Jyotirao Phule called the caste system the oldest form of slavery, foreshadowing that there is no singular or original form of racism, but evolving forms of descent-based discrimination that often inform each other.
What is common to both Dalits and Palestinians is extreme racialised discrimination, humiliation and segregation at the hands of the ethno-national state, which privileges a group with fictive ethnic roots. Both upper castes (Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas) and Zionists assert scriptural authority, genetic superiority, and cultural supremacy through the state. In the ethno-national state, the dominant group hegemonises politics and cultural apparatus, and controls discursive practices and storytelling through history, narratives and media. Such a state is a Carceralopolis, where the dominant group has carceral control over the existence of the subordinate group, which is invisibilised, spatially stigmatised, and violently exterminated.
Palestinian history and political assertion have been erased through statements like “Palestinians did not exist” (Golda Meir) and are “children of darkness” (Benjamin Netanyahu). Such rhetorical offenses draw from a history of racial othering. West Bank and Gaza have been occupied by Israel since 1967, and Palestinians have been economically impoverished and politically disenfranchised through expanding Zionist settlements, increased military surveillance, and violent massacres and incarceration.
While it is estimated that over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948 when Israel was founded, since Israel declared war on Gaza in October 2023, about 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, of which 13,000 have been children, and over 1.9 million people in Gaza have been displaced multiple times. Members of the Zionist state and the military have sexually assaulted Palestinian women, bombed Gaza, buried children alive, all with impunity.
In the last 2,000 years, Savarnas have assigned Dalits many names: Chandala, Ati-shudra, Untouchable, and Scheduled Caste, all of which carry their own tenor of humiliation. They have been confined to impoverishing occupations, such as manual scavenging, carrying dead animals, cleaning toilets, leather work, and toddy tapping. Dalits face systematic racialised discrimination in newer morphologies that continue the age-old practice of untouchability. If the Indian state were to acknowledge the presence of Dalits across all religions, their population would be 30% of the country. However, the number of Dalits in academic spaces, politics, media and in newsrooms, remains abysmally low. Dalit indigenous history has been erased as many were forcefully co-opted into the Hindu religion by anxious upper castes who form less than 10% of the Indian population. Massacres of Dalits – Kilvenmani (1968), Marichjapi (1979), Karamchedu (1985), Golana (1986), Manjolai (1999), Kambalapalli (2000), and Khairlanji (2006) – are invisibilised and erased from public memory and textbooks.
The Carceralopolis is operated by Savarna and Zionist officials and civilians who police racial borders and pursue the dominant group’s vision of building an ethno-national state where only the dominant group enjoys rights. In 2024, a six-year-old Palestinian child, Hind Rajab, was trapped in her uncle’s car and surrounded by dead relatives as her family was trying to escape Israeli bombing in Gaza, only to be attacked by Israeli tanks. She was later found dead by aid workers. In 2022, a nine-year-old Dalit child in Rajasthan, Indra Meghwal, was physically assaulted by his upper caste teacher for drinking water from a common earthen pot at school. He died of his injuries.
Dalit and Palestinian art forms, whether literature, films, paintings, or music, resound with similar themes. In her memoir, Coming Out as Dalit, Yashica Dutt describes how she had to ‘pass’ as upper caste in urban and academic spaces as she was consistently subjected to caste-based profiling by her Savarna peers. In Sayed Kashua’s fictional autobiography Dancing Arabs, the narrator is a Palestinian living in Israel and confesses how he passed as Israeli to escape Israeli surveillance. There is no dishonesty – it is an essential strategy to survive in a Carceralopolis that seeks to annihilate the subordinate group.
Mari Selvaraj’s film Karnan and Farah Nablusi’s film The Present reveal the comparable realities of the Carceralopolis. The Dalit and Palestinian protagonists are deprived of mobility, through the denial of a bus stop or the erection of a checkpoint. Both films address the humiliation inflicted by the dominant group, both landowners and the police. While the Dalit in the film encourages a village to rise in armed rebellion, the Palestinian quietly absorbs insults from a soldier in front of his daughter.
Sadly, what differentiates Dalits and Palestinians today is international awareness about their respective and comparable experiences of racism. There have been mass blockades, student protests and encampments in the US and Europe to protest the genocide of Gaza and to demand international divestment from Israel. At the same time, the deaths of Dalits, especially school and university students, do not receive similar national and international media coverage. The Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula was banned from his hostel in 2016, his university stipend was stopped, and he was discriminated against on account of being Dalit. Eight years later, the police and the central BJP politicians closed the police investigation, claiming he was not Dalit and that he committed suicide to hide his caste origins. Such slander is often the cruel fate of Dalit students, whose Dalit existence is erased.
Like the Velivada or the site where university students protested seeking justice for Vemula, the university has once again raised the moral conscience of the world against the Zionist genocide, while established postcolonial academics and subaltern studies experts, who are upper caste, maintain a studied silence.
Strong support for the Palestinians comes from the Dalit community on social media, which recognises their similar structures of oppression and shared obligation to oppose racism, as in the Dalit artist Vikrant Bhise’s twin paintings that depict Dalit and Palestinian women. Acknowledging these racist morphologies allows us to build new solidarities, and one is slowly forming between Dalits and Palestinians.
Aarushi Punia is a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD thesis at IIT Delhi compared the study of Dalit and Palestinian literature and narrative strategies of resistance.
Suraj Yengde, author of ‘Caste Matters’, curates Dalitality, has returned to Harvard University
