Eating potato for dinner
We often hear someone who wants to show that he is "casteless" exclaim, " I never see caste! I bring all my friends, even my lower caste friends, home and share my food with them!" Besides this statement being pretentious, duplicitous and condescending, the casteism in the statement can be accentuated by an unsaid line in this. Instead if we ask him whether he had ever partaken food of his Dalit friend at his friends home, he would be exposed for his hypocrisy. This is always about "his/her" food. Not about the food of the lower caste / Dalit ‘friend' being shared. It never is. This book is journey born out of a workshop of an open class course work of a bunch of students from Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Center, University of Pune. The course opened up with the readings of Jhotiba Phule, Ambedkar and Periyar on empowering women and moved on to a workshop on caste and feminism. This workshop which opened as an earnest effort to unders