Caste oppression and the marginalization of Dalits

Caste oppression and the marginalization of Dalits are presented as a system that joins inherited status to work, education, religion, housing, and public respect. Its force lies not only in open prejudice but in the expectation that social position will reproduce itself: Ayyan Mani can imagine a different future for his son, yet the routes to that future remain structured by unequal resources and caste-based judgments. The novel’s recurring contrasts show both the persistence of the hierarchy and the fragile, sometimes compromised ways people seek recognition within it.

Inherited Status and Religious Belonging

Sister Chastity describes the violence inflicted on Ayyan Mani’s forebears and says that upper-caste people still use degrading labels for Dalits in private, even when public language has changed. Ayyan indicates that he knows this distinction between public respectability and private contempt. In another conversation with her, he frames the Brahmins’ advantage as something accumulated over generations: books, English, professional achievement, and political ideals belong to a world built over centuries, while he describes himself as the son of a sweeper raised in a one-room home. His angry comparison challenges the assumption that present inequalities simply reflect differences in ability or effort.

Caste also shapes disagreement within Ayyan’s household. When he objects to the Ganesha idol brought home by Oja Mani, he argues that Buddhism, associated with Ambedkar’s rejection of caste oppression, is their chosen religious identity. Oja resists this separation from Hindu practice and says she considers herself Hindu. The disagreement is not merely about an idol: it reveals different understandings of belonging, inheritance, and whether a religion implicated in caste hierarchy can also be claimed as one’s own. Later, Oja connects Adi’s hearing impairment to the family’s lack of gods, expressing grief through a religious interpretation that differs sharply from Ayyan’s.

Education, Class, and Unequal Opportunity

The novel connects caste position to access to education and to the material conditions that make educational success possible. Sister Chastity calls Ayyan intelligent and praises his son’s supposed promise, but also points out that schooling is expensive and that Christian families with limited means can receive discounts. Her appeal makes religious affiliation appear at once a question of conviction and a possible route to financial assistance. The offer does not erase poverty; it shows how access to education may depend on benefits unavailable on equal terms.

Ayyan measures his own circumstances against those of Oparna Goshmaulik, whom he sees as a high-caste woman whose schooling at Cathedral School, studies at Stanford, and position as Head of Astrobiology have brought her into the Institute of Theory and Research. His resentment is shaped by the visible contrast between her educational path and his own social marginality. The comparison reflects Ayyan’s perspective rather than establishing that Oparna faced no obstacles, but it reveals how he reads privilege through the distribution of opportunity. Elsewhere, the novel depicts a woman in the chawls who tries wearing a skirt and returns home in a salwar after neighbors judge her. That incident shows how poverty and public scrutiny can constrain everyday choices as well as formal advancement.

The pressures surrounding Adi’s future make the stakes of education still clearer. Ayyan imagines his son, the child of a clerk and grandson of a sweeper, being expected to pursue engineering, compete in entrance examinations, and later seek an MBA because that is where families are told money lies. He pictures the preparation as beginning in childhood, with wealthier or better-positioned competitors receiving tuition and sample papers early. Even success would not guarantee equal recognition: he anticipates that light-skinned students might explain Adi’s place through the 15 per cent reservation for Dalits rather than his own work. The passage presents reservation as both an avenue into institutions and a target for stigma, with access granted under policy repeatedly recast as undeserved advantage.

Recognition and Its Limits

Ayyan’s fabrication of Adi’s genius briefly changes how the boy is seen. Adi begins to understand that classmates and teachers regard him as extraordinary rather than defining him by his hearing impairment. That distinction gives the secret pact with his father a social importance for him, even as its concealment from Oja becomes part of preserving the status it brings. At the same time, the manufactured reputation rests on a real vulnerability: Adi wears a hearing aid, and adults’ responses move between concern about his impairment and excitement about his supposed brilliance.

When a newspaper reports that Adi can recite the first thousand prime numbers, residents gathering in the shared toilet queues ask Ayyan to explain what prime numbers are and how they might help their own children become clever. They treat him with affection and respect as the father of a genius. The scene makes the recognition concrete, but also locates it among people sharing the difficult conditions of the chawls, not in a transformed social order. Ayyan’s response to a possible offer for a flat is to argue that the family should sell and leave, because their children should not have to remain in those conditions. The imagined benefit of Adi’s distinction is therefore material as well as symbolic: a chance, however uncertain, to move the next generation toward better housing and opportunity.

The public story grows far beyond the family. After the school quiz, Adi and Sister Chastity appear in news coverage, while parents recount the event with inaccuracies. Ayyan is presented as the father of a Dalit prodigy, and newspapers repeat his account of his son arriving at the edge of opportunity after centuries of oppression. This attention gives a neglected history a public audience, but it also turns the child into a symbol whose reputation depends on a deception. Ayyan eventually recognizes that the game has gone too far and ends the myth before he believes it could harm Adi. With its ending, the temporary excitement of exceptional status gives way to the ordinary constraints the family still faces.

Prejudice, Political Voice, and Institutional Power

The novel links social marginalization to both political organizing and institutional speech. S. Waman recounts being tied to a tree by Brahmin priests as a child after entering a temple, then leaving his village for Bombay with nothing. His later trajectory—from selling vegetables to organizing Dalit youth and entering politics—connects an experience of exclusion with the acquisition of political power. Ayyan remembers that the legal or social right to be touched by upper-caste people has not ended poverty. When the Ambedkar statue is desecrated, leaders such as Waman can mobilize angry young people; the resulting looting is presented as a volatile form of collective response, not as a remedy for entrenched deprivation.

At the Institute of Theory and Research, the same hierarchy appears in the language of scientific authority. Jana Nambodri asks Ayyan whether he entered Mensa under a reservation policy and orders him not to touch the blackboard again. In a private discussion, the astronomers generalize about supposedly inherited intellectual limits among Dalits, Africans, Eastern Europeans, and women. Their remarks turn prejudice into claims about biology and use professional status to present exclusion as rational judgment. The episode exposes a sharp contradiction: an institution devoted to knowledge can reproduce social assumptions while claiming to speak from scientific expertise.

Ayyan carries the recorded discussion to the Institute’s peons and explains its implications in Marathi: the speakers are treating intelligence as inherited in a way that marks Dalits as fit only for cleaning toilets. The translation makes the insult legible to workers whom the scientists’ conversation had treated as socially beneath them. When Ayyan says the men want coffee, one peon spits into the jug. The gesture is a small act of retaliation, but it accompanies a wider refusal: the peons go on strike, leave taps running, and clog the toilets with cutlery. Their labor, normally expected and unnoticed, becomes impossible for the institution to ignore.

Ayyan also writes an anti-caste statement on the blackboard and attributes it to Albert Einstein. When Nambodri discovers the false attribution, he publicly asks Ayyan whether Mensa had a reservation for Dalits, and the astronomers laugh. The episode joins the public dispute over caste policy to the question of who is authorized to make a statement count: Ayyan’s words are dismissed through mockery, while the borrowed authority of a celebrated scientist briefly gives them institutional weight. In a later confrontation, the astronomers’ recorded remarks become public. Ayyan’s press appearance presents his recordings as evidence of what occurred at the institute, and news coverage carries the scientists’ views about Dalits and women beyond the room. The peons’ strike and the prospect of protest leave the institute under pressure, showing how speech that had seemed protected by rank can acquire consequences once exposed.

Historical Memory and Social Meaning

Ayyan objects to national pride built from stories of ancient scientific and cultural greatness when those stories omit his own ancestors or cast them as defeated demons in heroic tales. His objection is not to knowledge itself but to a version of collective history that celebrates Brahmin achievement while excluding Dalits from the inheritance it claims to represent. The imagined past thus reinforces a present hierarchy: some people appear as the natural heirs of civilization, while others are denied a place in its account.

Across household arguments, school recognition, political protest, and the Institute scandal, marginalization operates through both material deprivation and control over interpretation. Poverty shapes where the family lives and what education may cost; caste affects whose intelligence is presumed, whose speech is trusted, and how achievement is explained. Adi’s brief public elevation unsettles those expectations, but its dependence on a fabricated genius identity also exposes how exceptional a child must appear before a Dalit family receives broad attention. The novel’s account of caste oppression therefore turns on a tension between visibility and equality: public recognition can make exclusion harder to ignore without, by itself, undoing the structures that sustain it.