When a young woman from rural India, from a marginalised community, was accepted into a prestigious postgraduate programme abroad, it should have been a moment of triumph. Instead, it marked the beginning of a new struggle; not just against financial barriers, but against casteist notions of merit, conditional solidarity, and the gatekeeping embedded even within anti-caste spaces.
This writing is a reflection that emerges from a crowdfunding campaign for a first-generation learner from a rural, oppressed caste background pursuing a postgraduate degree abroad—a journey mirroring Ambedkar’s own a century ago. Her aspiration is an act of resistance, but the barriers she faces reveal how caste and Brahmanical neoliberalism distort India’s equality promise.
To fundraise or not?
From the outset, we grappled with a difficult question: should we turn to public fundraising at all? The student was already burdened with educational loans. To accumulate further debt would have risked pushing her into a prolonged cycle of repayment and psychological strain. Yet, seeking financial help through crowdfunding came with the violence of making her needs legible within the dominant frameworks of victimhood and suffering.
The woman’s ‘success or failure’ in this academic pursuit, again within limiting evaluation structures, was not simply her own; it was shaped by systemic inequities that continue to haunt first-generation learners from marginalised communities. In this spirit of collective responsibility and political consciousness, we approached the community as a form of solidarity.
While crowdfunding can be critiqued for commodifying the emotional and intellectual labour of Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi (DBA) individuals to generate sympathy or visibility, we wondered: could we reimagine this process not as an extraction but as an appeal to shared responsibility—without reducing our struggle to poverty porn or our suffering to a spectacle?
Meritocracy of merit
After settling on this decision, new dilemmas emerged. Some individuals, including those who identify as allies of the anti-caste movement and even some with lived experience of caste marginalisation, expressed discomfort with or outright dismissed crowdfunding as a method essentially lacking praxis. Their critique often centred on concerns about merit or the perceived genuineness of such appeals.
Beneath this lay a deeper belief in the Brahmanical myth of merit—the assumption that truly ‘meritorious’ students would naturally secure prestigious scholarships without having to resort to public fundraising. However, this assumption is both dangerous and dishonest. It obscures the layered inequities shaping what we call academic excellence.
For many students from DBA communities, the pursuit of academic merit is often interrupted by structural challenges—unstable schooling, financial precarity, domestic responsibilities, and mental health burdens caused by discrimination and systemic violence. Academic excellence, in casteist India, is not a mere measure of effort but of access.
Who gets to dream?
Scholarships such as Chevening and Commonwealth (funded by the UK government), along with targeted scholarships for Indian students like Inlaks and Felix, often present themselves as progressive tools for mobility and decolonial engagement. However, they continue to reward exceptionalism, which is directly proportional to privilege. Access to English medium education, polished personal statements, international exposure, and cultural capital are rarely just individual achievements.
For these reasons, these scholarship cohorts, though open to all, often appear predominantly homogenous—urban, upper-caste, English-speaking, and elite-educated. In contrast, crowdfunding disrupts this formula. It highlights the gaps that formal funding structures overlook. It offers a way for those locked out of these tightly controlled proportions to assert their right to dream and study.
Moreover, these scholarships require the ability to frame one’s academic or professional trajectory in globally appealing terms, to articulate resilience, leadership, or impact in a specific institutional language. This language is often modelled around quantifiable outputs, neoliberal efficiency, and the STAR matrix (Situation, Task, Action, Result).
The students who can perform within this number matrix are seen as ‘deserving’, while others are invisibilised. These are not neutral requirements—they are learned, often groomed, and rarely accessible to those navigating systemic marginalisation. In this context, crowdfunding becomes more than a financial tool—it is a rupture that challenges the monopoly over legitimacy and asks: who gets to decide whose aspirations are worthy of being realised?
Alongside international scholarships, the Indian state’s National Overseas Scholarship (NOS) scheme for SC/ST students reveals a parallel logic of exceptionalism. To be eligible, applicants must come from families earning less than Rs 8 lakh annually—a cap that excludes many caste-oppressed students just above this arbitrary threshold. What about SC/ST students whose families earn Rs 8.5 or Rs 9 lakh—still far from intergenerational wealth by any standard?
And how many students from such impoverished backgrounds have the kind of supportive environments that nurture a global outlook or make it possible to even imagine access and mobility through international degrees? The state demands that caste-oppressed students be both exceptionally poor and exceptionally ambitious. But the capacity to dream big is intimately shaped by exposure, support, and circumstance.
According to Indian government records, 7,59,000 students pursued higher education abroad in 2024. Of these,115 students from oppressed caste communities are recipients of NOS, accounting for just 0.015% of the total. These figures highlight the stark disparity in access to international education and are telling of who foreign education is really for.
Marketplace of activism
Then there was the unspoken but widely understood rule: “It depends on who leads your fundraiser.” I think we quickly discovered what that meant. It meant that it doesn’t matter who raises money and for what cause, but who champions it and sees it through. Their social capital and reach will ensure that the target is met. This revealed, in no uncertain terms, that the architecture of solidarity remains uneven, where amplification is tied not just to the message but to the messenger.
In response, we began approaching prominent voices on social media—anti-caste activists with significant followings. One comrade noted, “Tomorrow, if Instagram shuts down, nobody will know who these people are,” gesturing toward the fragile and curated nature of online prominence. We were left to consider: in the marketplace of activism, who gets the numbers, who accumulates the followers, the retweets, the amplification? Whose voices are algorithmically favoured?
I was also advised to take a more strategic approach: to reach out to a specific individual, with the understanding that if they shared the fundraiser, their close circle, comprising other people with similar social capital, would follow suit. This meant that success wasn’t just about reaching the right person, but about cracking into their network, where endorsements and support trickled down from one layer of influence to the next. It became apparent that not everyone has access to these tightly knit webs of social capital.
Gatekeeping in Ambedkarite spaces
The anti-caste activists who appeared so committed online didn’t materialise as real-life allies. Their activism, it turned out, was largely confined to social media. Left with limited options, we turned to thinking about other avenues—organisations that might be in a position to fund causes like ours.
As we began reaching out, a troubling pattern emerged: it was mostly men who had access to these critical contacts, and they were strikingly reluctant to share them. What made this more glaring was the fact that many of these men had themselves turned to crowdfunding in the past, yet they didn’t offer us guidance on what worked. There was no openness or political commitment to walk alongside us. Instead, they guarded their network. Offers of help often felt transactional, laced with an expectation of familiarity or deference.
What we encountered was not just silence but a form of Brahmanical neoliberal scarcity mentality—a belief that access to resources must remain exclusive, elusive, and earned, not freely passed on in the spirit of collective upliftment. In these moments, the act of fundraising began to mirror the very hierarchies it sought to challenge. Rather than mobilising shared struggle, we were expected to navigate patronage dynamics where information and access were hoarded, not circulated.
When the fundraiser stalled, someone remarked: “Haven’t there been instances of men hitting their targets in a matter of a few hours, or at best a couple of days?” Trust, as we experienced, was definitely gender coded. DBA men often received instant support. Women, by contrast, encounter hesitation, silence, or suspicion even for minimal asks. The dynamics echoed familiar patterns: banks denying loans to unmarried women on the grounds of being too risky, too unstable. The exclusionary practices of formal institutions find repetition in the community’s own responses.
This experience left us with difficult questions. Can crowdfunding be reclaimed as a practice of political solidarity, rather than a spectacle of suffering? Can we build temporary infrastructures of care while continuing to demand structural change? For a Dalit woman to imagine herself in spaces that were never meant for her is already Ambedkarite resistance.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly identified the student as belonging to a Dalit community. The student is from a Denotified Tribal (DNT) community. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
Jayalakshmi is a human rights lawyer from India. She recently graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, with an LL.M. in International Human Rights Law as a UK Chevening Scholar.
Views expressed are the author’s own.