‘Creamy Layer’ is one of a handful of stories by Neerav Patel, who is known primarily as a major Dalit poet in Gujarat. Poised precariously at the intersections of multiple faultlines of tradition, modernity, language, class, caste and nation, the story raises a range of uneasy questions about Dalit emancipation and empowerment in independent India. Its range is bracketed by conflictual notions of caste, dogged and persistent despite all strategies for its annihilation – including migration, name-changes, social movements and public policy measures, and the casual denial of its existence in a developing postcolonial country.
The story revolves around a visit to their native village and the city of Ahmedabad by the Vaghelas, a Dalit couple who have transcoded their caste in cosmopolitan Mumbai, with their daughter’s marriage into a Brahmin family impending. Armed with modern education, a perfunctory Ambedkarite consciousness and elite class credentials, they feel they have transcended caste – but they are deeply mortified by the wretched condition of their relatives, both rural and urban, in the overarching caste universe, which remains unaffected by the project to annihilate caste.
If their relatives are entrenched in the structures that perpetuate their subjugation, they themselves are trapped, they realise, in a cocoon of alienation and self-deception. In Gujarat, the Vaghela surname typically connotes dominant-caste Rajputs, but some Dalit groups have historically adopted it in an attempt to assimilate into Hinduism and its social structures as part of a protective strategy that Ambedkar termed “protective discoloration”. Thus, confusingly, the surname simultaneously marks as well as eclipses caste identity. Patel brilliantly stages how even they, Sanskritised and the Anglicised, are subtly reminded of their caste in modern, urban, cosmopolitan spaces.
The story also dramatizes the conflict between romanticised notions of subaltern tradition upheld by the postcolonial left and the promises of the instrumental rationality advocated by the Enlightenment. Neither seems to add up when it comes to the Dalit question in India, Patel suggests.
In India’s affirmative-action regime, the “creamy layer” has long referred to the upper echelons among the socially and educationally disadvantaged castes and communities officially termed the Other Backward Classes. That layer, defined by a minimum annual family income of more than INR 800,000 (roughly USD 8250) is disqualified from positions reserved for the OBCs in government jobs and public universities. The term does not generally apply to the Dalits, or Scheduled Castes, who populate this story – though a 2024 ruling by the Supreme Court of India opened the door for the introduction of a creamy layer category in affirmative-action reservations for the Scheduled Castes as well. Still, the story indicates, Dalits who achieve some measure of social mobility find themselves in a similarly precarious “creamy layer”, left to navigate an obscene social reality even as some would like to believe they have escaped it.
What is lost in English translation, despite all paratextual devices, is the quintessence of the story’s expressions of caste, marked by language, lilt and tone as much as by silence, ellipses and disappearing signposts.
– Hemang Ashwinkumar
Creamy Layer
Holding a wedding ceremony in a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai, when you are on your own, far away from relatives and loved ones, is not child’s play; it’s like rowing a boat ashore across a turbulent sea. The Vaghelas, to their credit, had got quite a few things – clothes, jewellery, venue, catering, decoration, music party, beautician, lodging – sorted out simply by tearing out cheque leaves, one after another, from a bulky chequebook. And yet a tiny formality like inscribing the auspicious kankotri threw the couple into a dizzying churn. At last, after a lot of back and forth, they finalised not one but two invitation cards with different texts, designs, colour schemes and so on. One in English, the other in Gujarati. One for their caste brethren, and the other for the rest. Phew! Finally, everything fell in place.