It is a common claim made in India that caste-based discrimination no longer prevails in society. If it does prevail, then it takes place in rural areas, among “uneducated” people, or in the past, which India has moved beyond.
This claim sounds very comforting. It allows educational institutions, municipalities, and middle-class households to envision themselves as devoid of caste distinctions. It enables individuals to discuss merit without addressing exclusion. It allows classrooms to seem impartial, hostels to seem ordinary, and public institutions to appear fair.
However, the lives of Dalit people keep disturbing this comfort.
Caste: Nowhere and Everywhere All at Once
A child drinking water. A woman cooking food. A groom riding out on his ghudchadhi, the ceremonial wedding procession on horseback. A student walking into a classroom. Again and again, routine activities become caste issues.
Routine activities are caste issues.
The handpump is not an antique of an earlier India. In May 2026 in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, a sixteen-year-old Dalit boy was allegedly beaten up by upper-caste males for drinking water from a public handpump and touching a bucket, on the allegation that he had “polluted” it. In the same state’s Bundelkhand region, reports in 2026 depicted Dalit families in Chitrakoot being kept away from handpumps, borewells, and water tankers intended for upper-caste houses, as scarcity transformed water into yet another caste line.
A child at a handpump should be a normal sight. Here too, it becomes a question of caste.
Nine-year-old Indra Kumar Meghwal, a Dalit child, in Rajasthan’s Jalore district died in 2022 after allegedly being beaten up by his teacher. As per The Indian Express story, the FIR said the boy drank water from a pot that was kept separately for the upper-caste teacher who allegedly abused him with casteist remarks and assaulted him. Some elements of the case were later contested, but the claim lodged itself in the public memory because it touched on something painfully familiar: even water could be guarded by caste.
In Odisha’s Kendrapara district, an Anganwadi centre in Nuagaon village was almost deserted for nearly three months after a Dalit woman, Sharmistha Sethy, was appointed as helper-cum-cook in November 2025. Many upper caste families refused to send their children or to take food supplied through the centre. The boycott ended in February 2026, following repeated intervention by the district administration and state commissions — officials, police and local representatives visited the community to hold conversations — where children came and ate meals she had made.
Here, caste did not emerge as an ancient custom buried in the distant past. It infiltrated an Anganwadi centre, disrupted learning in preschool, and made food into a site of social exclusion.
Every other day, there are stories of Dalit grooms being beaten, halted, or forced to seek police protection for taking out the ghudchadhi — the groom’s ceremonial ride on horseback during a wedding. In April 2026, various news agencies reported that a Dalit groom, Golu Ahirwar, was allegedly dragged off a horse and abused in his wedding procession in Madhya Pradesh’s Damoh district. His family reported the assailants made casteist comments that such a procession was “not for people like us.” Such reports have come from Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh throughout the years. The ghudchadhi is meant to be a symbol of celebration. In these situations, it becomes a question of who is allowed to be seen in public with dignity.
These occurrences are not isolated moral failures. They serve as reminders of a societal structure that continues to instruct Dalit individuals on assessing risk in everyday life. Can I drink from here? Can I sit here? Can I eat this? Can I take out my ghudchadhi? Can I enter this classroom without being reduced to my caste?
The denial of caste persists partially because many people do not perceive caste as a harm. They view it as family, marriage, community, surname, ritual, dietary habit, neighbourhood, or “tradition.”
For those protected by caste, caste may feel invisible. For those who suffer its effects, caste is often painfully obvious.
This discrepancy is evident in the survey results. A 2021 Pew Research Center study found that the majority of Indians do not perceive “a lot” of caste discrimination in the country; only 20% asserted that Scheduled Castes experience considerable discrimination. However, the same study indicated that caste divisions persist: a significant number of Indians reported that their close friends predominantly belong to their own caste, and a substantial majority expressed the importance of prohibiting inter-caste marriage.
A different survey presents an even more pronounced narrative. The India Human Development Survey, conducted in 2011–12 and released by NCAER, found that 27% of participants acknowledged engaging in some type of untouchability. Among Brahmin respondents, the figure was 52%; among non-Brahmin forward caste respondents, it was 24%; and among OBC respondents, it was 33%.
This is the clearest contradiction: caste discrimination is publicly denied, yet caste practices are acknowledged within the domestic sphere.
Official crime figures likewise deny the comfort of denial. According to NCRB’s Crime in India 2023, 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes were registered in 2023. Uttar Pradesh recorded the largest number followed by Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. These are recorded cases; they do not take into account every insult, exclusion, threat, humiliation or silence that never becomes an FIR.
But to know caste simply through spectacular violence is not to know how it functions in the everyday. Caste isn’t always an assault. Sometimes it’s a seating arrangement. Sometimes it is a separate piece of cutlery. Sometimes it’s a surname asked with too much interest. Sometimes it is the tone of a teacher, the vibe of a hostel room, a WhatsApp group, a delay in a fellowship, a mistrust of a supervisor, a joke on reservation.
This is where the village handpump meets the university classroom.
The Equalizing Force of Education Versus Exclusion in Classroom
Education is often imagined as the opposite of caste. We want to believe that schools and universities save people from inherited inequity. Education has been in many ways a place of Dalit assertion, mobility and imagination. Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule, B.R. Ambedkar and generations of anti-caste theorists have seen education as a route to dignity and social reform.
But simply because the settings are classified as modern does not mean that they are automatically fair. Caste enters into these settings through individuals, practices, organisational cultures, and unstated presumptions about who “belongs”.
This has been something that various scholars have been talking about for a long while now. For example, Arvind Kumar Mishra has worked on caste humiliation, social exclusion and how the classroom shapes learning for marginalised students. Similarly, Yashpal Jogdand has written on caste humiliation and the Indian classroom; his writing speaks volumes about the process of learning shaped by the feeling of shame. Sukhadeo Thorat has documented how caste discrimination and exclusion function in education, from admission to day-to-day campus life.
The language varies in such work but the concern is the same: caste does not stay outside the classroom. It resides within it.
A Dalit student at a university may have to carry more than just books. They may carry the apprehension of being perceived as a “quota student” – unworthy and unwelcome, the burden of representing an entire community, the recollection of prior humiliation, and the threat that a single error can be interpreted not as a personal misstep but as evidence of the whole caste’s incompetence. This represents the psychological burden of caste in education.
Here a minor psychology theory helps out: stereotype threat. In a nutshell, stereotype threat is the knowledge that one’s group is negatively stereotyped, and the mere awareness of that creates pressure. A Dalit student who is aware of others’ doubts about their merit, may bring the extra burden of one’s caste awareness and consequently mental stress into an exam, a classroom debate, or an interview; in attempts to reject the stereotype, the stress makes him further validate it. The problem is not the mind of the students. The fault is the social context that makes the student feel watched, judged, and diminished.
But stereotype threat is only part of the story. The bigger reality is humiliation. Humiliation is not merely a hurt feeling. It is the feeling of being told your position, and being reduced to it.
Caste humiliation reminds Dalit people that their dignity is conditional: drink, but not from this pot; study, but don’t speak too confidently; enter the university, but remember you came through reservation; celebrate, but do not take out your ghudchadhi.
That is why incidents outside the college have relevance for students inside the campus. Dalit students are not anonymous in the classroom setting. They are entering the classroom with a background, with news headlines, with family stories, and with knowledge, and they know how things are handled when Dalits cross the hidden lines of caste.
Alleged beating of the child for drinking water, boycott of the food prepared by the Dalit woman, and the alleged assault on a groom during his ghudchadhi, all carry a message beyond the immediate victims. They show society where the boundaries of caste are still being defended.
Unquestioned Privilege and Invisible Pain
These situations can lead to a state of alertness for Dalit students. You learn how to read people and situations. You know when it is appropriate or not to reveal your caste identity. You become aware of which questions are innocent and which ones can be damaging. In colleges this alertness is draining. This affects confidence, engagement, relationships, mental well-being, and academic performance.
That is precisely the reason why discussion on mental health in India cannot be separated from discussions on caste. If a Dalit student feels alienated in university, it is not just sufficient to discuss the issue of individual resilience. It is important to know how classroom alienation takes place. What kind of hostels foster isolation? What kind of academic culture turns help into charity? What is the definition of merit that makes some students always feel accused?
Caste privilege is sometimes hidden in the rhetoric of “merit”. Most students carry many forms of privilege, including educated parents, stable homes, caste support systems, English-medium schools, comfort in public spaces, and feeling like they simply belong. However, these privileges usually go unacknowledged. When Dalit students arrive via constitutional protections, their presence is usually considered an act of courtesy rather than justice.
This is one of the cruellest tricks of caste in education: it makes privilege seem natural, and support seem undeserved.
It is not the case that laws have not been passed in India. The practice of untouchability has been abolished through the Constitution of India. The SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act exists. The system of reservations is followed. Fellowships exist. Committees exist.
Despite this, caste continues to exist through the difference between what is written in law and what actually happens. It thrives in decisions regarding who is permitted to enter the kitchen, who is permitted to eat one’s food, whose wedding procession is permitted to pass along the village road.
So, the question is not just whether discrimination on the basis of caste exists. The question is why so many people can keep on saying that it does not.
Perhaps caste is denied because seeing it would require change. It would mean dominating groups would have to look at their homes, their marriages, their friendships, their classrooms, their institutions. It would mean universities would have to stop viewing Dalit pain as an exception. It would need mental health specialists to view caste not as demographic facts but as a living architecture that shapes threat, shame, dignity and aspiration.
The caste we refuse to see was never invisible to those who suffer it. It is visible at the handpump. It is visible in the Anganwadi. It is visible at the wedding procession. It is visible in the classroom. The fatigue of students is evident as they are again and again required to prove their entitlement to their positions.
The real question is whether the rest of India is also prepared to see it that way.
Ankit Prakash
Dr. Ankit Prakash is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi. His teaching and research interests include social psychology, community psychology, caste, mental health, and higher education. His work examines the psychological consequences of structural inequalities, with a particular focus on caste-based discrimination, stereotype threat, and educational inclusion in contemporary India.