When I Hid My Caste

When I Hid My Caste collects short fiction by Baburao Bagul, whose 1963 collection Jevha Mi Jat Chorali Hoti (the Marathi original this book draws from) is considered a foundational text of Dalit literature. Bagul, born into a Dalit family in Maharashtra, wrote with a rawness and formal daring that departed sharply from the polite, upper-caste literary norms of his time.

The stories translated here by Jerry Pinto center on the lives of Dalit and other marginalized characters navigating caste discrimination, urban poverty, and violence in the years after Indian independence, when the promise of constitutional equality collided with the persistence of caste hierarchy in everyday life. Bagul's prose is unsentimental and often confrontational, refusing the redemptive arcs common to social-reform fiction of the era.

Pinto's translation, part of a broader effort to bring canonical Dalit writers to English-language readers, restores Bagul's reputation as a major figure in Indian literature whose influence extended into the Dalit Panther movement of the 1970s.