In the slums of Mumbai and a segregated Mahar quarter in rural Maharashtra during the 1940s and '50s, Daya Pawar recounts his own coming-of-age inside the daily cruelties of untouchability. First published in Marathi in 1978, this unflinching, self-scrutinizing autobiography is widely regarded as the work that opened the door for Dalit life-writing.
A person can seem fair-minded in a shared public space and then become rigidly bound by caste rules the moment they step into their own home. A teacher who showed no bias at school made low-caste pupils stand on his steps and handed them things so that not even a finger touched. Discrimination need not be a fixed trait; it can be a costume put on and taken off depending on the setting.
Exclusion often works through layout rather than open insult: where children sit, which way they face, where they may drink. Low-caste pupils sat at right angles to the others and had to walk back to their own settlement to get water. Whole neighbourhoods were placed apart from the main village so that the excluded would not 'pollute' it.
When someone with authority does wrong, the blame tends to fall on whoever lacks the standing to answer back. A theft by a superintendent's relative was pinned on the narrator's mother, and because the superintendent held power over them, neither could protest. Being unable to speak up is part of what makes a person a convenient scapegoat.
Remembering a humiliating past can feel like picking through garbage, and many would rather it stayed buried. But the past refuses to be erased, and the book argues that a person who does not know their past cannot direct their future. Honest memory, even of one's own failings and of power games within one's own group, is treated as a tool rather than a wound.
Moving from village to city offers new hopes, but the lines of caste do not vanish; they reappear in different forms. Even an educated self who tries to think past his origins is constantly interrupted by a self who can never move beyond them. Escape is so blocked that merely imagining an alternative becomes a radical act.