Who Are You, Really?
Before I entered the field, I had a methodological toolkit: a survey instrument, an interview guide, an ethics approval letter, a university ID card. What I did not have was an answer to a question no methods textbook prepared me for: should I tell people that I am Dalit?
India’s caste system is a birth-ascribed hierarchy in which Dalits, historically called untouchables and constitutionally designated Scheduled Castes, occupy the lowest social position, facing exclusion from land, education, and institutions across generations. Ambedkar described it as a system of “graded inequality”, in which each group is ranked above another, making collective solidarity against the whole structure extraordinarily difficult. For eight months, I conducted fieldwork with women beedi workers in Telangana, studying how labour welfare legislation reaches their lives. Beedi is a hand-rolled cigar made by wrapping tobacco in tendu leaf. For every cigarette smoked in India, roughly ten beedis are consumed, yet workers earn below the statutory minimum wage with limited access to the welfare entitlements the law promises.
The women I worked with came from different caste communities: Dalit women from Scheduled Caste backgrounds alongside women from Backward Class and Other Caste groups. For Dalit women, rolling beedis was often a matter of survival, their primary source of income with little else to fall back on. For dominant-caste women, it could supplement domestic life. The precarity was real but not equally distributed. Caste shaped every interaction: who spoke freely, who stayed guarded, and thus, whether to I decided name my own caste before I knocked on any door.
I chose to disclose, openly, each time. Some researchers navigating caste-hostile fieldwork have made the opposite choice. Rahul Choragudi, a Dalit ethnographer in a multi-caste village in Andhra Pradesh, assumed a different caste identity to gain access, a decision I understood even as I made a different one. Among Dalit women, disclosure opened things up; they recognised something of their histories in mine. Among dominant-caste women, it sometimes shut everything down. One woman stood and left mid-conversation when she learned my caste, taking the snacks and water she had offered minutes before. No explanation was needed. The withdrawal was the explanation, and following Ajay Choudhary’s insight that any remark from a participant, however harsh, is data, I treated it as exactly that.
This decision is not simply a practical calculation. It is an epistemic one. Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice identifies harm done to people in their capacity as knowers: the credibility deficit that follows marginalised people into every encounter regardless of expertise. When I calculated whether naming my identity would cost me access to knowledge, that was a live instance of testimonial injustice, my credibility contingent on concealing rather than asserting who I am.
Kristie Dotson’s work on epistemic oppression pushes this further, framing the problem not as a deficit in individual credibility but as a structural infringement on a marginalised knower’s epistemic agency — her ability to utilise shared epistemic resources and contribute to knowledge production at all. The burden on Dalit researchers to perform neutrality to enter spaces we are structurally excluded from is not a personal failing. It is the system operating as designed. Gopal Guru’s critique of Indian social science names this directly: social science is divided between theoretical brahmins and empirical shudras, with Dalit scholars pushed into empirical ghettoes while upper-caste academics build frameworks on data Dalit researchers collected. The labour is extracted; the credit is not shared. A growing body of anti-caste Dalit scholarship has documented this exhaustion, the weight of occupying knowledge spaces that welcome your data but not your analysis.
Drawing on Charles W. Mills, Zara Bain argues that dominant knowledge systems actively produce not-knowing in ways that serve existing power structures. Caste does exactly this. Sharmila Rege’s Dalit feminist standpoint insists that knowledge grounded in the lives and struggles of Dalit women is not a limitation to be managed but an epistemologically distinct resource, one that refuses relativism and stakes a claim to a more emancipatory account of social reality. As Shailaja Paik’s work on Dalit women reminds us, such burdens are rarely singular. Disclosure was not a vulnerability. It was a commitment to exactly that standpoint.
The asymmetry is the argument. A dominant-caste researcher in Telangana does not face this question because their caste is signalled passively through surname and institution, assumed legitimating from the outset. They enter fieldwork with identity as background noise. For me, it was always foreground. The question “who are you, really”, asked in Telugu with a probing cadence, was never curiosity. It was a demand to be placed within a hierarchy.
Concealment would have cost more than access. The withdrawals after disclosure were not data lost but data produced, evidence of how caste operates that concealment would have erased. Methods training that ignores this decision is not neutral. It is training calibrated for those who do not carry this burden, and for those of us who do, the disclosure question arrives before the first interview, before the first survey, before the first morning in the field. It is the first methodological choice we make. And it is one we make alone.
About the Author
Madhuri Kamtam
Research Associate, University of East Anglia
Dr. Madhuri Kamtam is a Research Associate at the University of East Anglia and a Yale University Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) fellow. Her research explores labour, gender, caste and welfare through an intersectional feminist lens.