A Tale of a Bahujan Doctor

I am Dr. Rahul from Maulana Azad Medical College.

This is an anthology of my personal loss, love, and hope in my time in a medical college.

I had stolen a chair from the front gate of my hostel and had gone to Gandhi Market to buy a rope a day before. I remember it was the morning of 4th September 2017. I stepped on the chair, I was anxious and was out of breath because I was not able to go through this system anymore and was also unable to pay my fees. I did not know anymore how could I rub the title of ‘Bahujan Doctor’ from my forehead. 

One thing that people don’t talk about in this city culture is the privilege culture. A lot of people think that casteism is a phenomenon that has to be seen or heard in actuality it is intrinsically weaved in our socio-economic structure that everyday slurs become common and easy privileges. The Savarna privilege and the uppermost of it called the Brahmanical privilege is also in the saying of some teachers who do not appear overtly casteist but get away with saying things like ‘we do not see any caste.’ I think a lot of people in medical colleges go through a very difficult time because how intense our lifestyle suddenly gets but we forget the fact that most of the time even in the final years are spent assisting senior doctors and teachers who make you feel ‘who you are’ telling you that is ‘what you only are.’ Right from the allocation of roll no. in medical College to acquiring provisional certificate, there is casteism seeped into the system. The method of allocation of roll no. ensures segregation of backward students from the forward students and a thorough undermining of abilities of the former. The number of failed student each semester have a disproportionate abundance of those students with reservation, students with surname vouching for their affluent identities are protected. Teachers are overtly casteist and conspicuous favouritism is rampant. College life presents its own challenges in the form of bullying and caste references, domicile slurs making it more difficult to assimilate into a new city culture as support systems of similar circles begin to weaken.

I am not saying that a Savarna person can understand what a Bahujan and Dalit cannot as we often forget that within the community I belong to, my maternal family is casteist too even when they are Bahujans themselves. Within Medical colleges too when you are categorised on the basis of your roll numbers in the very beginning, similar circles do begin to bond together but you feel suicidal when the support system who is supposed to understand the system also begins to seep in the very same thing of classification of within the Bahujan and the Dalits. Strangely then conversations of caste begin to be understood as not just black and white, who is at the uppermost triangle of ‘non-savarna’ circles can also be dominant. The second thing about these people is that they slowly become the perpetrators of the same thing that they are fundamentally against, that is, ‘exclusion’. They do not want to hear out a Savarna’s explanation, understanding, or apology. I am not saying that the Bahujans and Dalits are waiting for Brahmanical explanation of things on their literature or philosophy yet I saw that some Savarns helped me out when I wanted to end my life, a woman who would later go on to work with Bezwada Wilson. Pragya Akhilesh of the NaatyaVaas movement supported me and paid my entire college fees and introduced me to the people of NCDHR and Safai Karmachari Andolan.  

In August 2017 I Joined Lok Theatre’s one of the Rehabilitation Centres in Kashmere Gate. In 2020, I joined one of the centres of Safai Karmachari Andolan. I learned that conversations of caste are not so simple because caste dialogues exclude the people we fundamentally want to educate. Most of the Savarnas are casteist in their everyday life because they do not realise that ‘they have grown irrespective of caste’ They also do not understand Bahujan or Dalit literature or philosophy because they are simply not around many Bahujans and Dalits. The real receipt of a Savarna person not being casteist is also about how many people of different caste are his friends in his everyday life. In medical Colleges too our teachers ‘who do not see caste’ seem to not have many Bahujan and Dalit friends and now similarly my Bahujan and Dalit friends do not seem to have many Savarna friends.

Jai Bhim

Dr. Rahul kumar can be reached at the following email. [email protected]>