundaries, and the consequences are often violent—despite the armour. Numerous warriors have fallen, battles have been lost, but the war for self-respect is, sadly, still ongoing.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Annoyingly, I got over the rudeness of the titular question in a few years and then wondered, where does an upper-caste Indian draw their reference for what/who a Dalit is? I ask because Dalits in urban spaces camouflage their caste. Yashica Dutt outlines this in her incredible memoir, Coming Out as Dalit <h1 class="left" style="text-decoration: line-through;">(in a way even you could understand)</h1>. <h1 class="centre">So if the real Dalits are in incognito mode like spies hiding in plain sight, what’s the point of reference? (Perhaps a Dalit spy film is on the cards? Karan Johar needs to hire me to write this.) Sources are limited to bigoted stories of Dalits as dirty, unhygienic and lazy, or owning BMWs and grabbing your rightfully deserved IIT seat. Worse, books and films describe us only as malnourished and abused people in villages, without reference to us in cities. How then are you to know what I am or look like?</h1>
<h1 class="centre">In the essay Presenting the Dalit Body, Dr Anupama traces missionary and British attempts to clothe Dalit bodies, which offered an opportunity for Dalits to assert themselves. She refers to numerous Dalit autobiographies for anecdotal insights on the changes clothes brought. “I came to like it only because it (shirt and trousers) made me look different from what I was and gave me a social status I could not have otherwise acquired,” from Untouchable, The autobiography of an Indian Outcast (1936) by Hazari struck me. The British wanted to clothe all naked Indian bodies, but clothes were markers to segregate people along caste lines. Manu S Pillai, in the essay The Woman Who Cut Off Her Breasts, writes about the riots that erupted in 1850 after upper castes attacked Christian-convert lower-caste women. “The bone of contention was not that the converted women wanted to cover themselves — it was that they had covered themselves with the shawl permitted only to the high-born.”</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Western clothes were being adopted by the upper castes slowly, and since violence wasn’t justified when Dalits dressed similarly, ridicule was employed. They made fun of the converts who dressed like the memsaheb.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Clothes are an opportunity to visually move beyond the identity ascribed to you. Royalty and the affluent in the last century—and for time immemorial—have relied on the exquisite nature of their clothes to make themselves stand above the rest. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor's New Clothes is a perfect example of this. In the social media era, fit checks are just another opportunity to stand out. Celebrities' post-breakup gym fits aren’t just about fitness or weight; they are also trying to flood new pictures to erase an older identity or build a new one on its grave.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Dalits were once denied clothes and even footwear when an upper-caste person walked by. Too many Dalit autobiographies and memoirs refer to the desire for new clothes or school uniforms that would help them blend in better. Dr B R Ambedkar, lawyer, economist, pioneer and trailblazer with 9 degrees, dressed elegantly and stylishly in three-piece suits and hats, accessorising with belts, umbrellas and walking sticks. It makes people ask, Why did the leader and representative of the desolate look so fine?</h1> <h1 class="centre" style="text-decoration: line-through;">(Snakes will be snakes.)</h1>
<h1 class="centre">To offer young Dalits an aspiration and a dream.</h1>
<h1 class="right">Sayings like “The first impression is the best impression” and “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have” are just markers of how deeply appearance is tied to opportunity. Clothes and now brands are class markers in any society. Uniforms were supposed to create a sense of equality, but failed miserably. Students wore uniforms to establish a sense of equality, yes, but the age of the uniforms, the quality or brand of the shoes and bags always gave them away. The police and army have uniforms which carry power, but the housekeeping staff in uniform are soft targets for attacks. If you are walking the streets of Bangalore wearing harem pants, graphic tees and dishevelled hair, the police are definitely going to check you for substances. Clothes clearly mark who you are in society.</h1>
<h1 class="right">Let me take a minute to make you uncomfortable and tell you that you are casteist if you use the word chapri as a slur.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Where is the line between stylish and chapri? The line is who is wearing it. And it is thousands of years old. While rap musicians and artists from oppressed identities attempt to redeem and assert individual style and fashion in the popular realm, they are still haunted by a larger absence of awareness. This makes the world outside a battlefield. Ergo, armour. Trans people rely on gender affirming clothes to fight body dysphoria, and women who have to fight the penetrating male gaze understand what clothes do.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Dr Ambedkar addressed a group of 50 women after the Chavdaar Tank Satyagraha at Mahaad in December 1927. The Satyagraha was an assertion to access water from a public water tank because it was off limits to the untouchables. He urged the women to be part of the fight against untouchability and to speak out for the future of children so they do not receive the same respect as animals: “The way you wear your saris is a sign of your being untouchable, you must wipe out that sign… In the same way, your habit of wearing heavy necklaces round your necks and bracelets and bangles of kathil on your arms up to the elbow, mark you out as being untouchable.”</h1>
<h1 class="left">While many Instagram jewellery shops sell the same aesthetic as desi, tribal and traditional, these caste markers not too long ago inflicted violence, ridicule and ostracisation on Dalits. It’s easy to ridicule these shops for not acknowledging or knowing this history, but it is far more interesting to see who learns from this and how they spin it. The clothes, jewellery and fashion out of Harlem and the American hip-hop movement were a part of the larger civil rights and cultural renaissance. In India, brands, publications, films and products that scream that the caste system is atrocious or that we should uplift dalit crafts, are owned by upper castes who have monetised an aesthetic and suffering inflicted structurally by their ancestors.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">
My sweaty Kongu that slogs like a washing rock
Is not a sooty rag that guards the bosom.
Not a burden on the chest.
How shall I drag it into streets and defame it?
How shall I ruin myself by burning it?
</h1>
<h1 class="left">This is a translation of Joopaka Subhadra’s poem Kongu (pallu, loose end of the saree), a rejoinder to Jayaprabha's 1988 Telugu poem Paitanu Thagileyali (burn the paita/kongu/pallu). Jayaprabha laments the pallu as the patriarchy weighing her down and urges arson. Subhadra says the Kongu is a double-edged sword that both defends her and hurts her. So burning it won’t change anything for her or any other Dalit woman.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Two decades ago, in a Bangalore supermarket’s pickle and papad aisle, I was on my knees looking for hapla. In a blue supermarket T-shirt, an employee watched me struggle. An older woman with striking grey hair and sharp trousers walked towards me and asked me to fetch something. It was the second time this had happened. The supermarket staff was fair-skinned and well-dressed. I was and am not those things. I wasn’t wearing the same colour as the uniform, either. I don’t know what I muttered, but communicated that I wasn’t staff. I don’t think she apologised. I want to believe she did before she hurriedly walked away. I blamed myself for not dressing better.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">I was trained to mask my caste, and therefore often frightened to be found out. I didn’t know the consequences, but knew they wouldn’t be good. I still feel it on my skin, a decade-old stare from my neighbours who would watch me leave the house for school. My grandmother worked on their farm and home as a labourer three decades ago. These stares were our only exchange for the three years we were neighbours. Now, I wear armour to avoid the spiteful stares and disgust-filled eyes, like laser beams aimed at me.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">I’m weaving a new tale from the threads of history to protect myself from the horrors of the present world. My tailored clothes and put-together fits are my armour to move through the casteist lanes of agraharas (academia) that I walk every day. I do it in style.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">What does a Dalit look like? May you never find out.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Seen in the Banner: (From top left to right) Rettamalai Srinivasan, Arivu, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Yashica Dutt, Vinay Kumar, Ginni Mahi</h1>
<h1 class="left">(From bottom left to right) Ruth Manorama, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, C Mithavadi Krishnan, Faustina Bama, Amar Singh Chamkila</h1>
<h1 class="full">The word armour comes from the Latin armare, which means to arm oneself. Leaving the comfort and safety of home demanded that I do just that. The world outside has always been unkind. Dalits riding a horse, wearing a suit or even just a watch are acts transgressing caste boundaries, and the consequences are often violent—despite the armour. Numerous warriors have fallen, battles have been lost, but the war for self-respect is, sadly, still ongoing.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Annoyingly, I got over the rudeness of the titular question in a few years and then wondered, where does an upper-caste Indian draw their reference for what/who a Dalit is? I ask because Dalits in urban spaces camouflage their caste. Yashica Dutt outlines this in her incredible memoir, Coming Out as Dalit
<h1 class="centre" style="text-decoration: line-through;">(in a way even you could understand)</h1>
<h1 class="full">So if the real Dalits are in incognito mode like spies hiding in plain sight, what’s the point of reference? (Perhaps a Dalit spy film is on the cards? Karan Johar needs to hire me to write this.) Sources are limited to bigoted stories of Dalits as dirty, unhygienic and lazy, or owning BMWs and grabbing your rightfully deserved IIT seat. Worse, books and films describe us only as malnourished and abused people in villages, without reference to us in cities. How then are you to know what I am or look like?</h1>
<h1 class="full">In the essay Presenting the Dalit Body, Dr Anupama traces missionary and British attempts to clothe Dalit bodies, which offered an opportunity for Dalits to assert themselves. She refers to numerous Dalit autobiographies for anecdotal insights on the changes clothes brought. “I came to like it only because it (shirt and trousers) made me look different from what I was and gave me a social status I could not have otherwise acquired,” from Untouchable, The autobiography of an Indian Outcast (1936) by Hazari struck me. The British wanted to clothe all naked Indian bodies, but clothes were markers to segregate people along caste lines. Manu S Pillai, in the essay The Woman Who Cut Off Her Breasts, writes about the riots that erupted in 1850 after upper castes attacked Christian-convert lower-caste women. “The bone of contention was not that the converted women wanted to cover themselves — it was that they had covered themselves with the shawl permitted only to the high-born.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">Western clothes were being adopted by the upper castes slowly, and since violence wasn’t justified when Dalits dressed similarly, ridicule was employed. They made fun of the converts who dressed like the memsaheb.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Clothes are an opportunity to visually move beyond the identity ascribed to you. Royalty and the affluent in the last century—and for time immemorial—have relied on the exquisite nature of their clothes to make themselves stand above the rest. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor's New Clothes is a perfect example of this. In the social media era, fit checks are just another opportunity to stand out. Celebrities' post-breakup gym fits aren’t just about fitness or weight; they are also trying to flood new pictures to erase an older identity or build a new one on its grave.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Dalits were once denied clothes and even footwear when an upper-caste person walked by. Too many Dalit autobiographies and memoirs refer to the desire for new clothes or school uniforms that would help them blend in better. Dr B R Ambedkar, lawyer, economist, pioneer and trailblazer with 9 degrees, dressed elegantly and stylishly in three-piece suits and hats, accessorising with belts, umbrellas and walking sticks. It makes people ask, Why did the leader and representative of the desolate look so fine?</h1>
<h1 class="centre" style="text-decoration: line-through;">(Snakes will be snakes.)</h1>
<h1 class="full">To offer young Dalits an aspiration and a dream.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Sayings like “The first impression is the best impression” and “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have” are just markers of how deeply appearance is tied to opportunity. Clothes and now brands are class markers in any society. Uniforms were supposed to create a sense of equality, but failed miserably. Students wore uniforms to establish a sense of equality, yes, but the age of the uniforms, the quality or brand of the shoes and bags always gave them away. The police and army have uniforms which carry power, but the housekeeping staff in uniform are soft targets for attacks. If you are walking the streets of Bangalore wearing harem pants, graphic tees and dishevelled hair, the police are definitely going to check you for substances. Clothes clearly mark who you are in society.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Let me take a minute to make you uncomfortable and tell you that you are casteist if you use the word chapri as a slur.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Where is the line between stylish and chapri? The line is who is wearing it. And it is thousands of years old. While rap musicians and artists from oppressed identities attempt to redeem and assert individual style and fashion in the popular realm, they are still haunted by a larger absence of awareness. This makes the world outside a battlefield. Ergo, armour. Trans people rely on gender affirming clothes to fight body dysphoria, and women who have to fight the penetrating male gaze understand what clothes do.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Dr Ambedkar addressed a group of 50 women after the Chavdaar Tank Satyagraha at Mahaad in December 1927. The Satyagraha was an assertion to access water from a public water tank because it was off limits to the untouchables. He urged the women to be part of the fight against untouchability and to speak out for the future of children so they do not receive the same respect as animals: “The way you wear your saris is a sign of your being untouchable, you must wipe out that sign… In the same way, your habit of wearing heavy necklaces round your necks and bracelets and bangles of kathil on your arms up to the elbow, mark you out as being untouchable.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">While many Instagram jewellery shops sell the same aesthetic as desi, tribal and traditional, these caste markers not too long ago inflicted violence, ridicule and ostracisation on Dalits. It’s easy to ridicule these shops for not acknowledging or knowing this history, but it is far more interesting to see who learns from this and how they spin it. The clothes, jewellery and fashion out of Harlem and the American hip-hop movement were a part of the larger civil rights and cultural renaissance. In India, brands, publications, films and products that scream that the caste system is atrocious or that we should uplift dalit crafts, are owned by upper castes who have monetised an aesthetic and suffering inflicted structurally by their ancestors.</h1>
<h1 class="full">
My sweaty Kongu that slogs like a washing rock
Is not a sooty rag that guards the bosom.
Not a burden on the chest.
How shall I drag it into streets and defame it?
How shall I ruin myself by burning it?
</h1>
<h1 class="full">This is a translation of Joopaka Subhadra’s poem Kongu (pallu, loose end of the saree), a rejoinder to Jayaprabha's 1988 Telugu poem Paitanu Thagileyali (burn the paita/kongu/pallu). Jayaprabha laments the pallu as the patriarchy weighing her down and urges arson. Subhadra says the Kongu is a double-edged sword that both defends her and hurts her. So burning it won’t change anything for her or any other Dalit woman.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Two decades ago, in a Bangalore supermarket’s pickle and papad aisle, I was on my knees looking for hapla. In a blue supermarket T-shirt, an employee watched me struggle. An older woman with striking grey hair and sharp trousers walked towards me and asked me to fetch something. It was the second time this had happened. The supermarket staff was fair-skinned and well-dressed. I was and am not those things. I wasn’t wearing the same colour as the uniform, either. I don’t know what I muttered, but communicated that I wasn’t staff. I don’t think she apologised. I want to believe she did before she hurriedly walked away. I blamed myself for not dressing better.</h1>
<h1 class="full">I was trained to mask my caste, and therefore often frightened to be found out. I didn’t know the consequences, but knew they wouldn’t be good. I still feel it on my skin, a decade-old stare from my neighbours who would watch me leave the house for school. My grandmother worked on their farm and home as a labourer three decades ago. These stares were our only exchange for the three years we were neighbours. Now, I wear armour to avoid the spiteful stares and disgust-filled eyes, like laser beams aimed at me.</h1>
<h1 class="full">I’m weaving a new tale from the threads of history to protect myself from the horrors of the present world. My tailored clothes and put-together fits are my armour to move through the casteist lanes of agraharas (academia) that I walk every day. I do it in style.</h1>
<h1 class="full">What does a Dalit look like? May you never find out.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Seen in the Banner: (From top left to right) Rettamalai Srinivasan, Arivu, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Yashica Dutt, Vinay Kumar, Ginni Mahi</h1>
<h1 class="full">(From bottom left to right) Ruth Manorama, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, C Mithavadi Krishnan, Faustina Bama, Amar Singh Chamkila</h1>
