From Visible Untouchability to the Caste Closet: Caste Legibility, Passing, and Dalit Self-Fashioning in Omprakash Valmiki and Yashica Dutt

Abstract

This article compares Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan and Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit through the concept of caste legibility: the social codes by which caste is read from space, surname, body, language, education, and institutional status. Existing scholarship has examined Valmiki’s everyday caste oppression and Dutt’s “closet Dalithood,” but the relation between visible untouchability and modern caste passing is often narrated as a historical progression. This paper argues instead that the two memoirs expose flexible regimes of recognition. Valmiki records coerced legibility, yet also moments when mobility makes caste temporarily unreadable; Dutt records strategic opacity, yet shows how complexion, family history, English, and reservation can restore caste visibility. Passing therefore does not signal caste’s disappearance. It reveals the continuing material risk of being correctly read. Dalit autobiography becomes a form of counter-legibility that reclaims disclosure from caste society and turns stigma into political interpretation.