Caste has not disappeared at the gates of higher education. It enters the classroom, the hostel, the laboratory, the faculty room and, sometimes, even the vocabulary of merit.
featuredImageAccording to data, complaints of caste-based discrimination in universities and colleges rose from 173 in 2019-20 to 378 in 2023-24, covering reports from 704 universities and 1,553 colleges. Photo: XAdvertisement
There is something deeply unsettling about a society in which institutions meant to liberate individuals from the hierarchies of birth continue to reproduce those very hierarchies. Universities are expected to be spaces where reason challenges prejudice, where merit is cultivated rather than inherited, and where a young person’s possibilities are not determined by the circumstances of birth. Yet caste has not disappeared at the gates of higher education. It enters the classroom, the hostel, the laboratory, the faculty room and, sometimes, even the vocabulary of merit.
The uncomfortable question is no longer whether caste exists in our universities. It is why, despite constitutional guarantees, reservations and the expansion of educational opportunities, caste continues to shape the experience of learning, belonging and dignity. Perhaps literature helps us understand this better than institutional language or administrative data. In Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan, education is not a simple ladder of social mobility. The classroom itself becomes a site where caste announces its presence. The indignity of being made to perform menial work while others study reveals a fundamental contradiction: the institution expected to provide an escape from social hierarchy can reproduce the very order from which a student seeks liberation.
Caste does not merely prevent entry into education; it can determine the terms on which education is experienced. Bama’s Karukku complicates the assumption that education or social mobility automatically dissolves caste. Caste can survive beneath the language of equality, inhabiting relationships and institutions even when nobody is prepared to acknowledge its presence. For a Dalit student, admission to a university may represent the accumulated aspirations of a family and generations denied access to knowledge. But admission is only the beginning. What happens when the stigma attached to a caste surname travels with the student? When a scholarship is quietly treated as evidence of lesser merit? When discrimination is dismissed as oversensitivity, or when a complaint becomes a question of the student’s ability to adjust?
These are not merely questions of individual prejudice as they concern institutional culture. The language of merit becomes particularly important here. Merit is often presented as though it emerges in a social vacuum. But who has access to good schools, coaching, books, computers and the networks that make unfamiliar institutions easier to navigate? Who grows up with the confidence that failure is temporary because there is a social and economic cushion underneath? To acknowledge these inequalities is not to deny the importance of academic standards but it requires us to ask a more difficult question: can merit be understood without examining the unequal conditions in which it is produced, cultivated and demonstrated?
A university that refuses to ask this question risks mistaking inherited advantage for individual achievement. Indian literature has been asking these questions for decades. Daya Pawar’s Baluta exposes the social arrangements through which caste regulates dignity and dependence. Sharan Kumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi explores the psychological burden of being made to feel that one’s very existence is somehow illegitimate. Premchand’s Sadgati written in a different historical moment, continue to confront us with questions that modern India would prefer to regard as settled.
Who is entitled to dignity? Who is permitted to aspire? Who must repeatedly prove that they deserve a space that others inherit without question? Giriraj Kishor’s Parishisht brings these questions directly into the world of elite technical education. Set against the backdrop of a premier engineering institution at Kanpur, the novel exposes the persistence of caste beneath the vocabulary of modernity, scientific temper and meritocracy. Its Dalit students encounter not simply explicit prejudice but psychological violence, social isolation and institutional indifference.
The disturbing question at the heart of Parishisht remains relevant: can an institution call itself modern and meritocratic when caste influences who feels entitled to belong, who is made to feel like an outsider, and whose suffering remains invisible? The contemporary evidence makes it difficult to dismiss these literary accounts as merely historical or fictional concerns.
According to data reported by the University Grants Commission to a parliamentary committee, complaints of caste-based discrimination in universities and colleges rose from 173 in 2019–20 to 378 in 2023–24, covering reports from 704 universities and 1,553 colleges. These figures require careful interpretation. An increase in complaints could reflect more incidents, greater awareness, improved reporting, or some combination of these, though underreporting remains a concern. The real question is what happens after a student complains. A grievance mechanism that exists only on paper cannot protect anyone. Nor can the administrative disposal of a complaint be mistaken for justice. Deaths by suicide of Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad in 2016 and, more recently by Sahil Wakode at IIT Bombay have renewed concerns about the relationship between caste, institutional exclusion and the vulnerability of students from marginalised communities.
The circumstances of these deaths must be examined with care. In Sahil Wakode’s case, allegations of caste-based discrimination have been under investigation, while the institute has denied that such discrimination occurred. These distinctions matter, but they must not become an excuse to avoid the larger question: are our institutions adequately equipped to recognise and address the forms of humiliation, isolation and exclusion that students may experience? When a student is struggling, the institutional response cannot be limited to asking them to be patient, avoid confrontation and concentrate on their studies. The university must instead ask itself a more uncomfortable question: what conditions made a student feel that they did not belong here in the first place?
This is where institutional accountability becomes indispensable. When discrimination is alleged, the response cannot depend upon the reputation of the institution, the social standing of the accused or administrative convenience. A prestigious university does not become less responsible because acknowledging discrimination might damage its image. The higher an institution’s claim to excellence, the greater should be its responsibility to examine the social conditions under which that excellence is experienced.
Universities are not merely centres for producing degrees and professionals as they are also places where citizenship is learned, where equality and fraternity are either experienced or denied in everyday encounters. This is why B.R. Ambedkar remains indispensable to this conversation. He understood that political democracy could not remain secure if it rested upon deeply unequal social relations. The Constitution promises equality before the law, prohibits discrimination on specified grounds and abolishes untouchability. But constitutional morality cannot remain confined to the text of the Constitution. It must become an institutional practice.
For a university, constitutional morality should mean something concrete whereby a student must be able to enter a classroom without humiliation, participate without fear, seek redress without apprehension and pursue an aspiration without having to prove that their caste does not diminish their worth. There is a comforting belief that caste is gradually disappearing because India is modernising. The expansion of universities, professional education and urban life is sometimes offered as evidence of this transformation. But the works of Valmiki, Bama, Pawar, Limbale and Giriraj Kishor urge us to be more cautious. Caste does not necessarily disappear when institutions become modern. It can change its vocabulary, moving from overt exclusion to social isolation, from explicit insult to insinuation, from the denial of entry to the denial of belonging. A university’s commitment to equality cannot be measured merely by the number of students it admits from historically marginalised communities. It must also be measured by whether those students can learn, disagree, participate and aspire without fear of humiliation or exclusion.
The classroom is where the promise of the Constitution encounters the lived reality of Indian society. If caste continues to determine who belongs and who must struggle to be accepted, then the failure is not merely that of an individual institution. It is a failure to honour the constitutional promise of equality. And until we answer these questions honestly, the caste in the classroom will remain one of the most consequential unfinished tasks of Indian democracy.
Courtesy : The Tribune India
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