Overwriting Caste: From the Margins of the Mystic Writing Pad

THE MORE I RISE ALONG THE LADDERS OF education and social justice policy, the more I meet those who seem to lean on something I lack; not only a socioeconomic advantage, but a spiritual inheritance that secures their presence.

I feel this most sharply in academic spaces where presence itself can feel provisional. During my master's degree program, I witnessed a conversation between my teacher and another student about their closeness to knowledge and death due to their caste origin as the descendants of Chitragupta1. The caste structure of India was such that Dalits were excluded from access to knowledge, especially textual, written knowledge that was believed to be the domain of the upper castes. In that moment, knowledge appeared not as something one learned, but as something one descended from. The colonisation of knowledge by the upper castes might be a contested reality of Indian history but is an undying fantasy from ancient times until now, as seen in anti-reservation narratives and caste-based discrimination in academic institutions, government, and corporate

workplaces. It was from such a place that I entered my training in psychoanalysis with the persistent doubt—whether I am meant to be here at all.

During the selection process of the MPhil program, some leaked official documents circulated on WhatsApp groups made us aware that there was only one general category seat in the program that year. The government had made it mandatory to fill all reserved seats after they had remained vacant since the beginning of the program. Soon, doubt settled at the root of the constitution of our cohort. In the previous batches, had no one from the reserved category deserved the seats or were they denied entry? Were we here because we deserved to be here or because the l