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 law had intervened where desire had not? 

As trainees, we read extensively about how privileged therapists should work with marginalised patients but not the other way around. The lack of literature on how caste dynamics play out in the psychoanalytic clinical space creates a form of erasure of such experiences in the clinic. Without a language to comprehend these experiences, they remain difficult to recognise or think about. What does it do to us when we are presumed to be from a certain privilege by both underprivileged and privileged patients? How does our sense of marginalisation interact with the privileged “expert/educated” position we hold as therapists in the clinic or the field? Psychotherapy in India remains largely accessible to the upper caste, upper- and middle-class populations, a reality I now encounter daily in my private practice. Yet the training had little language for this reversal of the presumed analytic scene and its many variations. I began to sense that psychoanalysis in India, with its centenary legacy of inscriptions, has made little room for people like us. 

But this was not my first experience of caste. My mother never failed to distinguish herself from my father in terms of sub-caste, even though both came from the same caste. My mother’s lineage is rooted in the soil, in farming and landownership, while my father’s side comes from a lineage of nomadic singers. One side bound to settlement while the other of unbounded movement. Her family, she would say, was more educated, more cultured. My father’s side was deemed uncultured. There were hints of sexual promiscuity and lack of morality on his side, spoken of as if it were a consequence of their caste location. 

As a child, I was close to my mother. My mother’s narrative made me her mirror—her temperament, skin colour, ethics. My bond with my father existed mostly through music, a space from which my mother felt excluded. Even when she tried to participate, it felt as if she didn’t know how to enter the flow of melodic emotions. Music, my father would say, runs in our blood. I learned music early, sang from childhood, and for a long time it was my primary language for emotional expression, especially for feelings that were heavy, amorphous, or inarticulable. During my adolescence, when I began to form friendships with boys, my mother once said, “Maybe people who love music are also loose in their character.” It struck me like a poisonous dart. I left home, first for a science institute, then for a social science university. Music receded slowly and my singing almost vanished as I entered the world of psychoanalysis. Unlike singing, I cannot say writing is in my blood. Speaking emotions into words has only come through my entry into psychoanalysis and humanities as a discipline in recent years. I chose psychoanalysis—a discipline that demands verbalisation and articulation—in contrast to the non-verbal, flowing melodies that had once held me.

While the MPhil cohort eventually became a space where caste could be named and spoken about, the clinic did not. In my personal therapy with an upper-caste/class therapist, I drowned in silence and wordlessness. My country was increasingly gripped by a communally charged political atmosphere marked by growing violence and atrocities against both the Dalits and non-Hindu communities like Muslims and Christians. My experiences in the context of my socioeconomic status and the political upheavals of my country were repeatedly interpreted in terms of intra-psychic conflict or familial dynamics. Gradually, my therapist’s responses became more theoretical, more supervisory. She began commenting on my clinical work—“This is how we do it.” She made casual remarks about me wearing the same T-shirt every week. During the Covid pandemic, our sessions shifted to online mode. The lack of privacy I felt in my tiny apartment was interpreted as my psychic inability to keep my partner outside the clinical space rather than my economic reality. Her interpretations lodged themselves in me like indigestible chunks— intrusive, vaguely transgressive. But I had no concrete idea then what was really happening. I couldn’t think about caste or class, so I became more and more stifled by silence during the sessions.

My silence was interpreted as anger and hatred toward the therapist, but instead of being explored, it seemed to meet with a refusal to contain. Like a parent, she knew how to live and how to work, what to do with emotions, and I was expected to adapt and follow. Correction and advice were offered as care. It felt as if she couldn’t bear to touch what in me remained unpolished and unspeakable. My therapist’s caste/class blindness wrapped in neutrality felt strangely similar to my mother’s need for cultural refinement, as if both of them carried an unthought inheritance from their respective social positions. 

I tried to write to her about how my subjective experiences felt erased by theoretical distance and personal intrusion, how she had positioned herself as an elder sister—didi—but even before I had, she terminated our therapy over email. It felt like we had reached a limit of what the analytic frame could recognise without unsettling its own ideals. That limit, I came to realise, was not just theoretical but historically and socially organised. The psychic determinism in Indian psychoanalysis has been modelled on upper-caste Hindus serving as the ego-ideal. I later found echoes of this erasure in the writing of Black psychoanalysts. Wyche (2012) writes, 

Indeed, once my analysis got going, I did mention issues that had definitive racial concerns for me. However I felt that my concern was never recognized and it was invariably seen as a developmental, familial, or even symbolic issue. (p. 330)

With a new therapist, male, also upper-caste, I was finally able to begin speaking about caste and class directly. It was here that I realised my first experience of caste and untouchability had come through my relationship with my mother. When we revisited memories of music sessions with my father, it helped me elaborate on the nature of this discomfort. I recalled how uncomfortable I had felt when my mother sat in on them and tried to articulate it as “Music evokes a sense of boundlessness, an intangible connection.” My therapist’s slip of hearing turned “intangible” into “untouchable.” The image came back as my mother sitting slightly above us, looking down with a piercing gaze . . . I did not want that gaze to touch me. It felt as though she did not want to be touched by the flow either.

I am rooted in her and she is rooted in me. My mother’s gaze had always reached deeper and lingered longer—onto my skin, my expressions, or even inside my mind. I armoured up very early in my life. I wanted her markings on me to fail or at least be invisible. On one hand, she berated my father’s lack of aspirations. On the other hand, when I didn’t get good grades in high school exams, she consoled me, “In our kind of family, this is more than enough.” 

As I began formulating my thesis, I also began to encounter and verbalise the internalisation of stereotypes attributed to my caste. I doubted whether the Dalit writings I was drawn to were worthy of research, whether I had it in me to produce something significant. I watched upper-caste peers tormented by the fear of not meeting inherited standards. Where I come from, there are no standards to inherit. Writing became punctuated by long periods of blankness.

As Dalits, my parents could not dream expansively outside the mainstream careers that promise stability and upward mobility. When I was accepted into a premier institution outside my home state, my joy was immediately met by my mother’s terror—of me leaving, unprotected (me or her?). Perhaps there was an absence of imagination in the absence of a precedent to follow. I cannot imagine failure and I cannot imagine success. If who I am is inseparable from where I belong, then where I belong was rendered unspeakable for a very long time.

My mind falters to produce words. My experience of caste is the experience of absence—of dreams, aspirations, legacies, possibilities, role models. Caste, profession, relationship, emotion, and touch are threaded into an invisible knot I’m still trying to unravel. Carrying my mother’s aspiration to reach higher alongside the internalised social limits of who can rise, who can verbalise, I search for a surface to write. Freud (1925) imagined the psyche as a mystic writing pad where traces of inscriptions remain in deeper layers even as they are overwritten by new markings on the surface. On the surface of the social, the more powerful continually overwrites the less powerful, consciously and unconsciously. The less powerful are treated as though they should themselves remain erasable. To write from the margin, then, is to insist as traces against a surface that continues to resist.

¹ In Hindu mythologies, Chitragupta is seen as a man sitting with paper and pen, counting the sins and good deeds of every dead man to provide entry into the hell of Yama (the king of Hell, God of Death).