This write up is not a review of Dalit comedian Manjeet Sarkar’s one-hour-long special ‘Let’s talk about caste’. Rather, it's an open letter to Manjeet. To the man of the moment, a moment that we the Savarnas choose not to talk about, collectively. This letter explains why.
At a time when it's increasingly fashionable to punch up, and to punch at, the current regime for their communal-flavoured politics, how dare you, Manjeet, talk about us? We, the liberals and progressives, buy your tickets, make your shows housefull, and then you arrive to crack jokes on the Left? Really? You know how difficult it is to be a Lefty Savarna today? To exist in a state of sublime weightlessness, a curated lightness, a buoyancy so refined that transcends gravity itself? The Savarna being’s existential dilemma is not ‘To be or not to be?’ but ‘To appear or not to appear?’ — to appear progressive, that is. After all, what is privilege if not the luxury of treating oppression in abstraction, like a vintage wine to be sipped and analysed alongside eating, as you would suggest, those tiny burgers aka sliders?
You come and take a shot at everything we thought we built, and you think it is cool? Yes, we talk about equal pay with our coffee machines working and air conditioning on, so what? You think it's easy here inside India’s first world? Just because you are India’s first Dalit comedian, you think you have the right to turn the table and question our political sincerity? You know how many times we collectively watched Varun Grover’s three-minute long video in just about 10 days? Around 9 lakh times. And you uploaded your stand up more than a month back and received what? Some 50,000 odd views? And you think you are killing it?
Before you hurl any more mud at us, let us tell you: you are not cool. What do you even know about our struggles?
Picture, if you will, our daily plight. In a world where WiFi signals waver as we try to retweet our favourite woke comrade comedian’s videos, our artisanal coffee goes lukewarm. We wake up in homes our grandparents built on land their great-grandparents ‘acquired’, and wonder why education, once a cosy club of inherited merit, now feels like a warzone. And yet, we can’t talk about our reservations about reservation, at least not in public. Imagine how painful it is for us to perform this roleplay?
So what if we eat sliders while debating the nuances of fascism and the fascistic? We know the jargon, and therefore we exist. Since when, exactly, did knowing the right terms become a sin? Our knowledge of the world, after all, is accumulated through the hard work of inheriting a bookshelf full of white European authors (and some Bengali scholars of subaltern studies, too). We are allies, you see — as long as allyship doesn’t require sharing of land, or that bookshelf. Do not isolate yourself by alienating us from the struggle towards social justice. We are in this together.
Anyway, let’s not dwell on the trivialities of land and literature. Let’s talk about your audacity, Manjeet. How dare you reduce our centuries of refined, subliminal caste stewardship to mere jokes? We allowed you an entry through the invisible back door to our dinner parties, and yet, you could not feel our angst when we whispered, “We must do better”? Do you know how exhausting it is to maintain this veneer of wokeness?
And we reiterate — your insistence on “punching up” at us, instead of targeting the right-wing ecosystem, is deeply problematic. You may not have heard, but even in this capitalist system, we have ensured we do diversity workshops in our glitzy office spaces where we reflect on gender and race. Oh, now you will say caste is the primary axis of oppression in India, why not talk about caste? Well, progress takes time, Manjeet. Not all of us can afford to be a ‘revolutionary' like you, charging into battle with punchlines instead of patience. Be patient, man! Caste toh dheerey dheerey theek ho jayega.
And for once, let’s talk about your ‘comedy’, Manjeet. Do you think it’s easy to laugh at your jokes while calculating how they might implicate us? Take your bit about Savarnas feeling restricted with no internal freedom — you think that's a joke? And we have to awkwardly chuckle while side-eyeing our friends to see if they’re side-eyeing us? If that's not a deliberate insult to our progressivism, we really don’t know what it is.
And must you be so relentless? We allowed you to upload one special, one hour of talking about caste, and you make fun of our need for trigger warnings? So yes, if we are uncomfortable talking about your stand-up special, that's on you. Yes, we are so uncomfortable in the first 15 minutes itself, that our therapists – bless their Savarna souls – are overworked from helping us process your ‘lived experience’. Do you know how much it costs to unlearn supremacy in times of inflation?
Oh and if you think you are too cool to be touched, fear not. For every Dalit in the spotlight, there exists a hundred liberal Bhadraloks, with 80 of them being either a Chatterjee, Banerjee, Mukherjee, Ganguly or Bhattacharya. They will touch upon you in their PhD thesis pursued in Oxbridge. Or whatever subaltern studies department they are part of. So yes, we will talk about you in our peer-reviewed articles (but for once, give us a break and don’t ask who these peers are). Remember, we think, therefore you exist. We are the theoretical Savarnas, and you are nothing but an empirical fly on our collective feed. Want an example? Read the abstract below.
This paper situates the performative utterances of Manjeet Sarkar – a self-identified Dalit comedian – within the fraught dialectics of subaltern agency and Savarna epistemic hegemony. Deploying an interdisciplinary framework of critical caste theory, postcolonial humour studies, and the ontological turn in stand-up analytics, we interrogate how Sarkar’s 'caste comedy' destabilises, yet paradoxically reifies, the Brahminical sensorium through its liminal performativity. By engaging in what we term dialogic transgression, Sarkar’s humour operates as a counter-public sphere, albeit one that risks spectralisation by the very structures it seeks to dismantle. Methodologically, we employ ethnographic hermeneutics to decode Sarkar’s 'punchlines' as textual sites of subaltern resistance, while critically examining the neoliberal logics that commodify his dissent as 'edutainment' for privileged audiences. Our analyses reveal that Sarkar’s comedy, while ostensibly 'punching up', inadvertently sustains the Brahminical gaze by necessitating Savarna interlocutors to curate its radical potential. We conclude that Sarkar’s work, though framed as 'subaltern speech', is ultimately overdetermined by the Savarna academic-industrial complex, which metabolises his critique into tenure-track publications like this one. This research contributes to ongoing debates in Subaltern Studies by asking not Can the Subaltern Speak? but Can the Subaltern Shut Up?”
So yes. If we are not talking about you, that's because you are guilty of being the first Dalit comedian who tries to unsettle the liberals by his Dalitness. No wonder why, you will be the first Bengali who made it to the national stage, but was never claimed by the Bengalis. You will die before you are actually dead, in the collective willful amnesia of the Bhadralok. So please, get off the mic and give it up. We need our favourite woke comedians back on our feed. If you can’t respect the unbearable lightness of the Savarna progressive beings, get off our newsfeed, Manjeet. Your time is up.
Tamoghna Halder is an Assistant Professor (Economics) in the School of Arts and Sciences, at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.
Views expressed are the author's own.