Can We Ever Escape the Identity We Inherit? — Am I a Dalit? by Vijhay Sundar K.G., read and reviewed by Sameer Gudhate.

There are some questions that are asked because we don't know the answer.

And then there are questions we ask because we are afraid of what the answer might mean.

Am I a Dalit? belongs to the second category.

Vijhay Sundar K.G.'s novel begins in a world where caste is not an abstract idea discussed in textbooks. It is present in families, relationships, social behaviour, humiliation and the choices people are allowed to make. But what makes the novel interesting is that it doesn't stop at showing caste as a social evil. It asks a more uncomfortable question:

What happens when caste becomes part of the emotional inheritance of a family?

Vikash grows up with the privileges and prejudices of an orthodox Brahmin upbringing. Then he meets Arundhati, a Dalit woman and a mother. What begins with an apparently simple act of offering shelter becomes a confrontation with everything Vikash has been taught to believe about purity, status, relationships and belonging.

Their relationship is where the novel becomes particularly interesting.

It would have been easy to turn this into a familiar story of forbidden love: two people from different castes fall in love, society objects, and love becomes the answer.

Sundar doesn't take the easy route.

Love here has consequences.

Families fracture. People carry guilt. Choices made in one generation become burdens for another. And eventually, the story moves from Chennai to America, suggesting something that is perhaps more disturbing than caste itself:

Changing your geography does not necessarily change your inheritance.

Shiva, the next generation, becomes central to that idea.

His life forces the novel to move beyond the question of whether Vikash and Arundhati can live together. The larger question becomes whether their child can live without carrying the history that created them.

That is where Am I a Dalit? becomes a story about generational trauma.

We often imagine prejudice as something imposed from outside. Someone insults you. Someone excludes you. Someone refuses you an opportunity.

But prejudice can also become internal.

It can shape how a person sees themselves. It can influence what they hide, what they reveal, whom they trust and what they believe they deserve.

Shiva's journey makes that particularly painful.

One of the things I appreciated about the novel is that its characters aren't presented as convenient representatives of an argument. They make mistakes. They carry contradictions. They behave badly at times. They hurt one another. They also show compassion.

Arundhati, in particular, emerges as one of the novel's strongest emotional presences. Her resilience doesn't feel like a decorative quality added to make the story inspirational. She has to survive circumstances that repeatedly remind her of how little control society believes she should have over her own life.

Vikash is more complicated.

I didn't always find his choices easy to accept. But perhaps that is precisely why his character works. His journey isn't simply about becoming a better person. It is about discovering how deeply an inherited worldview can live inside someone, even when that person believes he has rejected it.

And that distinction matters.

It is relatively easy to reject an idea intellectually.

It is much harder to discover that some part of you is still living by it.

The novel also goes into some deeply disturbing territory, including caste violence, sexual assault and manual scavenging. These portions are not comfortable reading. They shouldn't be. But they also create one of the book's important tensions: how much suffering can a story place before the reader before the emotional impact begins to compete with the narrative itself?

For me, that is one area where the novel can feel uneven.

The early sections can be confronting to the point of feeling deliberately provocative. Some readers may struggle to understand where the story is going. But as the later parts begin connecting the characters' histories and motivations, those earlier choices acquire greater context.

The book asks us to think about caste, but I don't think caste is its only subject.

Its deeper subject is inheritance.

We inherit surnames.

We inherit beliefs.

We inherit family loyalties.

We inherit prejudices we never consciously chose.

And sometimes, we inherit wounds.

The uncomfortable question is whether we are responsible only for the things we personally believe—or also for what we continue carrying without examining it.

That is what stayed with me.

I don't think Am I a Dalit? offers a neat answer to that question. Nor should it.

Because the easiest response to caste is to say that humanity should come before labels.

Of course it should.

The harder question is: What do we do when the labels have already shaped the way people see themselves and one another for generations?

That question doesn't disappear when the characters leave Chennai.

It travels with them to America.

It travels into the next generation.

And eventually, it reaches the reader.

Perhaps that is the real strength of Vijhay Sundar K.G.'s novel.

It doesn't allow caste to remain somebody else's problem.

It asks what happens when history enters the home, becomes part of a family, and eventually becomes part of a child's understanding of who he is.

Some books give you answers.

This one leaves you with a question.

And this time, the question is difficult to put down.

Am I a Dalit?

Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is:

How much of the identity society gives us do we carry simply because nobody ever taught us how to put it down?

What stayed with me after finishing Am I a Dalit? was not a particular incident, but the uncomfortable thought that caste can travel much farther than we imagine. It can move from one generation to another, from a family into a child's identity, and even across continents. Vijhay Sundar K.G. doesn't make that journey comfortable, and perhaps that is why the book lingers. There are places where the storytelling is deliberately unsettling and difficult, but the questions it leaves behind are harder to dismiss. I finished the novel wondering not only how society labels us, but how much of those labels we unknowingly carry within ourselves.

Recommended for readers who enjoy socially conscious fiction, complex family narratives and novels that leave questions behind rather than neatly resolving them.

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