Grasim Soni
I was in the admin office when I first saw it. There it was in all its glory, a letter of recommendation. Printed on crisp university letterhead, carefully worded and full of praise for her commitment to social justice issues and her work around caste and religion in South Asia. The candidate that is being described is a Savarna classmate who is applying to a prestigious university in Europe for her master’s. She also happens to be the same classmate who had once dismissed affirmative action as a shortcut, the same person who once argued that the Gujarat disturbed areas act should always exist because she wants to live in safe neighborhoods. And yet here she was, narrating our stories, our histories as though it was for her to claim. The letter didn’t lie exactly. It just told a very selective truth.
Unfortunately, this episode is not an isolated incident. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly, from fellowship applications to academic conferences, and even far beyond the university space; it plays out even in public storytelling. Only last week, I attended a screening of a film which was about a muslim teenager claiming space in the current socio-political climate. The director? An upper caste woman, who once again was able to use the language of marginalisation to further her career. The film has already been screened at international festivals. Stories of Dalit and Muslim struggles are packaged into palatable formats that travel well across borders and win applause.
The ability to articulate pain in academic application has become a social capital of sorts. You don’t need to survive religious profiling or caste discrimination to talk about it. Using appropriate words, citing the right scholars, and delivering outrage in measured tones does the trick. Savarna scholars are fluent in this language. Through their proximity to institutions, networks, and mentors who teach them how to frame marginality in ways that are legible and at the same time do not challenge the status quo. In contrast, those of us who have been subjected to religious profiling or been discriminated against for our caste are told that our work is too emotional, too biased. We are advised to be more objective and more academic in how we speak of our trauma. Our proximity to injustice is treated as a liability, while distance is mistaken for neutrality.
None of this is to say that Savarna or non-Muslim scholars must remain silent on issues of injustice. But there’s a crucial difference that lies between solidarity and appropriation, a difference that must be named clearly. It’s the same line that separates standing for a community from speaking over it, and amplifying someone’s voice from replacing it entirely.
What makes this whole pattern more insidious is the lack of self-reflection on the part of institutions. Western academic and policy institutions, in a bid to appear more inclusive, are often satisfied with surface-level representation. These institutions refuse to interrogate the caste or communal profile of the so-called diverse voices they platform. And so, while students belonging to marginalized classes are told to “clean up their grammar”, others are celebrated for narrating the same story, which are now more polished and safely distanced from the discomfort of lived experience.
This has nothing to do with gatekeeping and everything to do with ethics. To turn another community’s oppression into a professional asset, to build a resume on wounds that are not yours, is dishonest and wrong. It is unethical to seek recognition for a struggle you only discovered in your college readings, while at the same time ignoring the people who simply cannot afford this luxury of detachment. Consider how, within a single family over two generations, power sustains itself while trends shift. One generation benefited from practicing casteism and islamophobia, through housing discrimination and unchallenged dominance in public and private spaces. Comes the second generation, which benefits from writing and talking about how casteism and Islamophobia are wrong. Between these two generations, a lot has changed; practicing casteism is replaced with the more trendy performative anti caste solidarity. But one thing remains constant: the mic must remain in their hands. Whether it is your pain or emancipation, only they benefit.
At this point, I’m faced with the question, “What genuine allyship is supposed to look like?” For starters, it’s not supposed to be decorative; it carries with it a certain risk, it demands a conscious withdrawal from the centre stage. And above all, it requires humility. Humility to listen, to make space, and to know when to step back entirely.
Bell hooks in “eating the other” dissects the white patriarchal men’s consumption of “the other”, as an exotic spice to enhance an otherwise bland dominant culture. The Savarna appropriation of anti-caste discourse operates on a similar plane. They do not engage with caste oppression or islamophobia to dismantle it, but to expand their own intellectual palettes. They sample Dalit-Bahujans’ suffering as raw fodder for their thesis papers and letters of recommendation. Their solidarity is not a matter of survival; it is merely a fancy souvenir-collecting step, something they can cite on their resumes. “The Other” is not consumed for nourishment, but for novelty. The Savarna scholar similarly treats the marginalised’s experience. Using them as content to be mined and not as a call to redistribute power. At the end, the difference between an oppressor and a ‘progressive’ oppressor, after all, is just aesthetics. The teeth remain the same.
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Grasim Soni holds a BA LL.B. from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. His primary areas of interest are constitutional law and human rights. He is currently serving as a Law Clerk at the Bombay High Court.
