Lokesh Bag
In a society where caste continues to shape access to knowledge, power, and dignity, any conversation about merit or excellence must begin by confronting the foundations on which our institutions stand. Caste is not merely a social identity; it is a structural faultline that distorts every idea of fairness, reason, and justice. As Dr. B. R. Ambedkar warned: “You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.”
The riddle of “merit” is that it changes shape depending on who’s speaking—and who’s being spoken about. We throw the word around as if it has one meaning, but what are we really describing? Is merit the highest scorer in an exam, or the one who scored average despite every obstacle? Is it the ability to recall theory, or to apply it in real life? Is it about academic brilliance or emotional intelligence and problem-solving abilities? Do we consider social, cultural, and economic oppression when we judge merit, or do we erase the privilege, the starting line, and pretend the race was ever fair?
Who defines the criteria, the benchmarks, the language of evaluation? Who decides which knowledge matters? Is there any influence of the oppressor castes in setting these standards—or is it entirely theirs? Because if only certain communities define merit, test it, and certify it, then how can it ever be fair to all? And when this system pretends to be fair, it not only gaslights the oppressed but legitimises their marginalisation as personal failure.
Even if we accept excellence in written exams as a measure of merit, merit itself is not solely about individual effort — it is equally about the environment that surrounds that effort. It’s about who grows up with support, with role models, with representation. Who see themselves reflected in textbooks, praised in the media, celebrated in history, and welcomed in institutions. It is not merely a function of talent or hard work, but of the cumulative social capital, emotional security, and cultural validation one inherits. When everything around you validates your presence, confidence becomes second nature.
For the average Dalit child, the struggle begins long before school age. Before a textbook is opened or a lesson begins, the child is already shaped by the spatial and structural violence of the caste order. The child navigates an environment structured to negate their worth. They are burdened with self-doubt, made to feel like impostors in systems not built for them, forced to prove their humanity before they are even allowed to prove their merit. Dalit localities are not merely peripheral; they are intentionally configured as zones of disposability, functioning as repositories for both material refuse and socially ostracised bodies. Our culture is appropriated and our existence is dehumanised. Dalits are kept at a distance from caste Hindus through a meticulously maintained social architecture that permits interaction only when our labour is needed. Every act of survival demands resistance. By the time a Dalit child enters a classroom, if they manage to reach it at all, they carry the cumulative exhaustion of a struggle the caste Hindu child has never known.
And when the Dalit child reaches school, the violence continues in more insidious forms. Dalit students are made to broom classrooms and clean toilets. Teachers humiliate them, doubt their abilities, and question their presence in the classroom. Eggs are removed from the menu because they don’t align with the Brahminical purity concept. The Dalit child thus does not merely lack access to material resources; they are inducted into a world that is designed to deny their humanity. It is a world that teaches them that they are inferior, that their community has no history worth remembering, no knowledge worth valuing, no creativity worth celebrating.
There is also a strange paradox in the discussion around merit in India. In public discourse around education, the burden of ‘merit’ is always placed on the students. But rarely do we ask: is the teacher meritorious? What qualifies as merit in a teacher, especially in a caste society? Is the teacher equipped with the knowledge and sensitivity to engage with the lived realities of Dalit students? What do we really mean by a “qualified” or meritorious teacher? Do Teacher Eligibility Tests include questions about caste? Do they assess whether a teacher understands structural oppression, democratic values, or the emotional toll of generational exclusion?
A teacher in a caste society does not operate in a vacuum. They carry their social location into the classroom—their biases, assumptions, and ideologies. If a teacher has never interrogated their caste privilege, never engaged with Anti-caste literature, then what kind of learning environment are they shaping?
The NCERT B.Ed. syllabus dangerously frames caste as a benign form of “diversity,” teaching it as part of India’s unity-in-diversity narrative rather than confronting its oppressive, hierarchical nature. This approach risks normalizing caste rather than challenging it. This ideological containment is further reinforced through the curation of intellectual voices. The curriculum is saturated with the voices of upper-caste figures such as Gandhi, Aurobindo, Krishnamurthy, and even contemporary figures like Shashi Tharoor — while it systematically erases anti-caste intellectuals and foundational texts like Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. This is not a mere oversight or gap; it is a deliberate political decision — a reflection of how Savarna dominance continues to shape what constitutes “valid knowledge” in Indian education. By sidelining Dr. Ambedkar and other radical thinkers from marginalized communities, the syllabus fails to acknowledge the most critical and transformative traditions of social thought this country has produced. Even when the word “caste” is mentioned, it is often through vague, depoliticized references under the umbrella of “diversity”, rather than a violent & oppressive system of graded inequality. This tokenistic mention serves only to obscure, not expose. The result is a curriculum that does not prepare teachers to challenge caste — it prepares them to coexist with it.
The contemporary discourse on “merit” in India is flawed. It is wielded as a tool of exclusion—particularly against Dalits, Adivasis, and other marginalized communities. What remains conspicuously absent from this discourse is a serious examination of those already deemed “meritorious.” If merit is to be treated as a normative standard, then the beliefs, conduct, and epistemic orientations of those occupying elite institutional positions must also be subject to scrutiny. Indeed, when we critically examine the statements and actions of some figures occupying higher positions within Indian academic, scientific, and judicial institutions, a disconcerting pattern emerges—one in which pseudoscience and adherence to Brahminism coexist with institutional legitimacy.
For instance, Laxmidhar Behera, the director of IIT Mandi, publicly claimed that meat consumption causes landslides. Similarly, at IIT Indore and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, scientists have performed Vedic rituals such as the Som Yagya with the stated aim of influencing weather patterns to bring rain. B. N Mallick, a professor of life sciences at JNU, even said, “Some castes are genetically malnourished and so very little can be achieved in raising them; and if they are, it would be undoing excellence and merit.”
In the judiciary, the use of Hindu scriptures as sources further reveals how Brahminical thought persists within spaces that are meant to uphold constitutional values. Justice Pratiba M. Singh has remarked that Indian women are “blessed” because the Manusmriti accords them a “very respectable position,” overlooking the text’s regressive stance on gender and caste. Justice Anil Dave, during a hearing on a rape survivor’s abortion plea, lamented modern discomfort with early childbirth, invoking the Manusmriti to suggest that girls traditionally gave birth before the age of 17. He even advised the victim to read the text.
These are the so-called “meritorious” people—sitting in top institutions, influencing policy, and shaping national discourse. These aren’t minor exceptions—they represent how deeply Brahminical thought permeates our scientific, legal, and educational systems.
As for corruption, look at the biggest scams, frauds, and loot in this country. Who’s behind them? CEOs, godmen, bureaucrats, and ministers—mostly oppressor caste men hiding behind their networks of privilege. They preach about merit while robbing this country dry. So when these very people question our merit, or our presence in institutions, we need to ask: whose version of meritocracy are we talking about? What merit do they actually hold, and what kind of merit are they trying to protect?
From the structure of entrance exams to the bias of interview panels, everything is tilted toward the oppressor castes. They design the tests and sit across the table as both examiner and gatekeeper. They make the rules and then applaud themselves for winning. And when we show up—despite it all—they call us “quota students,” question our capabilities, and dismiss our presence as unearned.
For generations, we never learned our art & skills in classrooms. No teacher stood at a blackboard to teach us to drum, sing, dance, paint, build homes, or to preserve our truth in folklore and stories. There were no syllabi, no certificates, no applause from academic spaces. We didn’t attend workshops. We learned by doing. By experimenting. By feeling the rhythm in our bodies, the texture in our hands, the wisdom in our communities. And yet, this creativity, this knowledge, this resilience, this skill—none of it is considered “merit.” Because the system only values what is approved by the oppressor castes.
And now—after generations of locking us out—the same oppressor Castes take our tests and declare us non-meritorious? They erased our histories, appropriated our culture, and still have the audacity to measure our worth using systems built to keep us out? If we could create, preserve, and pass on entire worlds of knowledge even without the assistance of schools, how can we ever be called non-meritorious?
Can someone who secures the highest rank in an agricultural exam—and whose family happens to own acres of land— can assert intellectual superiority over Dalit labourers whose embodied knowledge of soil, seasons, and survival has been passed down through generations of labour, real life understanding, and hardship? This question unsettles the very foundation of how we define knowledge, merit, and expertise in a caste society. This reveals the deep asymmetry in how knowledge is defined and who is authorised to produce it. We must ask whose perspective is institutionalised, whose intelligence is legitimised by state exams and degrees, and whose understanding is systematically excluded from the domain of “merit.”
Why is knowledge considered legitimate only when it is formalised and endorsed by oppressor-caste frameworks? Why is experiential knowledge—especially that of historically marginalised communities like Dalits—systematically excluded from what we recognise as “real” knowledge? Dalits have long been denied access to formal education, books, and scholarly spaces. What they know, they have learned through life itself—through exclusion, experience, labour, and survival. But this knowledge is seen as informal, lesser, and unworthy in all the spaces shaped by caste power. This is not a neutral system of merit. It rewards access, not understanding—and in doing so, it sustains a deeply casteist hierarchy of knowledge.
Why do we only measure intelligence in marks obtained in a written exam and language proficiency, but not in practical problem-solving? In the ability to adapt, create, and sustain under pressure? We’ve always been learning, surviving, and creating outside their institution. If we were given even half the resources they’ve had for generations—safe homes, stable incomes, academic mentorship, inclusive environments—we wouldn’t just match them in their exams, we’d outperform them. But these exams shouldn’t be centered around language proficiency, colonial syllabi, or rote memorization. True merit is ethical, relational, rational and transformative; it refuses to reproduce hierarchies and instead works to dismantle them.
The current definition of merit is dangerously narrow—shaped by the oppressor caste’s vision of success, built around dominant language fluency, elite institutional access, and comfort with standardised, text-heavy exams. It rewards those already privileged by the system and punishes those whom the system has historically excluded. Intelligence becomes measurable only through marks in written or multiple-choice exams, and fluency only through English or Hindi.
To truly democratise education & merit, we must not only expand how we assess students—we must transform how we teach them. Innovation in pedagogy is urgent. Multilingual teaching till class 5 that affirms students’ mother tongues can dismantle linguistic hierarchies and make it easier for the students to understand in the early stages of learning. Project-based and experiential learning can connect theory to real-world problem-solving, while visual and performance-based methods offer powerful ways of expressing understanding beyond written texts.
In subjects like maths and science, teaching must move away from rote memorisation and toward conceptual clarity through hands-on methods or visual methods. Use of local measurements, traditional knowledge systems, and tangible, real-life examples can bridge the gap between abstract ideas and students’ lived realities. For instance, teaching fractions through cooking, geometry through rangoli patterns or farming layouts, and physics through machines used in rural labour allows students to see that science and math already exist in their everyday lives. If going to real places and using real things is costly, it can be replaced by videos and presentations. Peer-based learning, games, interactive tools, and visual aids can support learning in young children. Scientific inquiry should be encouraged through curiosity, exploration, debates, and low-cost experiments—letting students build, test, and learn through doing.
Written exams must become just one part of a diverse, multimodal assessment system that values emotional intelligence, creativity, adaptability, and problem-solving in a range of situations—not just textbook scenarios, but in lived, everyday, and high-pressure contexts. Because when the method of evaluation changes, the meaning of intelligence changes too.
Education must also become emotionally and culturally relevant. Peer teaching and community-based projects give students room to think critically, collaborate, understand each other’s perspectives, and relate learning to their social contexts. Caste-sensitisation curriculum design—centering Dalit voices and histories—can directly confront epistemic exclusion and provide Dalit students with representation that affirms their identity and resistance. Representation of Dalits in curriculum framing, pedagogical research, teaching roles, and interview or assessment panels is essential—not just for equity, but for dismantling the caste biases embedded in every layer of the current system.
Dalit students do not lack merit—they are locked out of systems that refuse to see it unless it arrives in Oppressor caste approved forms. But if we design education that is flexible, inclusive, and anti-caste, their potential will not just be seen—it will redefine the very meaning of merit.
Refrences
Ambedkar, B. R. (2020). Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and speeches (Vol. 1, p. 66). Government of Maharashtra, Department of Education. (Original work published 1979)
National Council of Educational Research and Training. (2016). Syllabus for Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) programme (B. P. Bhardwaj, Programme Coordinator). Department of Teacher Education, NCERT.
Press Trust of India. (2023, September 7). Cloudbursts, landslides in Himachal happening because people eat meat: IIT Mandi Director. The Indian Express.
Tomar, S. (2025, April 29). MP scientists study whether “havan” can bring rain. Hindustan Times.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/mp-scientists-study-whether-havan-can-bring-rain-101745866502810.html
Raman, A. (2024, February 7). A faculty spat over quotas subtracts from JNU’s inclusive ethos. Outlook India. https://www.outlookindia.com/national/standard-deviation-news-265074
Express Web Desk. (2022, August 11). Scriptures like Manusmriti give respectable position to Indian women: Delhi HC judge. The Indian Express.
Press Trust of India. (2023, June 9). Gujarat HC judge cites Manusmriti in rape survivor’s abortion plea hearing. Business Standard.
https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/gujarat-hc-judge-sites-manusmriti-in-rape-survivor-s-abortion-plea-hearing-123060801069_1.html
~~~
Lokesh Bag is a Dalit writer and film critic with a postgraduate degree in Agricultural Entomology.
